On Monday, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his long-awaited report on the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, and for anyone hoping the findings would show there was some sort of conspiracy to take the president down, or that it would end with the line “Donald Trump is the greatest president, nay, human to have ever lived and it’s our recommendation that anyone who’s ever expressed a negative sentiment about him should be sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor Photoshopping his face onto an assortment of ripped bodies without eye roll or heavy sigh,” the report likely came as a real buzzkill. Instead, the IG found, the FBI had an “authorized purpose” when it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign, and rejected the claim that the case was initiated as some kind of political takedown or that informants were used in violation of government rules. Another fun finding? That Ivanka Trump has been buddies with Christopher Steele—the author of the dossier that her father has blasted as “phony and corrupt,” and the basis of the F.B.I. “witch hunt” against him—for years.
Rather than harbor a bias against Trump that led him to produce a negative, highly embarrassing file on the then-presidential candidate, the report found that, if anything, Steele was “favorably disposed” toward the Trump family, given his friendship with Ivanka, which @realDonaldTrump failed to mention at any point while slandering the former British spy as “dopey,” a “Trump hater,” and a “lowlife” on Twitter. While the apple of Trump’s creepy eye is not mentioned by name, the “family member” referenced is said to be his eldest daughter, according to ABC News. Per the report, Steele told investigators that the allegation he was biased against Trump was “ridiculous,” considering well before he started his research, he visited “a Trump family member” at Trump Tower and had “been friendly” with [the family member] for a number of years. Steele described his relationship with said family member as “personal” and told investigators that he’d once gifted them a family tartan from Scotland to.
According to ABC News’s Julia Macfarlane, Steele and Ivanka initially met at a dinner in 2007 and subsequently met up at Trump Tower. Emails suggest they stayed in touch over the next several years, with mentions of other dinners coming up. And not only were the two personal friends, Princess Purses reportedly invited the former spy to her office in 2010, after he’d gone into private practice, to “discuss the possibility of him working for the Trump Organization doing due diligence abroad as part of his work for Orbis [Business Intelligence],” the firm he founded. Strangely, however, none of this came up while the president was maligning Steele as an associate of “Crooked Hillary.” (It is not clear if Trump the elder was aware of his daughter’s relationship with Steele prior to the release of the IG report, or if he called her to wail “You just broke my heard into a thousands pieces!” this afternoon.)
While the report concluded that the FBI placed too much emphasis on Steele’s work, which, the IG wrote, sometimes exhibited a “lack of judgement,” it nevertheless found that none of the reporting in the dossier was done “in bad faith.” (On Monday, legal representatives for Steele issued a statement defending his work, saying that the Trump-Russia memos he wrote in 2016 were derived from “credible and reliable” sources and that his reporting was “extensively corroborated.” Ivanka’s attorney has not responded to ABC’s request for comment.)