[The Federalist] Special Counsel Robert Mueller spent more than $732,000 on outside contractors, including private investigators and researchers, records show, but his office refuses to say who they were. While it’s not unusual for special government offices to outsource for services such as computer support, Mueller also hired contractors to compile "investigative reports" and other "information."The arrangement has led congressional investigators, government watchdog groups and others to speculate that the private investigators and researchers who worked for the special counsel’s office might have included Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS, the private research firm that hired Steele to produce the Russia collusion dossier for the Clinton campaign.
They suspect the dossier creators may have been involved in Mueller’s operation, and even had a hand in his final report, because the special counsel sent his team to London to meet with Steele within a few months of taking over the Russia collusion investigation in 2017. Also, Mueller’s lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, had shared information he received from Fusion with the media.
Raising additional suspicions, Mueller’s report recycles the general allegations leveled in the dossier. And taking a page from earlier surveillance-warrant applications in the Russia investigation, it cites as supporting evidence several articles‐including one by Yahoo! News‐that used Steele and Fusion as sources.
Mueller even kept alive one of the dossier’s most obscene accusations‐that Moscow had "compromising tapes" of Trump with Russian hookers‐by slipping into a footnote an October 2016 text Trump lawyer Michael Cohen received from a "Russian businessman," who cryptically intimated, "Stopped flow of tapes from Russia."
Lawyers for the businessman, Giorgi Rtskhiladze (who is actually a Georgian American), are demanding a retraction of the footnote, arguing Mueller omitted the part of his text where he said he did not believe the rumor about the tapes, for which no evidence has ever surfaced.