You made that up.
A State Department employee interviewed Steele long before his garbage was used to illegally spy on a Presidential campaign, and with about 2 minutes research on a key Steele claim was able to conclusively show that a key claim of Steele's was am obvious fabrication.
No mention of Steele’s State Department interview was made to the FISA court. In fact, the court was informed that the only government agency to which Steele had provided information was the FBI (
here, page 23). The State Department interview was withheld out of fear that wounds to Steele’s credibility would doom the “VERIFIED APPLICATION.”
Steele identified two of his sources for Kavalec: Russia’s former spy chief Vyacheslav Trubnikov and top Kremlin adviser Vladislav Surkov. This underscores the possibility that Steele was duped, and that the dossier is a Russian disinformation operation that U.S. intelligence agencies fell for. And there’s more: Trubnikov has intriguing ties to
Stefan Halper, whom the FBI used as a confidential informant to approach Trump campaign figures Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.
Oh, and did I mention that
Steele himself did private-eye work for Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum oligarch known to be a close Putin confidant? And wouldn’t you know it: Steele was also pushing his U.S. government contacts — such as Justice Department official Bruce Ohr — to accommodate Deripaska’s desire to travel to the U.S. The idea was that Deripaska could be a valuable informant. Evidently, the FBI lost interest when Deripaska told agents that Steele’s Trump-Russia conspiracy theory was preposterous.