he said, what was significant about the material was that it confirmed information, contours of events and players, that we knew to be accurate and consistent with our understanding of the way putin and the russians were operating. at the same time, many other pieces of steele's information, most of them in fact, were devilishly hard to either prove or refute. but peter strzok, fbi's top counterintelligence official, had to try. his team created a spread sheet of every statement in christopher steele's reports to try to run each one down. they attempted to identify all the confidential sources and subsources in the reports to try to analyze the quality of their intelligence and where possible to interview those sources. peter strzok himself flew to europe to meet in person with christopher steele and others. this is how he sums it up. in mid-2017, the end of the time i worked with the group verifying and pursuing the