"On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all," Morell said. "There's no little campfire, there's no little candle, there's no spark. And there's a lot of people looking for it."
Morell also stated that the source of the infamous “golden showers” dossier published by BuzzFeed, former M16 spy Christopher Steele, is not credible.
Steele, through Washington-based firm Fusion GPS, was originally hired by ‘political opponents’ within the Democratic and Republican parties to investigate Trump, but it has not been revealed exactly who hired him. Steele sought to share the dossier with the FBI, who took it seriously, despite the far-fetched allegations, due to the British agent’s previous work on the FIFA case. It was revealed this week that the FBI offered him payment to continue his investigation into Trump and those around the candidate. The deal with the FBI reportedly fell through, and Steele continued to dig without payment.
"Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can't judge the information — you just can't,” Morell explained. "I had two questions when I first read it. One was, How did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries.”
Shockingly, he also revealed that Steele paid people for information — further sullying his dossier’s credibility.
"And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris,” Morell stated. “And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you're paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they're going to call you up and say, 'hey, let's have another meeting, I have more information for you,' because they want to get paid some more.”
"I think you've got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier."
Prior to the election, Morell had claimed that Trump was an "unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."
While Morell does not believe that Trump was working with the Russians, he still believes that there was an active campaign by the Kremlin consisting of hacking and spreading “fake news” to help the now-president.
