The Office of the Inspector General has no authority to redact information, and the Justice Department has final say on classification levels and markings, according to OIG rules.

Laufman, who specializes in inspector general investigations and sensitive national security matters as part of his private law practice, suggested there could have been political reasons for the aggressive declassification.

“It would be unusual for the attorney general in particular to push to declassify more than the IG thought appropriate,” Laufman added, “particularly if there were any resistance to doing that by the agencies that originated that information. Those are facts that would reasonably raise suspicions about motivations for declassifying that material.”

Barr decided to declassify portions of the IG’s report just before it was released, according to the New York Times, including sections dealing with British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s sources, Steele’s lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.

The inspector general gave Steele’s firm, Orbis, “highly redacted portions of the draft report for review and comment” before its release, the statement said. “At the twelfth hour late Sunday evening, Orbis was informed by the OIG that previously redacted material had been unredacted and that it contained negative information about Christopher Steele. Orbis was given no opportunity to review, much less comment, on this material.”

A spokesperson for the inspector general’s office declined to comment. A footnote in the report’s “methodology” section notes that “consistent with our standard practice, we provided a draft copy of this report to the Department and the FBI, and as appropriate, other government agencies, for the purpose of conducting a classification review and providing final classification markings.”

The chief issue with the newly declassified information, national security experts and former officials say, is that it offers identifying details about sources — specifically, how the report describes Steele’s sources, who ostensibly provided the bulk of the information Steele included in a dossier of Trump’s alleged Russia ties, and how the FBI vetted them.

“I would LOVE a roadmap like this from the Russians or Chinese,” said one former intelligence official, referring to the report’s extensive description of how the Crossfire Hurricane team —named after the codeword given to the FBI’s Russia probe — determined the authenticity of certain intelligence.

The report includes FBI interview notes summarizing conversations with sources, revealing identifying details—one sub-source was described as being the subject of a YouTube video and several press reports, for example, while another was said to have “direct access to a particular former senior Russian government official”— and a description from another intelligence service of one of its former employees.

Experts said the depiction of sources and vetting in the report could pose problems for the U.S.’ information sharing relationships, and undermine the FBI’s recruitment efforts.

“Who wants to be a source if you can’t keep a secret?” said another former intelligence official. “It has a chilling effect and makes existing sources anxious about whether their identities will be maintained confidentially.”

One paragraph in the report, for example, seemed to confirm previous reporting about the identity of a Steele sub-source, though subsequent court filings show that the sub-source was a different person than reported at the time.

In a footnote, Horowitz described the sub-source in question as being identified in Steele’s reporting interchangeably as “Source D,” “Source E,” “a Russian emigre,” and “an ethnic Russian associate” of Trump. That sub-source is identified, for the purposes of the report, as “Person 1.”

The report then explains, citing an interview with a supervisory intel analyst, that Person 1 had been the subject of press reports after the election. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported in early 2017 that Sergei Millian, a Belarus-born businessman who has claimed to work with Trump in the past and was identified as both Source E and Source D in the Steele dossier, could be the sub-source. The Washington Post later corrected the story and removed that reporting after it was contradicted by allegations contained in a federal indictment filed in November 2021.

In another footnote, Person 1 is described as having a “Russian/American organization in the U.S,” which matches Millian’s Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, the report reveals that Person 1 was found to have been in “sustained” contact with Papadopoulos, which also lines up with Millian’s reported activities during the election.

Millian, reported to be an unwitting source who didn’t know his conversations would make their way to Steele, has denied being a source at all for the dossier or knowing any of the information that was attributed to him in press reports. He also denied to POLITICO that he ever had a phone call with Steele’s primary sub-source, as described in the report. That sub-source told investigators that they “believed” they were speaking to Millian when they obtained information about Carter Page that was later used in the dossier.

A properly classified report would make it far more difficult to home in on an alleged source’s identity, said the second former intelligence official.

“If a journalist or a foreign intelligence service can identify a human being that way, then too much has been revealed,” this person said.

“How we handle sources — some of that is already public,” the second ex-official added. “But the identity of sources and the specific procedures for vetting them are usually among the most carefully guarded information we have.”

Additionally, the report revealed the assessment of a friendly foreign intelligence service, Britain’s MI6, about one of its former employees, Steele, who worked on the service’s Russia desk for nearly two decades. The revelation risks creating a chilling effect on future intelligence sharing between allies, argued the first former official.

While not naming MI6 directly, the report noted that the counterintelligence officials in charge of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap, traveled “abroad” in 2016 to meet with Steele’s former “professional contacts,” and quoted those associates’ use of intelligence jargon.

“Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;" Strzok and Priestap wrote in their feedback notes, obtained by the IG. “[R]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate,” read another.

Questions about the Trump administration’s willingness to declassify typically sensitive material predated Barr and the IG report.

In February 2018, Trump cleared the release of the so-called “Nunes memo” over the objections of his deputy attorney general at the time, Rod Rosenstein, and FBI Director Chris Wray, who argued that certain information in it should have been redacted. The controversial four-page document, written by then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, outlined alleged surveillance abuses carried out by the Justice Department.

Five months later, the Justice Department began releasing previously top-secret documents related to surveillance of Carter Page — the Trump campaign adviser who was the subject of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant obtained by the FBI in October 2016.

The application for that warrant and its subsequent renewals were found by the IG to be highly flawed, with omissions and inaccuracies outlined in the report released Monday.

Civil libertarians have been raising concerns about the FISA process for years, arguing that Americans’ civil rights are routinely violated and that there is too little oversight from Congress.

But the disclosure of the Page FISA materials struck national security experts as setting a precedent that could jeopardize confidential law enforcement and intelligence sources—and was unwise given the bipartisan support the surveillance tool generally enjoys.

The showdown continued into May of this year, when Trump gave Barr sweeping and unprecedented declassification powers and directed intelligence agencies to fully comply with the attorney general’s look at “surveillance activities” during the 2016 election. Trump defended his decision as a pro-transparency move that would give the public insight into nefarious government activity, and praised Barr as the ideal person to judge what should be released.

But questions about Barr’s objectivity — and the extent to which he may be influencing the ongoing criminal investigation being carried out by Durham—were revived on Tuesday when he repeated that he did not accept some of the IG’s conclusions and again slammed the FBI for possibly acting “in bad faith” in 2016.

“I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press,” Barr said. “I think there were gross abuses … and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”

Editor’s Note: POLITICO updated this 2019 story in November 2021 to reflect that the Washington Post corrected two articles that had misidentified a key source of the dossier of Trump’s alleged Russia ties.