Carter Page

In the spring of 2016 a company called Orbis, hired Christopher Steele to research Trumps relationship with Russia. Orbis was a subcontractor of Fusion GPS a private Washington firm. Fusion was contracted by the law firm of Perkins Coie which represented Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Clinton and the DNC paid Steele $168,000 for his work. A man named George Papadopoulos worked for the Trump campaign for three months in early 2016 as an unpaid foreign policy expert. In March of 2016 he met with some Russians who promised dirt on Hillary in the form of missing emails. Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat of the meeting who in turn passed the info on to the FBI. The FBI then opened an investigation into the Trump/Russia connection in July of 2016. In May of 2016 the Washington Post reported that an FBI informant met with Papadopoulos and Carter Page, another Trump foreign policy advisor and this led to investigating Page. FISA applications to surveil Page used this meeting and the Steele research dossier to get approval. This is the center of the controversy since the dossier was largely discredited as having uncorroborated salacious material on Trump. This surveillance included phone and email and then let to surveillance of other people whom Page had contacted. This is referred to as the two-hop method wherein anyone who had contacted Page was also surveilled and all of this information was passed onto the Mueller investigators and is currently being used.