WASHINGTON — Inside a London office building in early June, three investigators for the Justice Department’s inspector general took a crucial step toward clearing the political fallout from the Russia investigation: They spent two days interviewing Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose now-infamous dossier of purported links between Trump associates and Russia ended up in the hands of the F.B.I. ahead of the 2016 election.

The investigators pored over Mr. Steele’s old memos and his contemporaneous notes from meetings with F.B.I. agents in the fall of 2016, according to a person familiar with the investigation. They asked Mr. Steele to explain in detail how he had validated his sources inside Russia, how he communicated with them, and how he decided which of their claims to include in his reports. They spoke at length about Mr. Steele’s work with the F.B.I. on other Russia-related investigations and his contacts with a senior Justice Department official.

The interview was a key step in the investigation by the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, into the facts underlying a bitter partisan feud: Did F.B.I. officials do anything wrong in 2016 when they sought to understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia — including how they used information from Mr. Steele?

That question has hovered over the Russia inquiry for two years as President Trump and his allies repeatedly assailed the investigators who scrutinized him and his advisers. Attorney General William P. Barr, who has accused the F.B.I. of “spying” on the Trump campaign, has begun his own review that will include intelligence agencies as well.

But the investigation by Mr. Horowitz, who has maintained a reputation for being above the partisan fray, may have a better chance of being accepted across party lines as credible. Mr. Horowitz, who is expected to release a much-anticipated report of his findings in the coming weeks, is believed to be weighing whether to recommend that the Justice Department tighten rules for any future counterintelligence investigations of a presidential campaign, which was a novel dilemma in 2016, according to people familiar with aspects of his investigation.

Mr. Horowitz’s previous scrutiny of law-enforcement actions in 2016 has provided fodder to both Republican and Democratic critics. He found fault with the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey for public comments in 2016 about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but not with the decision to pass on charging her.

Mr. Horowitz also uncovered text messages between the F.B.I. employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page criticizing then-candidate Donald Trump. He sharply rebuked the pair but said he had found no evidence that the pair had acted with bias in the Clinton investigation.

At the center of Mr. Horowitz’s current investigation is Mr. Steele and how the F.B.I. used his reporting in its investigation of the Trump campaign.

Read the Mueller Report: Searchable Document and Index

The findings from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are now available to the public. The redacted report details his two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The president’s allies have vilified Mr. Steele, whose sources said Mr. Trump’s campaign was colluding with the Kremlin and that Russia has a compromising sexual video of Mr. Trump taken inside a Moscow hotel room. No evidence of such a recording has surfaced.

Mr. Trump’s allies have sought to conflate the much broader Russia investigation with the dossier and have increased their attacks since the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, concluded that while the campaign welcomed and expected to benefit from Russia’s election interference, the evidence did not prove any conspiracy.

Investigators working for Mr. Horowitz have asked witnesses about whether the F.B.I. properly opened the Russia investigation and how the bureau handled a pair of informants, including Mr. Steele, whose work was financed by Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Reuters first reported the investigators’ interview of Mr. Steele.

Mr. Horowitz is expected to answer whether Mr. Steele’s information played a role in opening the Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane. Former law enforcement officials have insisted it did not, saying they opened the inquiry in July 2016. The Steele dossier did not reach the relevant agents until Sept. 19, 2016, nearly two months later, people familiar with the matter have said.

But the primary focus of the inspector general’s inquiry is the role that Mr. Steele’s information played in investigators’ effort to obtain court permission to wiretap Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the application on Oct. 21, 2016, about a month after Mr. Page had left the campaign, and the wiretap order — one of 1,559 the court issued that year — was renewed three times in 2017, including twice by Trump-era Justice Department officials.

In August 2016, a month before agents on the Russia investigation received the Steele dossier, they had already started discussions with the Justice Department about seeking a wiretap order targeting Mr. Page, according to people familiar with the investigation’s timeline. Agents identified Mr. Page as a potential conduit between the campaign and Moscow, if there was any, because he had close business ties to Russia, had traveled there in July after joining the campaign, and had been targeted as a potential recruit by Russian intelligence agents in 2013 — yet did not seem concerned when the F.B.I. talked to him about it.

Still, the arrival of the dossier in September kicked the deliberations over whether to seek a wiretap order into a higher gear, according to people familiar with the Russia investigation. By adding further weight to their reasons to be suspicious of Mr. Page, Mr. Steele’s information helped officials overcome bureaucratic reluctance stemming from fears that any leak of the existence of such a wiretap would be politically radioactive.

Agents sought a warrant, mentioning in their application a claim from the dossier: One of Mr. Steele’s sources said that when Mr. Page was in Russia that July, he had supposedly met with the Kremlin-linked president of an energy firm and discussed energy cooperation between the United States and Russia and the prospects of lifting Western sanctions against the Kremlin related to its incursions in Ukraine.

Investigators flagged, in a lengthy footnote in the wiretap application, that Mr. Steele’s research was funded by someone “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit” Mr. Trump’s campaign. They did not specifically identify the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Trump’s allies have called it an abuse to use political opposition research in a wiretap application, especially without naming its funders.

The F.B.I. has defended its use of the material, saying Mr. Steele was a veteran intelligence professional who had helped the bureau obtain credible information in previous investigations. The footnote was a sufficient red flag because it “highlights for the court that this could have been opposition research, that that’s what the source was conducting,” Sally Moyer, an F.B.I. lawyer, said in private congressional testimony last fall.

Mr. Horowitz is also scrutinizing a related issue: whether law-enforcement officials adequately took into account new information as they sought to renew the wiretap. It is not clear, for example, when the F.B.I. figured out for certain that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had funded Mr. Steele’s research; investigators never updated the language describing his research in their three renewal applications.

Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele’s main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.

But it remains unclear whether that source was the origin of any of the claims about Mr. Page that made it into the wiretap application — and, if so, whether the F.B.I. ever told the surveillance court.

His investigators’ questions suggest that the inspector general is exploring several additional lines of potential criticism of the F.B.I. They asked Mr. Steele whether the bureau was overly reliant on the Russian expertise of outsiders like him. Mr. Steele told them that he believed the F.B.I. probably was underequipped to judge the inherently murky intelligence he was relaying.

They also asked about Mr. Steele’s relationship with Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official who was not working on the Russia investigation. After the F.B.I. formally terminated its confidential source relationship with Mr. Steele because he had spoken to the media about what he was hearing from his sources inside Russia, Mr. Ohr functioned as an intermediary for subsequent informal communications as the bureau continued to scrutinize Trump-Russia ties, including attempting to verify other claims in Mr. Steele’s dossier.

In all, the Page wiretap application has likely become among the most scrutinized wiretap applications in history. James Baker, the F.B.I. general counsel at the time, who also agreed to cooperate with the inspector general, would not comment on the substance of his interactions with Mr. Horowitz’s inquiry but has said in other forums that F.B.I. officials knew that everything they did would be second-guessed.

During a congressional deposition last fall, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, asked Mr. Baker why he took the unusual step of personally reviewing the original warrant application.

“I anticipated being — sitting here in rooms like this down the road, I seriously did, and I knew that it was — I knew that it was sensitive,” Mr. Baker replied, according to a transcript. “I knew that it would be controversial.”

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

On Twitter, follow Adam Goldman at @adamgoldmannyt, Charlie Savage at @charlie_savage, and Matthew Rosenberg at @allmattnyt.

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