The former British intelligence official who put together the controversial dossier on Donald Trump says that the information was so damaging that it terrified him.
Christopher Steele spoke to the British online newspaper The Independent this week. He said that as he researched Russia’s compromising information against the President-elect, including salacious stories about the use of prostitutes, he became increasingly alarmed.
Steele said that while his firm had been hired in September 2015 by Trump’s Republican opponents to dig up information, what he found seemed too significant to contain.
In July 2016, around the time of the party conventions, Steele produced a memo alleging contact between Trump’s campaign team and the Kremlin. It claimed that Trump’s people had agreed to downplay Moscow’s military actions against Ukraine. Almost immediately, Trump made a public statement saying that he would recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a territory of Ukraine.
Only a few weeks after the release of the memo, the Trump team asked the Republican Party to drop a plank in the party platform that called for U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
This was also at just about the same time that Trump made what he called a “joke” about the Russian hacking of the DNC, which Steele claims trump knew about. He urged the Russians to find Hillary’s missing emails.
That memo was sent directly to the FBI in July. No action was taken.
After Trump won his party’s nomination, it was the Democrats who continued to pay the company, called Fusion GPS.
By the time Steele and his team had compiled the information in the recently released dossier, the election was over and the Democrats no longer needed the information. But he continued to work without pay, convinced that the information he was compiling was vital to national security. He felt that it was his duty to get the compromising material to both British and U.S. intelligence services.
Steele contacted the FBI and MI6 again in September with more information. Again, he was frustrated that nothing seemed to be happening.
Steele came to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy within the FBI to focus full time on the Clinton email scandal, and to ignore the situation with Trump and Putin. Many of the agents in the New York office were long time friends of Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.
Two days before FBI director James Comey announced that there “might be more” Clinton emails to investigate, Giuliani said that the Trump campaign
“…a surprise or two you’re going to hear about in the next few days. We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn things around.”
The Democrats have since demanded, but failed to get, an explanation of how Giuliani knew ahead of time that something was coming.
Steele’s efforts to bring this explosive dossier into the public eye came to nothing until Sen. John McCain, no supporter of Trump, met with Sir Andrew Wood, a British expert on the Kremlin. The two men talked, and Sir Andrew described the dossier to McCain and vouched for the professionalism of Christopher Steele.
The information has finally become public. We’ll have to see how the FBI, and how the Republicans Party, reacts to it.
Featured image via YouTube screengrab.
