VERY LONG, BUT TOO IMPORTANT NOT TO PROMOTE
The best piece of investigative reporting I have seen in a long time. And huge congratulations to
The New Yorker for printing it.
Not only does it investigate the reliability of the Steele dossier, but it raises important questions about Comey's actions.
Jane Mayer's dissection of the Man behind the Investigation of Russian meddling.
In January, after a long day at his London office, Christopher Steele,
the former spy turned private investigator, was stepping off a commuter train
in Farnham, where he lives, when one of his two phones rang. He’d been looking
forward to dinner at home with his wife, and perhaps a glass of wine. It had
been their dream to live in Farnham, a town in Surrey with a beautiful Georgian
high street, where they could afford a house big enough to accommodate their
four children, on nearly an acre of land. Steele, who is fifty-three, looked
much like the other businessmen heading home, except for the fact that he kept
his phones in a Faraday bag—a pouch, of military-tested double-grade fabric,
designed to block signal detection.
A friend in Washington, D.C., was calling
with bad news: two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley,
had just referred Steele’s name to the Department of Justice, for a possible
criminal investigation. They were accusing Steele—the author of a secret
dossier that helped trigger the current federal investigation into President
Donald Trump’s possible ties to Russia—of having lied to the very F.B.I.
officers he’d alerted about his findings. The details of the criminal referral
were classified, so Steele could not know the nature of the allegations, let
alone rebut them, but they had something to do with his having misled the
Bureau about contacts that he’d had with the press. For nearly thirty years,
Steele had worked as a close ally of the United States, and he couldn’t imagine
why anyone would believe that he had been deceptive. But lying to an F.B.I.
officer is a felony, an offense that can be punished by up to five years in
prison.
The accusations would only increase doubts
about Steele’s reputation that had clung to him since BuzzFeed published
the dossier, in January, 2017. The dossier painted a damning picture
of collusion between Trump and Russia, suggesting that his campaign had
“accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his
Democratic and other political rivals.” It also alleged that Russian officials
had been “cultivating” Trump as an asset for five years, and had obtained
leverage over him, in part by recording videos of him while he engaged in
compromising sexual acts, including consorting with Moscow prostitutes who, at his
request, urinated on a bed.
In the spring of 2016, Orbis Business
Intelligence—a small investigative-research firm that Steele and a partner had
founded, in 2009, after leaving M.I.6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence
Service—had agreed to do opposition research on Trump’s murky relationship with
Russia. Under the arrangement, Orbis was a subcontractor working for Fusion
GPS, a private research firm in Washington. Fusion, in turn, had been
contracted by a law firm, Perkins Coie, which represented both Hillary
Clinton’s Presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Several
months after Steele signed the deal, he learned that, through this chain, his
research was being jointly subsidized by the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. In
all, Steele was paid a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars for his work.
Steele had spent more than twenty years in
M.I.6, most of it focussing on Russia. For three years, in the nineties, he
spied in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Between 2006 and 2009, he ran the service’s
Russia desk, at its headquarters, in London. He was fluent in Russian, and
widely considered to be an expert on the country. He’d also advised on
nation-building in Iraq. As a British citizen, however, he was not especially
knowledgeable about American politics. Peter Fritsch, a co-founder at Fusion
who has worked closely with Steele, said of him, “He’s a career public-service
officer, and in England civil servants haven’t been drawn into politics in
quite the same way they have here. He’s a little naïve about the public
square.”
And so Steele, on that January night, was
stunned to learn that U.S. politicians were calling him a criminal. He told
Christopher Burrows, with whom he co-founded Orbis, that the sensation was “a
feeling like vertigo.” Burrows, in his first public interview on the dossier
controversy, recalled Steele telling him, “You have this thudding headache—you
can’t think straight, you have no appetite, you feel ill.” Steele compared it
to the disorientation that he had felt in 2009, when his first wife, Laura, had
died, after a long illness, leaving him to care for their three young children.
That night, Burrows said, Steele and his
second wife, Katherine, who have been married since 2012, sat in their living
room, wondering what would become of them. Would they be financially ruined by
legal costs? (In addition to the criminal referral in the U.S., a Russian
businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, had filed a libel lawsuit against Steele, saying
that the dossier had falsely accused his company of helping the Russian
government hack into the Democratic Party’s internal e-mail system.) Would
Steele end up in a U.S. federal penitentiary? Would a Putin emissary knife him
in a dark alley somewhere?
In conversations with friends, Steele said
he hoped that in five years he’d look back and laugh at the whole experience.
But he tended toward pessimism. No matter how the drama turned out, “I will
take this to my grave,” he often predicted. A longtime friend of Steele’s
pointed out to me that Steele was in a singularly unenviable predicament.
The dossier had infuriated both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump by divulging
allegedly corrupt dealings between them. “You’ve got oligarchs running both
superpowers,” the friend said. “And, incredibly, they both hate this same guy.”
Legal experts soon assured Steele that the
criminal referral was merely a political stunt. Nevertheless, it marked a tense
new phase in the investigation into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. The initial
bipartisan support in Congress for a serious inquiry into foreign meddling in
America’s democracy had given way to a partisan brawl. Trump’s defenders argued
that Steele was not a whistle-blower but a villain—a dishonest Clinton
apparatchik who had collaborated with American intelligence and law-enforcement
officials to fabricate false charges against Trump and his associates, in a
dastardly attempt to nullify the 2016 election. According to this story line,
it was not the President who needed to be investigated but the investigators
themselves, starting with Steele. “They’re trying to take down the whole
intelligence community!” Steele exclaimed one day to friends. “And they’re
using me as the battering ram to do it.”
It was not the first time that a congressional investigation had been
used as a tool for destroying someone’s reputation. Whenever a scandal hit
Washington, opponents used subpoenas, classified evidence, and theatrical
public hearings to spread innuendo, confusion, and lies. Senators Grassley and
Graham declined to be interviewed for this article, but in January Grassley,
the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, gave a speech on the Senate
floor defending the criminal referral. He noted that Steele had drawn on
Russian contacts to amass the dossier. “Who was actually colluding
with Russians?” Grassley asked. “It’s becoming more clear.”
Democratic members of the committee, who
had not been consulted by Republicans about the criminal referral against Steele,
were enraged. The California senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking minority
member on the committee, declared that the Republicans’ goals were “undermining
the F.B.I. and Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation” and “deflecting
attention” from it. Feinstein said that the criminal referral provided no
evidence that Steele had lied, and, she added, “not a single revelation in the
Steele dossier has been refuted.”
Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator
from Rhode Island, is a former prosecutor who also serves on the Judiciary
Committee. “To impeach Steele’s dossier is to impeach Mueller’s investigation,”
he told me. “It’s to recast the focus back on Hillary.” The Republicans’ aim,
he believed, was to “create a false narrative saying this is all a political
witch hunt.”
Indeed, on January 18th, the staff of
Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
produced a report purporting to show that the real conspiracy revolved around
Hillary Clinton. “The truth,” Nunes said, is that Clinton “colluded with the
Russians to get dirt on Trump, to feed it to the F.B.I. to open up an
investigation into the other campaign.” Glenn Kessler, who writes the
nonpartisan Fact Checker
blog at the Washington Post, awarded
Nunes’s statement four Pinocchios—his rating for an outright lie. “There is no
evidence that Clinton was involved in Steele’s reports or worked with Russian
entities to feed information to Steele,” Kessler wrote.
Nonetheless, conservative talk-show hosts
amplified Nunes’s message. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson denounced Steele as “an intense
partisan with passionately left-wing views about American politics,” and said,
inaccurately, that his “sloppy and reckless” research “appears to form the
basis” of the entire Mueller investigation. Sean Hannity charged that Steele’s
dossier was “claptrap” filled with “Russian lies” that were intended to poison
“our own intelligence and law-enforcement network” against Trump. The editorial
page of the Wall
Street Journal accused
Steele of turning the F.B.I. into “a tool of anti-Trump
political actors.” Rush Limbaugh warned his radio listeners, “The battle is
between people like us and the Deep State who are trying to keep hidden what
they did.”
President Trump had mocked “the dirty
dossier,” suggesting that a “failed spy” had relied on “made-up facts by
sleazebag political operatives.” But on February 8th the President denounced
Steele by name for the first time. “Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame,” he
tweeted, was “all tied into Crooked Hillary.”
Two days later, Burrows, of Orbis, was at
his home, in Winchester, southwest of London, struggling to express to me how
odd and disturbing it was to have his business partner targeted by the
President of the United States. A tight-lipped fifty-nine-year-old who is
conservative in politics and in manner, Burrows, like Steele, had spent decades
as a British intelligence officer. “This whole thing has been quite surreal,”
he said. “We are being made into a political football, in U.S. terms, which we
really regret. Chris is being accused of being the heart of some Deep State
conspiracy, and he’s not even in your state.”
Steele’s lawyers have advised him not to
speak publicly about the controversy, and, because he is a former intelligence
officer, much of his life must remain secret. His accusers know this, and, as
Senator Whitehouse explained, “they are using selective declassification as a
tactic—they use declassified information to tell their side, and then the
rebuttal is classified.” Both the criminal referral and Nunes’s report used
secret evidence to malign Steele while providing no means for his defenders to
respond without breaching national-security secrets. But interviews with
Steele’s friends, colleagues, and business associates tell a very
different story about how a British citizen became enmeshed in one of
America’s most consequential political battles.
Steele was born in 1964 in Aden, then the capital of Yemen. His father
worked for the U.K.’s national weather service, and had postings overseas and
in Great Britain. Steele’s family was middle class, but its roots were
blue-collar: one of Steele’s grandfathers was a Welsh coal miner. An
outstanding student, Steele was accepted at Cambridge University in 1982. He soon
set his sights on becoming the president of the Cambridge Union, the
prestigious debating society. It is such a common path for ambitious future
leaders that, according to one former member, its motto should be “The Egos
Have Landed.” Getting elected president requires shrewd political skills, and
Steele secured the position, in part, by muscling the university newspaper, for
which he had been writing, into endorsing his candidacy. His jockeying created
enemies. One anonymous rival recently
told the Daily Mail that Steele used to be a “little
creep.”
Steele was a middle-of-the-road Labour
Party supporter, and at the Cambridge Union his allies, known as the
Anti-Establishment Faction, were state-schooled, middle-class students.
Steele’s camp competed against a blue-blooded Establishment Faction and a
right-wing Libertarian Faction. His longtime friend, who was part of a
like-minded society at Oxford, said, “Almost all of us had come from less posh
families, and suffered a bit from the impostor syndrome that made us doubt we
belonged there, so we worked many times harder to prove ourselves.” He recalled
Steele as an “astoundingly diligent” student with “huge integrity,” adding, “He
just puts the bit in his teeth and charges the hill. He’s almost like a
cyborg.”
Graham Davies, now a well-known
public-speaking coach in the U.K., became friends with Steele in the Cambridge
Union. He described him as “ultra low-key but ultra high-intensity,” adding,
“He’s a very quiet guy who listens more than he talks, which made him stand
out.” Davies went on, “Most of us like a bit of the spotlight, but Chris has
always been the opposite. That’s been part of his integrity. He’s quietly in
control.” Davies, who is a conservative, told me that Steele has many
conservative friends. (Steele supported the Labour government of Tony Blair
until the Iraq War, but he voted for a local Conservative official in his home
county.) “He’s not an ideologue,” Davies said. “He’s got his political views,
but he’s a pragmatic thinker. Fairness, integrity, and truth, for him, trump
any ideology.”
Steele is said to be the first president
of the Cambridge Union to invite a member of the Palestine Liberation
Organization to speak. And he presided over numerous high-profile political
debates, including one in which the proposition that President Ronald Reagan’s
foreign policies had hurt the U.K. carried the house.
Tellingly, none of Steele’s old friends
seem to remember the first time they met him. Of average height and build, with
pleasant features, a clean-cut style of dress, and a cool, neutral gaze, he
didn’t draw attention to himself. He was a natural candidate to become
professionally unnoticeable. Davies, who dines several times a year with Steele
and other schoolmates, said, “He’s more low-key than Smiley”—the John le Carré
character. But, he noted, whenever Steele took on a task “he was like a terrier
with a bone—when something needs investigating, he applies the most intense
intellect I’ve ever seen.”
Steele graduated in 1986, with a degree in
social and political science, and initially thought that he might go into
journalism or the law. One day, though, he answered a newspaper ad seeking
people interested in working abroad. The advertiser turned out to be M.I.6,
which, after a battery of tests, recruited Steele into its Russian-language
program. By the time he was in his mid-twenties he was living in Moscow.
Steele worked out of the British Embassy
for M.I.6, under diplomatic cover. His years in Moscow, 1990 to 1993, were
among the most dramatic in Russian history, a period that included the collapse
of the Communist Party; nationalist uprisings in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the
Baltic states; and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin gained
ultimate power in Russia, and a moment of democratic promise faded as the
K.G.B.—now called the F.S.B.—reasserted its influence, oligarchs snapped up
state assets, and nationalist political forces began to emerge. Vladimir Putin,
a K.G.B. operative returning from East Germany, reinvented himself in the shadowy
world of St. Petersburg politics. By the time Steele left the country, optimism
was souring, and a politics of resentment—against the oligarchs, against an
increasing gap between rich and poor, and against the West—was taking hold.
After leaving Moscow, Steele was assigned
an undercover posting with the British Embassy in Paris, but he and a hundred
and sixteen other British spies had their cover blown by an anonymously
published list. Steele came in from the cold and returned to London, and in 2006
he began running its Russia desk, growing increasingly pessimistic about the
direction of the Russian Federation.
Steele’s already dim view of the Kremlin
darkened in November, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B.
officer and a Putin critic who had been recruited by M.I.6, suffered an
agonizing death in a London hospital, after drinking a cup of tea poisoned with
radioactive polonium-210. Moscow had evidently sanctioned a brazen murder in
his own country. Steele was put in charge of M.I.6’s investigation.
Authorities initially planned to indict one suspect in the murder, but
Steele’s investigative work persuaded them to indict a second suspect as well.
Nine years later, the U.K.’s official inquiry report was finally released, and it
confirmed Steele’s view: the murder was an operation by the F.S.B., and it was
“probably approved” by Vladimir Putin.
Steele has never commented on the case, or
on any other aspect of his intelligence work, but Richard Dearlove, who led
M.I.6 from 1999 to 2004, has described his reputation as “superb.” A former
senior officer recalls him as “a Russia-area expert whose knowledge I and
others respected—he was very careful, and very savvy.” Another former M.I.6
officer described him as having a “Marmite” personality—a reference to the
salty British spread, which people either love or hate. He suggested that
Steele didn’t appear to be “going places in the service,” noting that, after
the Cold War, Russia had become a backwater at M.I.6. But he acknowledged that
Steele “knew Russia well,” and that running the Russia desk was “a proper job
that you don’t give to an idiot.”
The British Secret Intelligence Service is
highly regarded by the United States, particularly for its ability to harvest
information from face-to-face sources, rather than from signals intelligence,
such as electronic surveillance, as the U.S. often does. British and American
intelligence services work closely together, and, while Steele was at M.I.6,
British intelligence was often included in the U.S. President’s daily-briefing
reports. In 2008, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, visited the U.K., and
Steele briefed him on Russian developments. The following year, President Obama
visited the U.K., and was briefed on a report that Steele had written about
Russia. Steve Hall, a former chief of the C.I.A.’s Central Eurasia Division,
which includes Russia, the former Soviet states, and the Balkans, told me,
“M.I.6 is second only perhaps to the U.S. in its ability to collect
intelligence from Russia.” He added, “We’ve always coördinated closely with
them because they did such a great job. We’re playing in the Yankee Stadium of
espionage here. This isn’t Guatemala.”
In 2008, Steele informed M.I.6 that he
planned to leave the service and open a commercial intelligence firm with
Burrows. He left in good standing, but his exit was hastened, because M.I.6
regarded his plans as a potential conflict of interest. Launching the business
was a risky move: London was filled with companies run by former intelligence
officers selling their contacts and inside knowledge. To differentiate itself,
Orbis, which opened its office in Mayfair, attempted to exploit Steele’s
Russian expertise. The strategy appears to have paid off. According to people
with knowledge of the company, Orbis grossed approximately twenty million
dollars in its first nine years. Steele now drives a Land Rover Discovery
Sport, and belongs to a golf club. He also runs a bit, but the feats that kept
him in shape while he was a spy—he ran six marathons and twenty-five
half-marathons, and competed in a dozen Olympic-length triathlon events—have
been replaced by the carrying of a briefcase. His free time is devoted largely
to his family, which includes three cats, one of whom not long ago replicated
the most infamous allegation in the Steele dossier by peeing on a family
member’s bed.
Orbis’s clients are mostly businesses or
law firms representing corporations. Burrows said that although the company has
fewer than ten full-time employees, “we’re a bit like the bridge on the
Starship Enterprise—we’re a small group but we manage an enormous ship.” To
serve its clients, Orbis employs dozens of confidential “collectors” around the
world, whom it pays as contract associates. Some of the collectors are private
investigators at smaller firms; others are investigative reporters or highly
placed experts in strategically useful jobs. Depending on the task and the
length of engagement, the fee for collectors can be as much as two thousand
dollars a day. The collectors harvest intelligence from a much larger network
of unpaid sources, some of whom don’t even realize they are being treated as
informants. These sources occasionally receive favors—such as help in getting
their children into Western schools—but money doesn’t change hands, because it
could risk violating laws against, say, bribing government officials or insider
trading. Paying sources might also encourage them to embellish.
Steele has not been to Russia, or visited
any former Soviet states, since 2009. Unlike some of his former M.I.6
colleagues, he has not been declared persona non grata by Putin’s regime, but,
in 2012, an Orbis informant quoted an F.S.B. agent describing him as “an enemy
of Mother Russia.” Steele concluded that it would be difficult for him to work
in the country unnoticed. The firm guards the identities of its sources, but it’s
clear that many Russian contacts can be interviewed elsewhere, and London is
the center of the post-Soviet Russian diaspora.
Orbis often performs anti-corruption
investigations for clients attempting internal reviews, and helps hedge funds
and other financial companies perform due diligence or obtain strategic
information. One Orbis client who agreed to talk to me, a Western businessman
with interests in Russia and Ukraine, described Steele to me as “very
efficient, very professional, and very credible.” He said that his company had
successfully cross-checked Steele’s research with other people, adding, “I
don’t know anyone who’s been critical of his work. His reports are very good.
It’s an absolute no-brainer that he’s just a political target. They’re trying
to shoot the messenger.”
Orbis promises confidentiality, and
releases no information on its clientele. Some of its purported clients, such
as a major Western oil company, are conventional corporations. Others are
controversial, including a London law firm representing the interests of Oleg
Deripaska, the billionaire victor of Russia’s aluminum wars, a notoriously
violent battle. He has been described as Putin’s favorite oligarch. Steele’s
possible financial ties to Deripaska recently prompted Senator Grassley to
demand more information from the London law firm. If a financial trail between
Deripaska and Orbis can be established, it is likely to raise even more
questions about Steele, because Deripaska has already figured in the Russia
investigation, in an unsavory light. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign
manager, has been accused of defrauding Deripaska’s company while working for
it in Ukraine. (Manafort has been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on
charges of money laundering and other financial crimes. He has pleaded not
guilty.) Even if Steele’s rumored work for Deripaska is aboveboard, it
illustrates the transition that he has made from the world of government
service to the ethically gray world of commerce. Oligarchs battling other oligarchs
provide some of the most lucrative work for investigators with expertise in
Russia. Orbis maintains that, as long as its activities are limited to
providing litigation support for Western law firms acting in Western courts, it
is helping to settle disputes in a more civilized way than they would be in
Russia. But Steele stepped into a murkier realm when he left M.I.6.
Republican claims to the contrary, Steele’s interest in Trump did not
spring from his work for the Clinton campaign. He ran across Trump’s name
almost as soon as he went into private business, many years before the 2016
election. Two of his earliest cases at Orbis involved investigating
international crime rings whose leaders, coincidentally, were based in New
York’s Trump Tower.
Steele’s first client after leaving M.I.6
was England’s Football Association, which hoped to host the World Cup in 2018,
but suspected dirty dealings by the governing body, fifa. England lost out in its bid to Russia, and Steele determined that the
Kremlin had rigged the process with bribes. According to Ken Bensinger’s “Red Card,” an upcoming
book about the scandal, “one of Steele’s best sources” informed him that the
Deputy Prime Minister, Igor Sechin—now the C.E.O. of the Russian
state-controlled oil giant Rosneft—is suspected of having travelled to Qatar
“to swap World Cup votes.”
Steele appears to have spoken anonymously
to the Sunday Times of Londonabout the case. An “ex-M.I.6
source” who investigated the bidding process told the paper, “The key thing
with Russia was six months before the bid, it got to the point where the
country feared the humiliation of being beaten and had to do
something. . . . Putin dragged in all sorts of capabilities.” He
added, “Don’t expect me or anyone else to produce a document with Putin’s
signature saying ‘Please, X, bribe Y with this amount in this way.’ He’s not
going to do that.”
Steele might have been expected to move on
once his investigation of the bidding was concluded. But he had discovered that
the corruption at fifa was
global, and he felt that it should be addressed. The only organization that
could handle an investigation of such scope, he felt, was the F.B.I. In 2011,
Steele contacted an American agent he’d met who headed the Bureau’s division
for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who proved
essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department
indicted fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars
in bribes and kickbacks. One of them was Chuck Blazer, a top fifa official who had embezzled a fortune from the organization and
became an informant for the F.B.I. Blazer had an
eighteen-thousand-dollar-per-month apartment in Trump Tower, a few floors down
from Trump’s residence.
Nobody had alleged that Trump knew of
any fifa crimes, but Steele soon came across
Trump Tower again. Several years ago, the F.B.I. hired Steele to help crack an
international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected
Russian organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was
based in an apartment in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted
more than thirty co-conspirators for financial crimes. Tokhtakhounov, though,
eluded arrest, becoming a fugitive. Interpol issued a “red notice” calling for
his arrest. But, in the fall of 2013, he showed up at the Miss Universe contest
in Moscow—and sat near the pageant’s owner, Donald Trump.
“It was as if all criminal roads led to
Trump Tower,” Steele told friends.
Burrows told me that he and Steele made a
pact when they left M.I.6: “We both agreed it was a duty to alert U.K. and
allied authorities if we came across anything with national-security
dimensions. It comes from a very long government service. We still have that
ethos of wanting to do the right thing by our authorities.”
By working with law-enforcement
authorities on investigations, Steele has kept a foot in his former life. Some
critics have questioned the propriety of this. Lindsey Graham recently
argued, in the Washington Post, “You can
be an F.B.I. informant. You can be a political operative. But you can’t be
both, particularly at the same time.”
Burrows said that on several occasions
Orbis had warned authorities about major security threats. Three years
ago, a trusted Middle Eastern source told Orbis that a group of isis militants were using the flow of refugees from Syria to infiltrate
Europe. Orbis shared the information with associates who relayed the
intelligence to German security officials. Several months later, when a concert
hall in Paris, the Bataclan, was attacked by terrorists, Burrows and Steele
felt remorse at not having notified French authorities as well. When Steele
took his suspicions about Trump to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016, it was in
keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a politically driven aberration.
Even before Steele became involved in the
U.S. Presidential campaign, he was convinced that the Kremlin was interfering
in Western elections. In April of 2016, not long before he took on the Fusion
assignment, he finished a secret investigation, which he called Project
Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference
in the politics of four members of the European Union—France, Italy, the United
Kingdom, and Germany—along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles
persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media
warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support”
given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds
of support. The report discusses the Kremlin’s entanglement with the former
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the French right-wing leader
Marine Le Pen. (Le Pen and Berlusconi deny having had such ties.) It also
suggests that Russian aid was likely given to lesser-known right-wing
nationalists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The Kremlin’s long-term aim,
the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the
expense of Europe’s liberal democracies. The more immediate goal was to “destroy”
the E.U., in order to end the punishing economic sanctions that the E.U. and
the U.S. had imposed on
Russia after its 2014 political and military
interference in Ukraine.
Although the report’s language was dry,
and many of the details familiar to anyone who had been watching Russia
closely, Project Charlemagne was the equivalent of a flashing red light. It
warned that Russian intelligence services were becoming more strategic and
increasingly disruptive. Russian interference in foreign elections, it cautioned,
was only “likely to grow in size and reach over time.”
In the spring of 2016, Steele got a call from Glenn Simpson, a former
investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal who, in 2011, had
left journalism to co-found Fusion GPS. Simpson was hoping that Steele could
help Fusion follow some difficult leads on Trump’s ties to Russia. Simpson said
that he was working for a law firm, but didn’t name the ultimate client.
The funding for the project originally
came from an organization financed by the New York investor Paul Singer, a
Republican who disliked Trump. But, after it became clear that Trump would win
the Republican nomination, Singer dropped out. At that point, Fusion persuaded
Marc Elias, the general counsel for the Clinton campaign, to subsidize the
unfinished research. This bipartisan funding history belies the argument that
the research was corrupted by its sponsorship.
Steele and Simpson had previously worked
together, and they shared a mutual fascination with
Russian oligarchs and
international organized crime. They had symbiotic approaches. Fusion focussed
on open-source research—mind-numbing dives into the fine print of public
records. Steele’s specialty was gathering intelligence from informed sources,
many of them Russian.
One question particularly gnawed at
Simpson. Why had Trump repeatedly gone to Russia in search of business, yet
returned empty-handed? Steele was tantalized, and took the job, thinking that
he’d find evidence of a few dodgy deals, and not much else. He evidently didn’t
consider the danger of poking into a Presidential candidate’s darkest secrets.
“He’s just got blinkers,” Steele’s longtime friend told me. “He doesn’t put his
head in the oven so much as not see the oven.”
Within a few weeks, two or three of
Steele’s long-standing collectors came back with reports drawn from Orbis’s
larger network of sources. Steele looked at the material and, according to
people familiar with the matter, asked himself, “Oh, my God—what is this?”
He called in Burrows, who was normally unflappable. Burrows realized that they
had a problem. As Simpson later put it, “We threw out a line in the water, and
Moby-Dick came back.”
Steele’s sources claimed that the F.S.B.
could easily blackmail Trump, in part because it had videos of him engaging in
“perverted sexual acts” in Russia. The sources said that when Trump had stayed
in the Presidential suite of Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, in 2013, he had paid
“a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in
front of him,” thereby defiling a bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had slept
in during a state visit. The allegation was attributed to four sources, but
their reports were secondhand—nobody had witnessed the event or tracked down a
prostitute, and one spoke generally about “embarrassing material.” Two sources
were unconnected to the others, but the remaining two could have spoken to each
other. In the reports Steele had collected, the names of the sources were
omitted, but they were described as “a former top-level Russian intelligence
officer still active inside the Kremlin,” a “member of the staff at the hotel,”
a “female staffer at the hotel when trumphad
stayed there,” and “a close associate of trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow.”
More significant, in hindsight, than the
sexual details were claims that the Kremlin and Trump were politically
colluding in the 2016 campaign. The Russians were described as having
cultivated Trump and traded favors with him “for at least 5 years.” Putin was
described as backing Trump in order to “sow discord and disunity both within
the U.S.” and within the transatlantic alliance. The report claimed that,
although Trump had not signed any real-estate-development deals, he and his top
associates had repeatedly accepted intelligence from the Kremlin on Hillary
Clinton and other political rivals. The allegations were astounding—and
improbable. They could constitute treason even if they were only partly true.
According to people familiar with the
matter, as Steele began to assemble the first of seventeen memos, which became
the dossier, Burrows expressed reservations about including the golden-showers
allegation. He had a cautious temperament, and worried about the impact that
the sensational item might have. But Steele argued that it would be dishonest
and distorting to cherry-pick details, and that the possibility of a potential
American President being subject to blackmail was too important to hide.
“That’s classic Steele,” his longtime friend told me. “He’s so straight.”
In a fateful decision, Steele chose to
include everything. People familiar with the matter say that Steele knew he
could either shred the incendiary information or carry on. If he kept
investigating, and then alerted officials who he thought should know about his
findings, he feared that his life—and, indeed, the life of anyone who touched
the dossier—would never be the same.
At the time, Steele figured that almost
nobody would ever see the raw intelligence. The credibility of Steele’s dossier
has been much debated, but few realize that it was a compilation of contemporaneous
interviews rather than a finished product. Orbis was just a subcontractor, and
Steele and Burrows reasoned that Fusion could, if it wished, process the
findings into an edited report for the ultimate client. So Orbis left it up to
Fusion to make the judgment calls about what to leave in, and to decide whether
to add caveats and source notes of the kind that accompany most government
intelligence reports.
John Sipher spent twenty-eight years as a
clandestine officer in the C.I.A., and ran the agency’s Russia program before
retiring, in 2014. He said of Steele’s memos, “This is source material, not expert
opinion.” Sipher has described the dossier as “generally credible,” although
not correct in every detail. He said, “People have misunderstood that it’s a
collection of dots, not a connecting of the dots. But it provided the first
narrative saying what Russia might be up to.” Alexander Vershbow, a U.S.
Ambassador to Russia under George W. Bush, told me, “In intelligence, you
evaluate your sources as best you can, but it’s not like journalism, where you
try to get more than one source to confirm something. In the intelligence
business, you don’t pretend you’re a hundred per cent accurate. If you’re
seventy or eighty per cent accurate, that makes you one of the best.”
On June 24, 2016, Steele’s fifty-second birthday, Simpson called, asking
him to submit the dossier. The previous day, the U.K. had voted to withdraw
from the E.U., and Steele was feeling wretched about it. Few had thought that
Brexit was possible. An upset victory by Trump no longer seemed out of the
question. Steele was so nervous about maintaining secrecy and protecting his
sources that he sent a courier by plane to Washington to hand-deliver a copy of
the dossier. The courier’s copy left the sources redacted, providing instead
descriptions of them that enabled Fusion to assess their basic credibility.
Steele feared that, for some of his Russian sources, exposure would be a death
sentence.
Steele also felt a duty to get the
information to the F.B.I. Although Trump has tweeted that the dossier was “all
cooked up by Hillary Clinton,” Steele approached the Bureau on his own.
According to Simpson’s sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee,
Steele told him in June, 2016, that he wanted to alert the U.S. government, and
explained, “I’m a former intelligence officer, and we’re your closest ally.”
Simpson testified that he asked to think about it for a few days; when Steele
brought it up again, Simpson relented. As Simpson told the Senate Judiciary
Committee, “Let’s be clear. This was not considered by me to be part of the
work we were doing. This was like you’re driving to work and you see something
happen and you call 911.” Steele, he said, felt “professionally obligated to do
it.” Simpson went along, he testified, because Steele was the
“national-security expert,” whereas he was merely “an ex-journalist.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David
Garrow has questioned
Steele’s motives in the Wall Street Journal, calling
him a “paid operative” spreading “partisan gossip.” He told me that Steele’s
whistle-blowing seemed “self-dramatizing,” adding, “We see Steele viewing
himself as a historically important person. He believes he has unique knowledge
that he must warn the world about.” As a historian who has written critically
about the F.B.I.’s persecution of Martin Luther King, Jr., Garrow is troubled
by Steele’s zealousness. “In this secret-agent world, there’s a desire to
maximize their importance,” Garrow said. “It’s as if all these guys wanted to
play themselves in the movies.”
But Mark Medish, a former director of
Russian affairs at the National Security Council, told me that “if Steele had
not shared his findings, he might have been accused of dereliction or a coverup.”
He added, “It takes courage to deliver bad news, particularly when the stakes
are so high.” And Senator Whitehouse described Steele’s actions as akin to
warning the F.B.I. about a “physical detonation of some sort,” noting, “If it
had gone off, and he or the F.B.I. had ignored it, heads would roll.”
Regardless of what others might think,
it’s clear that Steele believed that his dossier was filled with important
intelligence. Otherwise, he would never have subjected it, his firm, and his
reputation to the harsh scrutiny of the F.B.I. “I’m impressed that he was
willing to share it with the F.B.I.,” Sipher said. “That gives him real
credibility to me, the notion that he’d give it to the best intelligence
professionals in the world.”
On July 5, 2016, Steele went to his London
office and met with the F.B.I. agent with whom he’d worked on the fifa case. The agent responded to the first memo in the dossier, Steele
has said, with “shock and horror.” Simpson knew that Steele had informed the
F.B.I., but he has said that, amid the tumult of the 2016 campaign, it more or
less slipped his mind. (In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he
recalled asking himself, “I wonder what the F.B.I. did? Whoops—haven’t heard
from them.”) As the summer went on, there was little indication that the F.B.I.
was paying much attention, either.
For all the Republicans’ talk of a
top-down Democratic plot, Steele and Simpson appear never to have told their
ultimate client—the Clinton campaign’s law firm—that Steele had gone to the
F.B.I. Clinton’s campaign spent much of the summer of 2016 fending off stories
about the Bureau’s investigation into her e-mails, without knowing that the
F.B.I. had launched a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump team’s
ties to Russia—one fuelled, in part, by the Clinton campaign’s own opposition
research. As a top Clinton-campaign official told me, “If I’d known the
F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the
rooftops!”
At virtually the same time that Steele told the F.B.I. about Russia’s
interference in the 2016 Presidential campaign, the Kremlin was engaged—without
his knowledge—in at least two other schemes to pass compromising information
about Hillary Clinton to Trump’s inner circle.
The first scheme involved the Trump
foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos. In April, 2016, over drinks with an
Australian diplomat at a London bar, he divulged that Russia had access to
thousands of Clinton e-mails. The diplomat informed his supervisors of this
bizarre-sounding claim, but Papadopoulos was young and inexperienced, and the
Australians didn’t give it much weight.
The second scheme unfolded at Trump Tower
in New York. On June 9, 2016, top members of Trump’s campaign—including Donald
Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner—had a private meeting on the
twenty-fifth floor with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer. The attendees
had been promised that she would present them with dirt Moscow had collected on
Hillary Clinton. The meeting was set up after Donald, Jr., was approached by an
emissary close to the Agalarov family—Azerbaijani oligarchs with whom Trump had
partnered on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, in Moscow. In an e-mail, the
emissary promised Donald, Jr., that the documents “would incriminate Hillary
and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” and
described this gift as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr.
Trump.” Instead of going to the F.B.I., as Steele had, Trump’s older son
responded giddily to the e-mail: “If it’s what you say I love it especially
later in the summer.”
Donald, Jr., and the other participants
insist that nothing of consequence happened at the Trump Tower meeting:
Veselnitskaya expressed frustration with U.S. sanctions on Russia, but offered
no information on Clinton. A number of former intelligence officers, however,
believe that the meeting, which happened soon after Papadopoulos’s encounter
with the Australian diplomat, enhances the dossier’s credibility. John
McLaughlin, the deputy director of the C.I.A. from 2000 until 2004, told me, “I
haven’t formed a final thought, but clearly parts of it are starting to
resonate with what we know to be true about the Russians’ willingness to
deliver information harmful to Hillary Clinton.”
Furthermore, Steele’s dossier had
highlighted the Agalarov family’s connection with Trump. Ten months before
the Times reported on the Trump Tower meeting, exposing the role of the
Agalarov family’s emissary in setting it up, one of Steele’s memos had
suggested that an “Azeri business associate of Trump, Araz agalarov, will know the details” of “bribes” and “sexual activities” that Trump
had allegedly engaged in while visiting St. Petersburg. (A lawyer for the
Agalarovs denies these claims.)
On June 14, 2016, five days after the
Trump Tower meeting, the Washington Post broke the news that the Russians
were believed to have hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail
system.
The first reports were remarkably blasé. D.N.C. officials admitted that
they had learned about the hack months earlier. (It later surfaced that in
November of 2014 Dutch intelligence officials had provided U.S. authorities
with evidence that the Russians had broken into the Democratic Party’s computer
system. U.S. officials reportedly thanked the Dutch for the tip, sending
cake and flowers, but took little action.) When the infiltration of the
D.N.C. finally became public, various officials were quoted as saying that the
Russians were always trying to penetrate U.S. government systems, and were
likely just trying to understand American politics better.
The attitudes of Democratic officials
changed drastically when, three days before the start of the Democratic
National Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped twenty thousand stolen
D.N.C. e-mails onto the Internet. The e-mails had been weaponized: what had
seemed a passive form of spying was now “an active measure,” in the parlance of
espionage. The leaked e-mails, some of which suggested that the D.N.C. had
secretly favored Clinton’s candidacy over that of Bernie Sanders, appeared just
when the Party was trying to unify its supporters. The Party’s chair, Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign, and recriminations and demonstrations
disrupted the Convention.
Trump’s response was exultant. He said,
“If it is Russia—which it’s probably not, nobody knows who it is—but if it
is . . . Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find
the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be
rewarded mightily by our press.” His campaign later described these comments as
a joke.
At this point, a Clinton foreign-policy
adviser, Laura Rosenberger, who had held various positions at the National
Security Council and at the State Department during the Bush and Obama
Administrations, grew seriously alarmed. She’d already noticed that Trump had
pro-Russian positions on many issues, which seemed to her to be inexplicably
outside the Republican mainstream.
She’d also been struck by Trump’s hiring of
Paul Manafort, who had worked as a political consultant for pro-Kremlin forces in
Ukraine. Trump’s team then appeared to play a role in modifying the G.O.P.
platform so that it better reflected Russia’s position on Ukraine policy. “It
was all beginning to snowball,” she told me. “And then, with the e-mail leaks,
it was, like, ‘Oh, fuck’—excuse my French—‘we are under attack!’ That was the
moment when, as a national-security adviser, you break into sweats.”
Rosenberger, meanwhile, had no idea that
the Clinton campaign had indirectly employed a Russia expert: Steele. Orbis’s
work was sealed off, behind a legal barrier. Marc Elias, the attorney at
Perkins Coie who was serving as the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, acted
as a firewall between the campaign and the private investigators digging up
information on Trump. It’s a common practice for law firms to hire
investigators on behalf of clients, so that any details can be protected by
attorney-client privilege. Fusion briefed only Elias on the reports. Simpson
sent Elias nothing on paper—he was briefed orally. Elias, according to people familiar
with the matter, was flabbergasted by the dossier but wasn’t sure what to do
with the allegations. “Sex stuff is kind of worthless in a campaign,” Simpson
told me. In the absence of live accusers or documentary evidence, such material
is easy to dismiss, and can make the purveyor look sleazy.
At the same time, the financial
machinations described in Steele’s reports were complex, and difficult to
confirm: “yanukovych had confided in putin that he did authorise and order substantial kick-back payments
to manafort as alleged but sought to reassure
him that there was no documentary trail left behind.” (Manafort has denied
this.) Elias broadly summarized some of the information to top campaign
officials, including the campaign manager, Robby Mook, but Elias found much of
the Kremlinology abstruse. He was more interested in finding actionable
intelligence on the people who had exfiltrated the Democrats’ internal e-mails,
and how to stop them.
Mook told me, “The problem with the Russia
story is that people just weren’t buying it. Today, it’s, like, ‘Of course!’
But back then people thought that we were just desperately peddling conspiracy
theories.” After the D.N.C.’s e-mails were hacked, Mook went on TV talk shows
and pointed the finger at Russia, but, he says, his comments were often
dismissed as “spin.” On Jake Tapper’s “State of the Union,” he declared,
“What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us that Russian state
actors broke into the D.N.C., stole these e-mails, and other experts are now saying
that the Russians are releasing these e-mails for the purpose of actually
helping Donald Trump.” Tapper then interviewed Donald Trump, Jr., who ridiculed
Mook’s accusation as “disgusting” and “phony”—even though it’s now known that,
just a few weeks earlier, he had met at Trump Tower with a Russian offering
dirt on Clinton.
That summer, Steele noticed a few small news items further connecting
Trump’s circle to Russia. On July 7, 2016, two days after Steele met in London
with the F.B.I., Carter Page, a Trump foreign-policy adviser, travelled to
Moscow, on a campaign-approved visit, and delivered a lecture at the
prestigious New Economic School. Page’s remarks were head-turning. He
criticized “Washington and other Western capitals” for “their often hypocritical
focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime
change.”
Page was an odd choice for Trump. In New
York in 2013, two Russian intelligence operatives had attempted to recruit
Page, an oil-industry consultant, although wiretaps revealed that one of the
operatives had described him as an “idiot.” The F.B.I. later indicted the two
Russian spies, and warned Page that the Kremlin was trying to recruit him, but
he continued to pursue oil-and-gas deals in Russia. Ian Bremmer, the president
of the Eurasia Group, a risk-consulting firm where Page had previously
worked, said that Page had become a pro-Kremlin “wackadoodle.”
Steele didn’t know it, but U.S.
authorities were independently monitoring Page. According to the recently
released report by the Democratic minority on the House Intelligence Committee,
the F.B.I. had interviewed Page about his contacts with Russian officials in
March, 2016—the same month that Trump named him an adviser.
When Page gave his Moscow lecture, he
declined to answer questions from the audience about whether he would be
meeting Russian officials. Soon afterward, Steele filed another memo to Fusion,
alleging that Page had indeed met with Russians close to Putin, as part of an
ongoing effort by the Russians to cultivate sympathetic Trump aides. Steele’s
sources claimed that one person Page had met with was Igor Sechin, the C.E.O.
of the oil giant Rosneft. Sechin had purportedly proposed to Page increasing
U.S.-Russian energy coöperation in exchange for lifting the Ukraine-related
sanctions on Russia. Page, the dossier said, had “reacted positively” but had
been “non-committal.” (Rosneft declined to comment. Page told me, “Steele got
everything wrong as it relates to me.”)
A subsequent Steele memo claimed that Sechin
was so eager to get U.S. sanctions lifted that, as an incentive, he offered
Page the opportunity to help sell a stake of Rosneft to investors. Steele’s
memo also alleged that while Page was in Russia he met with a top Kremlin
official, Igor Diveykin, who floated the idea of leaking Russian kompromat on Clinton, in order to boost Trump’s candidacy. According to
Steele’s memos, the damaging material on Clinton was political, not personal,
and had been gathered partly from Russian intercepts.
Page has denied any wrongdoing. In a
congressional interview in November, 2017, he initially said that he had not
met with any Russian officials during his July trip. But, according to the
Democrats’ recent Intelligence Committee report, when Page was confronted with evidence
he was “forced to admit” that he had met with a top Kremlin official, after
all, as well as with a Rosneft executive—Sechin’s close associate Andrey
Baranov. The dossier may or may not have erred in its naming of specific
officials, but it was clearly prescient in its revelation that during the
Presidential campaign a covert relationship had been established between Page
and powerful Russians who wanted U.S. sanctions lifted. Trump and his advisers
have repeatedly denied having colluded with Russians. But, in Steele’s telling,
the Russians were clearly offering Trump secret political help.
Steele’s memos describe two other Trump
advisers as sympathetic to Russia: Paul Manafort, then the campaign manager,
and Michael Flynn, an adviser whom Trump later appointed his national-security
adviser. Flynn resigned from that post almost immediately, after it was
revealed that he had engaged in conversations with the Russian Ambassador,
Sergey Kislyak, about U.S. sanctions that Obama had imposed before leaving office.
Flynn has become a central figure in Mueller’s investigation, having pleaded
guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with Kislyak.
On July 26, 2016, after WikiLeaks disseminated the D.N.C. e-mails,
Steele filed yet another memo, this time claiming that the Kremlin was “behind”
the hacking, which was part of a Russian cyber war against Hillary Clinton’s
campaign. Many of the details seemed far-fetched: Steele’s sources claimed that
the digital attack involved agents “within the Democratic Party structure
itself,” as well as Russian émigrés in the U.S. and “associated offensive cyber
operators.”
Neither of these claims has been
substantiated, and it’s hard to imagine that they will be. But one of the
dossier’s other seemingly outlandish assertions—that the hack involved
“state-sponsored cyber operatives working in Russia”—has been buttressed.
According to Special Counsel Mueller’s recent indictment of thirteen Russian
nationals, Kremlin-backed operatives, hiding behind fake and stolen identities,
posed as Americans on Facebook and Twitter, spreading lies and fanning ethnic
and religious hatred with the aim of damaging Clinton and helping Trump. The
Kremlin apparently spent about a million dollars a month to fund Internet
trolls working round-the-clock shifts in a run-down office building in St.
Petersburg. Their tactics were similar to those outlined in Steele’s
Charlemagne investigation, including spreading falsehoods designed to turn
voters toward extremism. The Russian operation also involved political activism
inside the U.S., including the organizing of bogus pro-Trump rallies.
In England, Steele kept cranking out
memos, but he was growing anxious about the lack of response from the F.B.I. As
the summer wore on, he confided in an American friend, Jonathan Winer, a
Democratic lawyer and foreign-policy specialist who was working at the State
Department. Steele told him that Orbis sources had come across unsettling
information about Trump’s ties to Russia. Winer recalls Steele saying that he
“was more certain of it than about any information he’d gotten before in his
life.” Winer told me, “Chris was deeply disturbed that the Kremlin was
infecting our country. By hacking our computers and using WikiLeaks to
disseminate the information—it was an infection. He thought it would have
really bad consequences for the U.S. and the U.K., for starters. He thought it
would destabilize these countries. He wanted the U.S. government to know. He’s
a very institution-oriented person.”
During the previous two years, Steele had
been sending Winer informal reports, gratis, about raw intelligence that he’d
picked up on Ukraine and related areas while working for commercial clients.
Winer, who encouraged Steele to keep sending the reports, estimated that he had
received more than a hundred and twenty of them by 2016. He and others at
the State Department found the research full of insights. Winer recalls
Victoria Nuland, the top official overseeing U.S. policy on Russia, expressing
surprise at how timely Steele’s reports were. A former top State Department
official who read them said, “We found the reports about eighty per cent
consistent with other sources we had.
Occasionally, his sources appeared to
exaggerate their knowledge or influence. But Steele also highlighted some
players and back channels between Russia and Ukraine who became important
later. So the reports had value.”
In September, 2016, Steele briefed Winer
on the dossier at a Washington hotel. Winer prepared a two-page summary and
shared it with a few senior State Department officials. Among them were Nuland
and Jon Finer, the director of policy planning and the chief of staff to
Secretary of State John Kerry. For several days, Finer weighed whether or not
to burden Kerry with the information. He’d found the summary highly disturbing,
but he didn’t know how to assess its claims. Eventually, he decided that, since
others knew, his boss should know, too.
When Kerry was briefed, though, he didn’t
think there was any action that he could take. He asked if F.B.I. agents knew
about the dossier, and, after being assured that they did, that was apparently
the end of it. Finer agreed with Kerry’s assessment, and put the summary in his
safe, and never took it out again. Nuland’s reaction was much the same. She
told Winer to tell Steele to take his dossier to the F.B.I. The so-called Deep
State, it seems, hardly jumped into action against Trump.
“No one wanted to touch it,” Winer said.
Obama Administration officials were mindful of the Hatch Act, which forbids
government employees to use their positions to influence political elections.
The State Department officials didn’t know who was funding Steele’s research,
but they could see how politically explosive it was. So they backed away.
Steele believed that the Russians were engaged
in the biggest electoral crime in U.S. history, and wondered why the F.B.I. and
the State Department didn’t seem to be taking the threat seriously. Likening it
to the attack on Pearl Harbor, he felt that President Obama needed to make a
speech to alert the country. He also thought that Obama should privately warn
Putin that unless he stopped meddling the U.S. would retaliate with a
cyberattack so devastating it would shut Russia down.
Steele wasn’t aware that by August, 2016,
a similar debate was taking place inside the Obama White House and the U.S.
intelligence agencies. According to an article by the Washington Post,
that month the C.I.A. sent what the paper described as “an
intelligence bombshell” to President Obama, warning him that Putin was directly
involved in a Russian cyber campaign aimed at disrupting the Presidential
election—and helping Trump win. Robert Hannigan, then the head of the U.K.’s
intelligence service the G.C.H.Q., had recently flown to Washington and briefed
the C.I.A.’s director, John Brennan, on a stream of illicit communications
between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted. (The content of
these intercepts has not become public.) But, as the Post noted,
the C.I.A.’s assessment that the Russians were interfering specifically to boost
Trump was not yet accepted by other intelligence agencies, and it wasn’t until
days before the Inauguration that major U.S. intelligence agencies had
unanimously endorsed this view.
In the meantime, the White House was
unsure how to respond. Earlier this year, at the Council on Foreign Relations,
former Vice-President Joe Biden revealed that, after Presidential daily
briefings, he and Obama “would sit there” and ask each other, “What the hell
are we going to do?” The U.S. eventually sent a series of stern messages to the
Russians, the most pointed of which took place when Obama pulled Putin aside on
September 5th, at a G20 summit in China, and reportedly warned him, “Better
stop, or else.”
But Obama and his top advisers did not
want to take any action against Russia that might provoke a cyber war. And
because it was so close to the election, they were wary about doing anything
that could be construed as a ploy to help Clinton. All along, Trump had
dismissed talk of Russian interference as a hoax, claiming that no one really
knew who had hacked the D.N.C.: it could have been China, he said, or a guy
from New Jersey, or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred
pounds.” Trump had also warned his supporters that the election would be rigged
against him, and Obama and his top aides were loath to further undermine the
public’s faith.
In early September, 2016, Obama tried to
get congressional leaders to issue a bipartisan statement condemning Russia’s
meddling in the election. He reasoned that if both parties signed on the
statement couldn’t be attacked as political. The intelligence community had
recently informed the Gang of Eight—the leaders of both parties and the ranking
representatives on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees—that Russia was
acting on behalf of Trump. But one Gang of Eight member, Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell, expressed skepticism about the Russians’ role, and refused to
sign a bipartisan statement condemning Russia. After that, Obama, instead of
issuing a statement himself, said nothing.
Steele anxiously asked his American
counterparts what else could be done to alert the country. One option was
to go to the press. Simpson wasn’t all that worried, though. As he recalled in
his subsequent congressional testimony, “We were operating under the assumption
at that time that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, and so there
was no urgency to it.”
Contemporaneous F.B.I. text messages disclosed
recently by the Wall Street Journal reflect a similar
complacency. In August, 2016, two F.B.I. employees, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok,
texted about investigating possible collusion between Trump and the Russians. “omg i cannot
believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive
connections,” Strzok wrote. Page suggested that they
could take their time, because there was little reason to worry that Clinton
would lose. But Strzok disagreed, warning that they should push ahead, anyway,
as “an insurance policy” in case Trump was elected—like “the unlikely event you
die before you’re 40.”
When excerpts of these texts first became
public, Trump defenders such as Trey Gowdy seized on them as proof that the
F.B.I. had schemed to devise “an insurance policy” to keep Trump from getting
elected. But a reading of the full text chain makes it clear that the agents were
discussing whether or not they needed to focus urgently on investigating
collusion.
In late summer, Fusion set up a series of
meetings, at the Tabard Inn, in Washington, between Steele and a handful of
national-security reporters. These encounters were surely sanctioned in some
way by Fusion’s client, the Clinton campaign. The sessions were off the record,
but because Steele has since disclosed having participated in them I can
confirm that I attended one of them. Despite Steele’s generally cool manner, he
seemed distraught about the Russians’ role in the election. He did not
distribute his dossier, provided no documentary evidence, and was so careful
about guarding his sources that there was virtually no way to follow up. At the
time, neither The
New Yorker nor any other news organization ran
a story about the allegations.
Inevitably, though, word of the dossier
began to spread through Washington. A former State Department official recalls
a social gathering where he danced around the subject with the British
Ambassador, Sir Kim Darroch. After exchanging cryptic hints, to make sure that
they were both in the know, he asked the Ambassador, “Is this guy Steele
legit?” The Ambassador replied, “Absolutely.” Brennan, then the C.I.A.
director, also heard the rumors. (Nunes reportedly plans to examine Steele’s
interactions with the C.I.A. and the State Department next.) But Brennan said
recently, on “Meet the Press,” that he heard just “snippets” about the dossier
“in press circles,” emphasizing that he didn’t see the dossier until well after
the election, and said that “it did not play any role whatsoever” in the
intelligence community’s appraisal of Russian election meddling. Brennan said
of the dossier, “It was up to the F.B.I. to see whether or not they could verify
any of it.”
It wasn’t until October 7, 2016, that
anyone in the Obama Administration spoke publicly about Russia’s interference.
James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, and Jeh Johnson, the
head of the Department of Homeland Security, issued a joint statement saying
that the U.S. intelligence community was “confident” that Russia had directed
the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails. James Comey, then
the F.B.I. director, had reportedly changed his mind about issuing a public
statement, deciding that it was too close to the election to make such a
politically charged assertion.
In a normal political climate, the U.S.
government’s announcement that a foreign power had attacked one of the two
dominant parties in the midst of a Presidential election would have received
enormous attention. But it was almost instantly buried by two other shocking
news events. Thirty minutes after the statement was released, the
Washington Post brought to light the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump
describes how his celebrity status had allowed him to “grab” women “by the
pussy.” A few hours after that, WikiLeaks, evidently in an effort to bail out
Trump by changing the subject, started posting the private e-mails of John
Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. The intelligence community’s assessment
was barely noticed.
Steele finally met again with the F.B.I. in early October of 2016. This
time, he went to Rome to speak with a team of agents, who avidly asked him for
everything he had. The news generated by the publication of the D.N.C. e-mails
had triggered the change. It had led the Australians to reconsider the
importance of George Papadopoulos’s claims, and to alert American authorities.
On July 31, 2016, the F.B.I. had launched a formal investigation.
The agents asked Steele about
Papadopoulos, and he said that he hadn’t heard anything about him. After the
meeting, Steele told Simpson that the Bureau had been amassing “other
intelligence” about Russia’s scheme. As Simpson later told the Senate Judiciary
Committee, F.B.I. agents now “believed Chris’s information might be credible.”
Although the Bureau had paid Steele for past work, he was not paid for his help
on the Trump investigation. Orbis remained under contract to Fusion, and Steele
helped the F.B.I. voluntarily. (He did request compensation for travelling to
Rome, but he never received any.)
Soon after the meeting in Rome, the F.B.I.
successfully petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a
warrant to spy on Carter Page. Trump’s defenders have accused the Bureau
of relying on politically motivated smears to spy on Trump’s campaign, but by
then Page was no longer an adviser to Trump, and the F.B.I. had collected
information in addition to what had been supplied by Steele.
The Bureau encouraged Steele to send any
relevant information he came across, and that October he passed on a
questionable item—a bit of amateur sleuthing that had been done by someone he’d
never met, a former journalist and self-styled investigator named Cody Shearer.
Jonathan Winer, Steele’s friend at the State Department, had shared with him an
unfinished memo written by Shearer. Not only did it claim that the F.S.B. had
incriminating videotapes of Trump having sex in Moscow; it also made wild allegations
that leaders of former Soviet states had given huge payments to Trump family
members. Steele wasn’t aware that Shearer had longtime ties to the Clintons, as
did Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton ally, who had given Shearer’s report to Winer.
Steele had never met Blumenthal, either, but he dutifully jotted down the chain
of custody on the cover of the report before sending it on to the F.B.I., with
the caveat that he couldn’t vouch for its credibility. He noted, though, that
some of the findings were “remarkably similar” to Orbis’s.
Trump’s defenders have seized on the
Shearer memo, which Steele didn’t write, using it to argue that Steele’s
research was politically tainted by the Clintons. Sean Hannity’s official Web
site carried the
inaccurate headline “christopher steele authored another
dossier, used clinton contacts.”
As the election approached, the
relationship between Steele and the F.B.I. grew increasingly tense.
He couldn’t
understand why the government wasn’t publicizing Trump’s ties to Russia. He was
anguished that the American voting public remained in the dark. Steele confided
in a longtime friend at the Justice Department, an Associate Deputy Attorney
General, Bruce Ohr (whose wife, Nellie Ohr, was briefly a contractor for
Fusion). In a memo to the F.B.I., Bruce Ohr recalled Steele saying that, given
what he had discovered, he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and
was passionate about him not being President.” According to people familiar
with the matter, Ohr and other officials urged Steele not to be so upset about
the F.B.I.’s secrecy, assuring him that, in the U.S., potentially prejudicial
investigations of political figures were always kept quiet, especially when an
election was imminent.
Steele was therefore shocked when, on
October 28, 2016, Comey sent a letter to congressional leaders: the F.B.I. had
come across new e-mails bearing on its previously closed investigation into
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server as Secretary of State. He said that
these e-mails required immediate review. The announcement plunged Clinton’s
campaign into chaos. Two days before the election, Comey made a second
announcement, clearing her of wrongdoing, but by that point her campaign’s
momentum had stalled.
To Steele, the F.B.I., by making an
incriminating statement so close to Election Day, seemed to be breaking a rule
that he’d been told was inviolable. And, given what he—and very few others—knew
about the F.B.I.’s Trump investigation, it also seemed that the Bureau had one
standard for Clinton and another for her opponent. “Chris was concerned that
something was happening at the F.B.I.,” Simpson later told the House
Intelligence Committee. “We were very concerned that the information that we
had about the Russians trying to interfere in the election was going to be
covered up.” Simpson and Steele thought that “it would only be fair if the
world knew that both candidates were under investigation.”
At Fusion’s urging, Steele decided to
speak, on background, to the press. Identified only as a “former Western
intelligence officer,” he told David
Corn, of Mother
Jones, that he had provided information to
the F.B.I. as part of a “pretty substantial inquiry” into Trump’s ties to
Russia. He noted, “This is something of huge significance, way above party
politics.”
The F.B.I., which had hoped to protect its
ongoing probe from public view, was furious. Nunes, in his memo, claimed that
Steele was “suspended and then terminated” as a source. In reality, the break
was mutual, precipitated by Steele’s act of conscience.
Inside the Clinton campaign, John Podesta,
the chairman, was stunned by the news that the F.B.I. had launched a full-blown
investigation into Trump, especially one that was informed by research
underwritten by the Clinton campaign. Podesta had authorized Robby Mook, the
campaign manager, to handle budget matters, and Mook had approved Perkins
Coie’s budget request for opposition research without knowing who was producing
it. Podesta and Mook have maintained that they had no idea a former foreign
intelligence officer was on the Democrats’ payroll until the Mother Jones article appeared, and that they didn’t read the dossier until
BuzzFeed posted it online. Far from a secret campaign weapon, Steele turned out
to be a secret kept from the campaign.
On November 8, 2016, Steele stayed up all night, watching the U.S.
election returns. Trump’s surprise victory hit Orbis hard. A staff memo went
out forgiving anyone who wanted to stay home and hide under his duvet. The news
had one immediate consequence for Steele. He believed that Trump now posed a
national-security threat to his country, too. He soon shared his research with
a senior British official. The official carefully went through the details with
Steele, but it isn’t clear whether the British government acted on his
information.
The election was over, but Steele kept
trying to alert American authorities. Later that November, he authorized a
trusted mentor—Sir Andrew Wood, a former British Ambassador to Moscow—to inform
Senator John McCain of the existence of his dossier. Wood, an unpaid informal
adviser to Orbis, and Steele agreed that McCain, the hawkish chair of the
Senate Armed Services Committee, should know what was going on. Wood told me,
“It was simply a matter of duty.” Steele had gone to him before the election
for counsel. They’d discussed the possibility that Steele’s sources in Russia
were wrong, or spreading disinformation, but concluded that none of them had a
motive to lie; moreover, they had taken considerable risks to themselves to get
the truth out. “I sensed he was distinctly alarmed,” Wood told me. “I don’t
doubt his good faith at all. It’s absurd for anyone to suggest he was engaged
in political tricks.”
The week before Thanksgiving, Wood briefed
McCain at the Halifax International Security Forum. McCain was deeply
concerned. He asked a former aide, David Kramer, to go to England to meet
Steele. Kramer, a Russia expert who had served at the State Department, went
over the dossier with Steele for hours. After Kramer promised to share the
document only with McCain, Steele arranged for Kramer to receive a copy in
Washington. But a former national-security official who spoke with Kramer at
the time told me that one of Kramer’s ideas was to have McCain confront Trump
with the evidence, in the hope that Trump would resign. “He would tell Trump,
‘The Russians have got you,’ ” the former official told me. (A lawyer for
Kramer maintains that Kramer never considered getting Trump to resign and never
promised to show the dossier only to McCain.) Ultimately, though, McCain and
Kramer agreed that McCain should take the dossier to the head of the F.B.I. On
December 9th, McCain handed Comey a copy of the dossier. The meeting lasted
less than ten minutes, because, to McCain’s surprise, the F.B.I. had possessed
a copy since the summer. According to the former national-security official,
when Kramer learned about the meeting his reaction was “Shit, if they’ve had it
all this time, why didn’t they do something?” Kramer then heard that
the dossier was an open secret among journalists, too. He asked, “Is there
anyone in Washington who doesn’t know about this?”
On January 5, 2017, it became clear that
at least two Washingtonians remained in the dark about the dossier: the
President and the Vice-President. That day, in a top-secret Oval Office
meeting, the chiefs of the nation’s top intelligence agencies briefed Obama and
Biden and some national-security officials for the first time about the
dossier’s allegation that Trump’s campaign team may have colluded with the
Russians. As one person present later told me, “No one understands that at the
White House we weren’t briefed about the F.B.I.’s investigations. We had no
information on collusion. All we saw was what the Russians were doing. The
F.B.I. puts anything about Americans in a lockbox.”
The main purpose of the Oval Office
meeting was to run through a startling report that the U.S. intelligence chiefs
were about to release to the public. It contained the agencies’ unanimous
conclusion that, during the Presidential campaign, Putin had directed a cyber
campaign aimed at getting Trump elected. But, before releasing the report, the
intelligence chiefs—James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence;
Admiral Mike Rogers, the N.S.A. director; Brennan; and Comey—shared a highly
classified version with Obama, Biden, and the other officials.
The highly classified report included a
two-page appendix about the dossier. Comey briefed the group on it. According
to three former government officials familiar with the meeting, he didn’t name
Steele but said that the appendix summarized information obtained by a former
intelligence officer who had previously worked with the F.B.I. and had come
forward with troubling information. Comey laid out the dossier’s allegations
that there had been numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian
officials, and that there may have been deals struck between them. Comey also
mentioned some of the sexual details in the dossier, including the alleged
golden-showers kompromat.
“It was chilling,” the meeting participant
recalls.
Obama stayed silent. All through the
campaign, he and others in his Administration had insisted on playing by the
rules, and not interfering unduly in the election, to the point that, after
Trump’s victory, some critics accused them of political negligence. The
Democrats, far from being engaged in a political conspiracy with Steele, had
been politically paralyzed by their high-mindedness.
Biden asked, “How seriously should we take
this?” Comey responded that the F.B.I. had not corroborated the details in the
dossier, but he said that portions of it were “consistent” with what the U.S.
intelligence community had obtained from other channels. He also said that the
F.B.I. had “confidence” in the dossier’s author—a careful but definite endorsement—because
it had worked not only with him but with many of his sources and sub-sources,
whose identities the Bureau knew. “He’s proven credible in the past, and so has
his network,” Comey said.
“If this is true, this is huge!” Biden
exclaimed.
Someone asked how intelligence officials
planned to handle the dossier with Trump. Comey explained that he’d decided to
brief the President-elect about it the next day. He would do it on
his own, he said, to avoid unnecessary embarrassment. But he thought that
Trump needed to know about the dossier, even if the allegations were false, for
two reasons: it could prove “impactful” if the dossier became public, and the
dossier could be used as leverage over the President-elect. Trump later
suggested that Comey had actually used the dossier to get leverage over him,
but, according to the officials familiar with the meeting, Comey’s motive was
to protect the President-elect. In fact, if Comey had wanted to use the dossier
as leverage, he could have done so months earlier, before Trump was elected,
since it had been in the F.B.I.’s possession.
Comey’s meeting with the President-elect,
in a conference room at Trump Tower, did not go well. Neither he nor Trump has
disclosed details of their exchange, but Comey later released a public
statement in which he said that as soon as he left the building he “felt
compelled” to memorialize in writing what had occurred. He’d never felt the
need to take such a legal step during the Obama years. Later, when he was
questioned by a Senate panel, Comey explained that he had done so because of
the “nature of the person,” adding, “I was honestly concerned he might lie
about the nature of our meeting.” The briefing established a rocky dynamic that
culminated in Trump’s dismissing Comey, and with Trump adopting a hostile
posture toward the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies investigating him.
Republican critics have accused the
intelligence agencies of having blended Steele’s work with their own
investigations. But the F.B.I., by relegating the dossier to an appendix,
deliberately separated it from the larger intelligence-community report. Steele
has told friends that this approach left him exposed. The F.B.I. never asked
his permission to do this. “They threw me under the bus,” Steele has complained
to friends.
Unsurprisingly, the salacious news leaked
in no time. Four days after Comey briefed Trump, CNN reported that
the President-elect had been briefed on a scandalous dossier supplied by a
former British intelligence operative. Almost instantly, BuzzFeed posted a copy
of Steele’s dossier online, arguing that the high-level briefing made it a
matter of public interest. BuzzFeed has declined to reveal its source for the
dossier, but both Orbis and Fusion have denied supplying it. By a process of
elimination, speculation has centered on McCain’s aide, Kramer, who has not
responded to inquiries about it, and whose congressional testimony is sealed.
Trump immediately denounced CNN’s report
as “fake news,” and BuzzFeed as “a failing pile of garbage.” He called the
document “crap” compiled by “sick people,” and at a news conference at Trump
Tower he insisted that the golden-showers episode couldn’t be true, because he
was “very much of a germophobe.”
The day after BuzzFeed posted the dossier,
the Wall Street
Journal identified
Steele as its author. In England, reporters peered in his
windows and tracked down his relatives, including the siblings of his deceased
wife. Two reporters from RT, a Russian state news agency, seemed especially
aggressive in staking out his house. In response, Steele and his family went
into hiding. They reportedly left their three cats with neighbors, and Steele
grew a beard.
The dossier’s publication caused a series of repercussions. Aleksej
Gubarev, the Russian Internet entrepreneur, sued Steele and Orbis, and also
BuzzFeed, for libel. He said the dossier falsely claimed that his companies,
Webzilla and XBT Holding, had aided the Russian hacking of the D.N.C. (Steele’s
lawyers have said that the dossier’s publication was unforeseen, so he
shouldn’t be held responsible. BuzzFeed has argued that the content was not
libelous.) Pretrial maneuvering in the libel case has resulted in a court
ordering Gubarev to disclose whether he or his companies are under criminal
investigation. His answer may shed some light on the dossier’s depiction of him
as a questionable character.
In Russia, there were rumors of a more
primitive kind of justice taking place. During Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the
Senate Judiciary Committee, his lawyer asserted that “somebody’s already been
killed as a result of the publication of this dossier.” Who that could be has
been the subject of much media speculation. One possibility that has been
mentioned is Oleg Erovinkin, a former F.S.B. officer and top aide to Igor
Sechin, the Rosneft president. On December 26, 2016, Erovinkin was found dead
in his car. No official cause of death has been cited. No evidence has emerged
that Erovinkin was a Steele source, and in fact Special Counsel Mueller is
believed to be investigating a different death that is possibly related to the
dossier. (A representative for Mueller declined to answer questions for this
article.) Meanwhile, around the same time that Erovinkin died, Russian
authorities charged a cybersecurity expert and two F.S.B. officers with
treason.
In the spring of 2017, after eight weeks
in hiding, Steele gave a brief statement to the media, announcing his intention
of getting back to work. On the advice of his lawyers, he hasn’t spoken
publicly since. But Steele talked at length with Mueller’s investigators in
September. It isn’t known what they discussed, but, given the seriousness with
which Steele views the subject, those who know him suspect that he shared many
of his sources, and much else, with the Mueller team.
One subject that Steele is believed to
have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in
late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which
did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is
based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official
said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that
the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of
State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was
notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.)
The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump
to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and
who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the
conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was
exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming
President.
As fantastical as the memo sounds,
subsequent events could be said to support it. In a humiliating public
spectacle, Trump dangled the post before Romney until early December, then
rejected him. There are plenty of domestic political reasons that Trump may
have turned against Romney. Trump loyalists, for instance, noted Romney’s
public opposition to Trump during the campaign. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump
aide, has suggested that Trump was vengefully tormenting Romney, and had never
seriously considered him. (Romney declined to comment. The White House said
that he was never a first choice for the role and declined to comment about any
communications that the Trump team may have had with Russia on the subject.) In
any case, on December 13, 2016, Trump gave Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of
ExxonMobil, the job. The choice was a surprise to most, and a happy one in
Moscow, because Tillerson’s business ties with the Kremlin were long-standing
and warm. (In 2011, he brokered a historic partnership between ExxonMobil and
Rosneft.) After the election, Congress imposed additional sanctions on Russia,
in retaliation for its interference, but Trump and Tillerson have resisted
enacting them.
Eighteen months after the dossier’s publication, Steele has impassioned
detractors on both the left and the right. On the left, Stephen Cohen, a Russia
scholar and Nation contributor, has denied the existence of any collusion between
Trump and Russia, and has accused
Steele of being part of a powerful “fourth branch of
government,” comprising intelligence agencies whose anti-Russia and anti-Trump
biases have run amok. On the right, the Washington Examiner’s Byron York has championed Grassley and Graham’s criminal
referral, arguing that
Steele has a “credibility issue,” because he purportedly lied to the F.B.I.
about talking to the press. But did Steele lie? The Justice Department has not
filed charges against him. The most serious accusation these critics make is that
the F.B.I. tricked the fisa Court
into granting a warrant to spy on Trump associates on the basis of false and
politically motivated opposition research. If true, this would be a major abuse
of power. But the Bureau didn’t trick the court—it openly disclosed that
Steele’s funding was political. Moreover, Steele’s dossier was only part of
what the fisa warrant rested on. According to the
Democrats’ Intelligence Committee report, the Justice Department obtained
information “that corroborated Steele’s reporting” through “multiple
independent sources.”
It’s too early to make a final judgment
about how much of Steele’s dossier will be proved wrong, but a number of
Steele’s major claims have been backed up by subsequent disclosures. His
allegation that the Kremlin favored Trump in 2016 and was offering his campaign
dirt on Hillary has been borne out. So has his claim that the Kremlin and
WikiLeaks were working together to release the D.N.C.’s e-mails. Key elements
of Steele’s memos on Carter Page have held up, too, including the claim that
Page had secret meetings in Moscow with Rosneft and Kremlin officials. Steele
may have named the wrong oil-company official, but, according to recent
congressional disclosures, he was correct that a top Rosneft executive talked
to Page about a payoff. According to the Democrats’ report, when Page was asked
if a Rosneft executive had offered him a “potential sale of a significant
percentage of Rosneft,” Page said, “He may have briefly mentioned it.”
And, just as the Kremlin allegedly feared,
damaging financial details have surfaced about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine
officials. Further, his suggestion that Trump had “agreed to sideline Russian
intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue” seems to have been confirmed by
the pro-Russia changes that Trump associates made to the Republican platform.
Special Counsel Mueller’s various indictments of Manafort have also
strengthened aspects of the dossier.
Indeed, it’s getting harder every day to
claim that Steele was simply spreading lies, now that three former Trump
campaign officials—Flynn, Papadopoulos, and Rick Gates, who served as deputy
campaign chairman—have all pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and appear to be
coöperating with the investigation. And, of course, Mueller has indicted
thirteen Russian nationals for waging the kind of digital warfare that Steele
had warned about.
On January 9th, Trump’s personal attorney,
Michael Cohen, filed a hundred-million-dollar defamation lawsuit against
Fusion. He also sued BuzzFeed. Cohen tweeted, “Enough is enough of the #fake
#RussianDossier.” Steele mentioned Cohen several times in the dossier, and
claimed that Cohen met with Russian operatives in Prague, in the late
summer of 2016, to pay them off and cover up the Russian hacking operation.
Cohen denies that he’s ever set foot in Prague, and has produced his passport
to prove it. A congressional official has told Politico, however, that an
inquiry into the allegation is “still active.” And, since the dossier was
published, several examples have surfaced of Cohen making secretive payments to
cover up other potentially damaging stories. Cohen recently
acknowledged to the Times that he personally paid Stephanie
Clifford, a porn star who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, a hundred and thirty
thousand dollars; it is widely believed that Trump and Clifford had a secret
sexual relationship.
In London, Steele is back at work,
attending to other cases. Orbis has landed several new clients as a result of
the publicity surrounding the dossier. The week after it became public, the
company received two thousand job applications.
John Sipher, the former C.I.A. officer,
predicts that Mueller’s probe will render the final verdict on Steele’s
dossier. “People who say it’s all garbage, or all true, are being politically
biased,” Sipher said. “There’s enough there to be worthy of further study.
Professionals need to look at travel records, phone records, bank records,
foreign police-service cameras, and check it all out. It will take professional
investigators to run it to ground.” He believes that Mueller, whose F.B.I. he
worked with, “is a hundred per cent doing that.”
Until then, Sipher said, Steele, as a
former English spook, is the perfect political foil: “The Trump supporters can
attack the messenger, because no one knows him or understands him, so you can
paint him any way you want.” Strobe Talbott, a Russia expert who served as
Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, and who has known
Steele professionally for ten years, has watched the spectacle in Washington
with regret. Talbott regards Steele as a “smart, careful, professional, and
congenial” colleague who “knows the post-Soviet space, and is exactly what he
says he is.” Yet, Talbott said, “they’re trying to turn him into political
polonium—touch him and you die.” ♦
This article
appears in the print edition of the March 12, 2018, issue, with the headline
“The Man Behind the Dossier.”
The print version is the one I first read.
·
Jane Mayer has been
a New
Yorker staff writer since 1995.