10, 2017, the FBI and several news outlets had already seen Steele's intelligence reports and had attempted to corroborate their contents, but could not. "I was surprised and shocked."Įven before the dossier surfaced publicly on Jan. And therefore, it became much more of serious issue than we had expected," Steele recalled.
"It meant that, for the first time, there was a potentially serious situation of 'kompromat' against a presidential candidate. Steele said that as he worked on the report, he grew increasingly alarmed by the picture it was painting.
Steel dossier testimony series#
Over seven months, the memos laid out a series of damning claims alleging that the Russians were attempting to influence the campaign in Trump's favor, that members of the Trump campaign had various connections and communications with Kremlin officials, that the campaign had coordinated with Kremlin officials and accepted a flow of anti-Clinton information, and, most alarmingly, that the Kremlin perhaps had materials with which it could blackmail or exercise leverage over Trump. MORE: ‘Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier’ | Oct 18 only on Hulu contacts - between Trump campaign officials and individuals having ties to the Russian government." And, proof emerged that the Trump Organization had been discussing a real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign.Īll were findings that had been signaled, at least broadly, in Steele's work. Investigators determined there had been "numerous links - i.e. The Mueller probe found that Russia had been making efforts to meddle in the 2016 campaign, and that Trump campaign members and surrogates had promoted and retweeted Russian-produced political content alleging voter fraud and criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton. Yet in many ways, the dossier proved prescient. "Raw intelligence in the sense that what we sent over was the initial findings." "Bearing in mind, this was raw intelligence," said Chris Burrows, Steele's partner in the private investigative firm Orbis Business Intelligence. And it never got any traction because no one could nail anything in it down," said Barry Meier, author of "Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies," and a vocal critic of Steele's. "Everyone with whom the dossier was shared sent reporters out, tried to confirm the basic allegations within it. Trump and his allies immediately lashed out at the allegations laid out in the dossier, calling it "fake news" and "phony stuff." The president's detractors embraced it, using it to buttress growing suspicions about what they saw as Trump's odd infatuation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the real-world implications of its claims, even though unproven, exacerbated an already fraught moment in American history. The salacious mix of sex, spies, and scandal made for an irresistible political drama. The dossier's contents, laid out in 17 memos, upended Washington and quickly ricocheted across the globe after BuzzFeed News published the bombshell reports in early 2017 - 10 days before Donald Trump was sworn into office. "I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it," Steele said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos about how he gathered his intelligence, and the life-altering events that ensued after his work and identity were made public.
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