![]() Indeed, they were not meant to be published verbatim – they were only meant to create rumours which would seep into reporting, and therefore blacken the Republican candidate in the election campaign.People pass the building housing the offices of Orbis Buiness Intelligence (C) where former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele works, in central London, Britain, January 12, 2016. No proper newspaper ought to have published these claims. Steele briefed journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN. Pointedly, many of these sources hedged their claims with qualifications that the stories were third-hand and that they could not verify them. Steele’s sources were mostly fantasists from the hinterland of espionage or disgruntled Russians and Americans who had tried to do business in Russia. More outlandish still, Steele alleges the incident was filmed by Russian spies and that the Russian state was using the ‘pee tape’ as kompromat against Trump. Trump is then alleged to have procured some prostitutes to urinate on the bed. Most eye-catching was the claim that Trump, on a visit to Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe contest, had booked himself into the same Ritz-Carlton Hotel room that the Obamas had once stayed in. The dossier made wild claims about Russian interference in the US elections. It told absurd and extravagant stories – all pointing to the unfounded claim that Trump was in fact a Russian asset and had been for decades. You might have thought that there was enough of a case to be made against Trump’s right-wing policies, but the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign seemed much more drawn to digging up personal dirt on Trump. The report was dressed up as a ‘dossier’ and shown as a briefing document to a number of media outlets in an attempt to influence their reporting on Trump. And clearly, his status as a ‘former’ British intelligence officer lent the report gravitas. ![]() In any event, Steele clearly sweated his old Russia contacts for tittle-tattle to plump out the hit piece on Trump. It is commonplace for Britain’s MI5 to use private companies as front organisations, so how seriously we should take Orbis’s independence is hard to tell. Apparently Steele was now working as a private individual. Orbis’s co-founder was Christopher Steele. They employed a US-based intelligence firm, Fusion GPS, who in turn subcontracted the work to a British-based firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. She said he knew more about Russia than anyone else.ĭuring the 2016 US elections, the Democratic National Committee commissioned research on the then Republican nominee, now president, Donald Trump. Elizabeth Teague at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office invited me in to talk about my interview with Litvinenko and the circumstances surrounding it. That was the determination of the British government who sought Lugovoy’s extradition, though this was refused by the Russians. It seems more than likely that Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian agent Andrei Lugovoy who met him shortly before he fell ill and died. After he fell out with his bosses at the FSB, Litvinenko moved to London, where he dedicated himself to retailing stories – some true, some not – about his former employees. I interviewed Litvinenko about his days in the FSB. He was tasked with infiltrating Chechen gangs in Moscow, and then later with interrogating Chechen separatists in their attempted independence movement. Litvinenko had been an officer in the Russian FSB. ![]() I met Christopher Steele once back in 2006 when he was investigating the poisoning of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko.
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