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JANE MAYER for the New Yorker: Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier
Jane Mayer NYer is so good she can insert a moment of levity in the middle of a blockbuster profile about Christopher Steele
Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier
How the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump’s ties to Russia.
By Jane Mayer
...........
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 rest of this VERY comprehensive article HERE:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier
Link to tweet
MORE MORE MORE
British ex-spy reveals Kremlin blocked Trump from naming Mitt Romney as secretary of state: report
Former MI6 spy Christopher Steele has reportedly told special counsel Robert Mueller that he believes the Russian government directly intervened to block President Donald Trump from appointing Mitt Romney as his secretary of state.
In a New Yorker profile of Steele published Monday, reporter Jane Mayer writes that Steele — who authored the infamous Fusion GPS dossier alleging deep ties between President Donald Trump and the Russian government — wrote a memo in late 2016 claiming that Russia worked to stop then-President elect Trump from making noted Russia hawk Romney his chief diplomat.
“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,'” writes Mayer. “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.”
As Mayer notes, however, Trump had plenty of reasons to reject Romney as his secretary of state other than his views on Russia, including Romney’s own blistering criticism of Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump did eventually pass over Romney and instead named former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his top diplomat.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/british-ex-spy-reveals-kremlin-blocked-trump-naming-mitt-romney-secretary-state-report/
11 replies
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he was chosen to be the first mormon president. Wouldn't be at all surprised if he thinks he can use the Senate seat as a platform to launch another presidential run.
Hillary is supposed to just go away, yet this guy comes back from the political dead and it's all A-OK. The double standard is in full force with him.
