Christopher Steele, the Trump Dossier Author, to Be Questioned by U.S. Officials

[babylonsister]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/christopher-steele-the-trump-dossier-author-to-be-questioned-by-us-officials?ref=home

Christopher Steele, the Trump Dossier Author, to Be Questioned by U.S. Officials
Nico Hines
Chris Ratcliffe

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled a dossier on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, is set to meet American officials in the coming weeks, according to The Times of London. An insider at Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence company said the former MI6 officer told the Department of Justice that he would only discuss his dealings with the FBI and wanted assurances that U.S. officials would secure the agreement of the British government, which has reportedly not yet been approached about the meeting. The Steele dossier, which was published by BuzzFeed News after being passed around Washington, D.C., has been frequently attacked by Trump, who says he was the victim of a complex hoax that linked him to oligarchs and claimed he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail attempts.

[H2O Man]

1. Recommended.

[MFGsunny]

2. K & R

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

3. I sense a set up... rather suspicious timing. Hope I'm wrong!

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[Jarqui]

5. I do too

An insider at Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence company said the former MI6 officer told the Department of Justice that he would only discuss his dealings with the FBI and wanted assurances that U.S. officials would secure the agreement of the British government, which has reportedly not yet been approached about the meeting.

I would stipulate that the discussion must be recorded and if the DoJ misquotes or misrepresents any aspect then Steele will release the recording to the media.

Cockroaches don't like bright lights.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

8. No they don't... hate cockroaches btw!!

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[watoos]

4. So who are US officials?

This looks to me like the Bill Barr witch hunt investigation.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

6. Like one of my favorite senators once said...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, is a former prosecutor who lso 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.”

[watoos]

12. Absolutely, I have been saying the same

Trump is planning on putting Hillary on the 2020 ballot. I live among Trumpers and to a person, every one I ask tells me that they could never vote for Hillary. She had been smeared so badly by the right that people didn't vote for Trump as much as they voted against Hillary. Trump wants a repeat of 2016.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

24. Yes! I think the orchestrated smear of Hillary

had to be the most effective mass brainwashing event in my lifetime. Think it even seeped into our side. You suddenly thought...baggage. then you had to slap yourself and remember it wasn't true.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

7. Wish we could read whole London times srticle

but you have to join.

I wonder why Steele would agree to speak.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

9. My spider-sense is tingling... wondering what the Rethuglican rats are up to.

Surely no good.


Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[watoos]

13. I'm guessing he has nothing to hide.

Republicans have accused him of digging up dirt on Trump, maybe he just wants to set the record straight?

[Laura PourMeADrink]

19. I tend to agree with that, from Steele's perspective..but

Why would they want to talk to him? Just to have him admit on a new record he was hired by Clinton via her law firm & Fusion? This is not any kind of new news.

[watoos]

29. They want to demonize Steele,

make him out to be a Democratic conspirator, claim that his dossier was made up fiction. They probably already have their narrative ready to roll before Steele is ever interviewed.

I'm glad that Steele demanded guidelines to protect himself.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

36. Hope his demands are much broader than only

Wanting to talk to FBI and to get British government agreement. Like he needs to have people from British intell to accompany him.

[pazzyanne]

10. "Trump, who says he was the victim of a complex hoax that linked him to oligarchs"

Of course this guy didn't invite Russians into the oval office to brag about firing Comey. And of course it wasn't behind closed doors either.

[zentrum]

11. That pee part of the

.....story just sounds so much like Trump. His ugly racism.

Too Trumpish to be a story anybody else could make up.

It's the least important part of the story and yet the very part of it that could bring him down with his base. They don't care about corruption, or the elections---but some creepy behavior with prostitutes? That would degrade him, even in their evangelical eyes.

[watoos]

15. Trumpers will never leave Trump.

Trump supported Roy Moore and Kavanaugh. Want to know what the Trumpers I live among said to me? Who didn't try to get in a girl's pants when we were young?

[Wounded Bear]

17. Don't count on it...

Trumplodytes love Trump because they want to be him, especially the part about being able to pay prostitutes to act out their fantasies.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

20. I think you are right..but the key to me is the part about

How it was Obama's bed that make it so much a Trumpian move.

[zentrum]

25. That's exactly

...what I mean. The perverse racism of it. Too weird to make up. But smacks of his mentality.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

33. Exactly. It was post Obama's humiliating him

So brilliantly at the correspondent dinner in 2011. And another tell...liar-in-chief claimed he never spent night in hotel which NBC said wasn't true.

[The Mouth]

26. Or, when that specific detail is shown to be untrue

It will invalidate everything else in the dossier in their eyes.

I don't believe the pee story, Trump's a germophobe. It's almost like it was planted there specifically TO be repudiated, thus (in the eyes of many) completely repudiating everything. At least that's what I'd do if I was working for that side.

[watoos]

30. Maybe the fact that Trump is a germophobe

isn't really a fact? A lot of people wipe off their shopping cart at the grocery store but that doesn't mean they are a germophobe.

[The Mouth]

32. I doubt it

It's a pretty well known quirk about him for many years. I mean it's a non zero chance of being a ruse, but I wouldn't bet on it, IIRC people have mentioned it going back long before 2016.

But I could be wrong, often am, but he said this about himself o Howard Stern back in 1993 or 2003, and in his book 'Art of the Comeback' 1997

I'm still suspecting a very slick Russian game of giving Steel a detail that can be later discredited, thereby seemingly discrediting everything else.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

37. See, trump can't keep a secret. It's almost like he

can't resist telling you a detail that people may have missed to prove he is smarter EVEN while he is claiming the entire bad story is 100% - made up.

I can picture the event happening...but because he is a germophobe, just watched from a distance. They probably encouraged him to get on the bed but he refused.

[The Mouth]

38. Plausible

I think what you say is entirely plausible.

Just saying that having a spurious detail that can be refuted or shown to be plausible is an old, old trick. If the Russians were in on anything, then they very likely were aware of Steele's operations; if you can't stop them -(an 'accident' might be too messy, or as a former(?) intelligence operative he may have had backups upon backups)- then you try to discredit them later.

Hell, if I were ex-KGB I'd have played someone like Steele with false info from the start so that after people took it, ran with it, used it as a basis for stuff then you pull the rug out under them.Not that Steel's info is false but that is what chess players do, feints within feints.

Whatever one thinks of Trump's cognitive capacity, if the Russians were involved in this game they didn't send the B team. I'd bet they had infiltrated McCain, Cruz, Bernie, Hillary and several other campaigns with at least some personnel, most political campaigns don't vet volunteers much, if at all at anything but the very highest levels.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

39. Agree. They were likely amassing trump kompromat

before they knew he could win because of his business dealings with them. And what about Rubio and Jeb. They had actually used Fusion too to find dirt, right? Albeit likely through a republican donor.

[Roy Rolling]

14. Republican Shenanigans

"We got Hillary dirt, CIA agent names for Putin, and three new girls we can call for a good time when in Russia". ---Republican Investigators (unemployed Benghazi investigators)

[NCjack]

16. Perhaps Mr. Steele withheld some damaging assertions that can be verified. He could

amend his report and send it to all of the sponsors of the original Steele Report, the FBI, and Congress. Tell the FBI investigator that his information network is sleeping, but every time in the future that he is annoyed by the FBI, there could be more amendments.

[lark]

18. This could be really bad.

I hope those trump asses don't kidnap him and take him back to the USA for trial. I could just see Barr ordering this at drumpfs; request and the charge will be treason and malicious lies - even though lots of the dossier proved to be 100'' accurate - that will never be mentioned and the lies will be the ones drumpf and Barr invent to lock Steele up.

He better bring a bodyguard and insist on this happening at M16 to prevent international kidnapping and kangaroo trial.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

22. This is a must read article from last year imho

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier
Snip (from 2018)

A friend (of Steele) 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.

Snip

Legal experts soon assured Steele that the criminal referral was merely a political stunt

Snip

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.

[The Mouth]

27. Don't put anything past them.

People can be made to talk, to say anything. Video can be edited. Heart attacks happen. This shit is real and the playbook is brutal.

If I was working on the other side, Mr. Steele *would* confess that it was a malicious and treacherous lie, that Hillary had put him up to it, the video would be oh so perfectly edited, and then he would have a convenient "MASSIVE heart attack" (gratuitous 'Wag The Dog' reference).

[Takket]

21. If he wants to talk it should be to Congress.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

23. Yes..a bipartisan environment for sure! If its

NY FBI he's not as smart as I thought.

[watoos]

31. Rudy's boys.

He should bring his own person to record the interview.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

34. Bet Rudy's deeply involved in this. Nunez too. And i

Didn't remember that Steele talked to Mueller team. Maybe they found some inconsistency there???
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/05/politics/special-counsel-russia-dossier-christopher-steele/index.html

[kimbutgar]

28. I just hope he doesn't get accidentally poisoned Steele needs to wear gloves and a respirator mask

Steele needs to wear gloves and a respirator maskAnd refuse the offer of any refreshments!

[Laura PourMeADrink]

35. Exactly. If I were him I wouldn't even go to US. Although

Dingbat is in London

[Hekate]

40. He wisely insists the British government must say yes first. I hope, for his sake, he also insists

...the interviews take place in Britain in the offices of MI6. If I were Steele, or the Brits, I would not trust Trumpists as far as I could throw them, and would not come here. Trump likes ambushes with cameras, as Pelosi and Schumer know.

[triron]

41. Agree.

[triron]

42. kick for visibility