film / tv / substack / social media / lists / web / celeb / pajiba love / misc / about / cbr
film / tv / substack / web / celeb

GettyImages-872780694.jpg

Highlights from The New Yorker's Bombshell Report on the Christopher Steele Dossier

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | March 5, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | March 5, 2018 |


GettyImages-872780694.jpg

Christopher Steele is not some two-bit hack. He worked for MI:6 for 20 years, mostly investigating Russia. He was not, however, political — as a British citizen, he wasn’t even all that familiar with American politics. He was, however, instrumental in rooting out the corruption in the international soccer organization, FIFA. When Steele took on this investigation, he wasn’t all that familiar with Donald Trump’s business activities, but he knew of a lot of crooked Russian crime figures associated with Trump Tower. “It was as if all criminal roads led to Trump Tower,” Steele told friends, according to the New Yorker.

Steele’s firm was subcontracted by another firm, which was originally funded by a Republican who disliked Trump. Only after Trump won the nomination did the Clinton campaign begin to pay the firm for opposition research. Steele didn’t expect to find much, but he ended up finding a lot more than he had bargained for. As Simpson later put it, “We threw out a line in the water, and Moby-Dick came back.”

One of the first things he discovered was intel on the pee tape, and it wasn’t like some half-assed allegation. He had four sources (though all four had only heard the intel second-hand, but the sources are legit and largely unconnected:

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 trump had stayed there,” and “a close associate of trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow.”

Although Trump tries to suggest otherwise, Christopher Steele did not inform the FBI of his findings on behalf of Clinton. Clinton didn’t even know that he’d provided the dossier to the FBI.

“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.”

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!”

While Steele was not aware of the Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and a Russian lawyer, the dossier did help to highlight a connection:

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.)

This is by now common knowledge, but it always bears repeating: Mitch McConnell is the reason that alarm bells were not sounded before the election:

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.

The pee tape, by the way, was mentioned in another memo completely independent of Christopher 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.

Meanwhile, if this is true, it would explain why Trump pulled the plug on Mitt Romney:

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.

Conclusion? Oh, the pee tape is definitely real.

Source: New Yorker