Retired British spy Christopher Steele is stepping out of the shadows to discuss his so-called 'Steele dossier' for the first time publicly.
— and malign its author. Trump himself repeatedly lashed out at Steele and the report. At one point, then-President Trump tweeted of Steele: "This man should be extradited, tried, and thrown into jail. A sick lier [sic] who was paid by Crooked Hillary & the DNC!"
The dossier did deal a series of blows to Steele's credibility in both media and government investigations, most notably a December 2019 Justice DepartmentPHOTO: Christopher Steele, author of the so-called 'Steele dossier,' is seen in a scene from the ABC News documentary, 'Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,' airing Oct. 18, 2021.
Steele said he knew within the first month of his reporting that "supporters of Hillary Clinton" were funding Fusion GPS's work, and by extension his own. "He was the lead Russianist at MI6 prior to leaving the government and an extremely well-regarded investigator, researcher, and, as I say, we're friends and share interest in Russian kleptocracy and organized crime issues," Simpson testified regarding Steele. "I would say that's broadly why I asked him to see what he could find out about Donald Trump's business activities in Russia.
"One was, there was a large-scale Russian interference campaign in the American election in 2016," he said. Part of the challenge — and the intrigue — of Steele's reporting is that much of it is virtually impossible for lay people to verify. When the Department of Justice's inspector general examined the dossier's claims, he concluded that what Steele described as "raw intelligence" amounted to little more than rumor and bar talk.
Steele suggested his collector may have "taken fright" at having his cover blown and "[tried] to downplay and underestimate" his own reporting when he spoke to the FBI. Steele added that the information he gathered passed through an important filter: his experience as an expert on Russian intelligence activities going back decades.
Steele acknowledged that "there is a chance" the Russians intentionally tainted his reporting, but said he felt it was "very unlikely." When Stephanopoulos asked him to explain why the tape, if it does exist, has not been made public, Steele replied that "it hasn't needed to be released." The report cast doubt on one of the dossier's most striking claims: that Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney, had traveled to Prague in the summer of 2016 for "secret meeting/s with Kremlin officials."
PHOTO: In this Feb. 27, 2019, file photo, Michael Cohen, former attorney for President Donald Trump, testifies during the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 election in Washington, D.C. Dismissing claims that subsequent government reports undermined his findings, Steele argued that, in his view, Mueller's team actually served to reinforce the broad strokes of his dossier — those "four pillars" he described."Those four pillars that we mentioned ... when you actually look at the detail, if you're forensic about looking at the detail of the report, then it paints a totally different picture, in my view," Steele said.
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