Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's frustration as FBI sat on Donald Trump Russia file for months

Exclusive: Steele was so concerned by revelations he worked without payment after Trump's election victory in November

Kim Sengupta Defence Editor  friday 13-01-2017  (CET)

Christopher Steele worked for MI6 before founding private firm Orbis Business Intelligence

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who investigated Donald Trump’s alleged Kremlin links, was so worried by what he was discovering that at the end he was working without pay, The Independent has learned.

Mr Steele also decided to pass on information to both British and American intelligence officials after concluding that such material should not just be in the hands of political opponents of Mr Trump, who had hired his services, but was a matter of national security for both countries.

However, say security sources, Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

It is believed that a colleague of Mr Steele in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, felt the same way and, at the end also continued with the Trump case without being paid. 

Fusion GPS had been hired by Republican opponents of Mr Trump in September 2015. In June 2016 Mr Steele came on the team. He was, and continues to be, highly regarded in the intelligence world. In July, Mr Trump won the Republican nomination and the Democrats became new employers of Mr Steele and Fusion GPS. 

In the same month  Mr Steele produced a memo, which went to the  FBI, stating that Mr Trump’s campaign team had agreed to a Russian request to dilute attention on Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine. Four days later Mr Trump stated that he would recognise Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. A month later officials involved in his campaign asked the Republican party’s election platform to remove a pledge for military assistance to the Ukrainian government against separatist rebels in the east of the country. 

Mr Steele claimed that the Trump campaign was taking this path because it was aware that the Russians were hacking Democratic Party emails. No evidence of this has been made public, but the same day that Mr Trump spoke about Crimea he called on the Kremlin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

By late July and early August MI6 was also receiving information about Mr Trump. By September, information to the FBI began to grow in volume: Mr Steele compiled a set of his memos into one document and passed it to his contacts at the FBI. But there seemed to be little progress in a proper inquiry into Mr Trump. The Bureau, instead, seemed to be devoting their resources in the pursuit of Hillary Clinton’s email transgressions. 

The New York office, in particular, appeared to be on a crusade against Ms Clinton. Some of its agents had a long working relationship with Rudy Giuliani, by then a member of the Trump campaign, since his days as public prosecutor and then Mayor of the city.  

As the election approached, FBI director James Comey made public his bombshell letter saying that Ms Clinton would face another email investigation. Two days before that Mr Giuliani, then a part of the Trump team, talked about “a surprise or two you’re going to hear about in the next few days. We’ve got a couple of things up our sleeve that should turn things around”.

After the letter was published Mr Giuliani claimed he had heard from current and former agents that “there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI” over the original decision not to charge Ms Clinton and that Mr Comey had been forced by some of his agents to announce the reinvestigation. Democrats demanded an investigation into how Mr Giuliani acquired this knowledge without getting an answer.

In October a frustrated and demoralised Mr Steele, while on a trip to New York, spoke about what he has discovered to David Corn, the Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones. There was a little flurry of interest that quickly died down.

Mr Trump’s surprise election victory came and the Democrat employers of Mr Steele and Mr Johnson no longer needed them. But the pair continued with their work, hopeful that the wider investigation into Russian hacking in the US would allow the Trump material to be properly examined.

It was against this background that Senator John McCain, who had been hearing with growing alarm reports about Mr Trump and the Kremlin, met Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, who had spent 10 years in Russia and is highly respected for his knowledge of Russian affairs, at a security conference in Halifax, Canada.

Sir Andrew stressed to Senator McCain that he had not read the dossier, but vouched for Mr Steele’s professionalism and integrity. The chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee then sent an emissary to London who picked up the dossier from an intermediary acting on behalf of Mr Steele. The Senator personally took the material to Mr Comey.

Mr Trump and Barack Obama were briefed about the allegations as part of a report into Russian hacking a week ago. Mr Trump remained silent about them until they were published this week and then he angrily denounced them as lies. His spokesperson said he could not recall the briefing. 

Mr Steele is now in hiding, under attack from some Tory MPs for supposedly trying to ruin the chances of Theresa May’s Government building a fruitful relationship with the Trump administration. Some of them accuse him of being part of an anti-Brexit conspiracy. A right-wing tabloid has “outed” him as being a “confirmed socialist” while at university.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-russia-dossier-file-investigation-hacking-christopher-steele-mi6-a7526901.html


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My Comments :

1. The picture so far - seemingly showing the apparent introduction towards the final showdown of President-elect Donald Trump - had appeared to be rather blur by an overcrowd of (non-verifiable) details, but seems nevertheless gradually to become more articulate as times progresses.

2. The originally blurred picture is becoming more articulate, because the details of the actors on the private intelligence platform (Steele/Simpson), and the process of - and the following by the press of - their information gathering finally are emerging ever more clearly in the aftermath of the first shock-publication of the so-called Steele/Simpson report by BuzzFeed News.

3. The identification of both intelligence bureaus - Orbis and Fusion GPS - and the public endorsement by some (apparently) credible character witnesses (like the former UK ambassador to Russia, Andrew Wood) on the integrity of their leading representatives (Steele and Simpson) in itself seems to be substantially contributing to the possibility, that the authenticity of the report might be likely to be assumed positive.

4. If  indeed it might be proven beyond reasonable doubt, that (officials within) the UK and USA secret services (like the FBI Counterintelligence Division) might intentionally have suppressed the content of the highly damaging report and additionally may have done so, to have the USA presidential and Congress elections fundamentally influenced towards a certain political outcome, the entire election might be considered ILLEGAL and its result might therefor even be quashed within the next few weeks.

5. In this context, we have to bear in mind, that there have been whistle-blowers from the FBI in the past, that have been describing a structural pattern of serious criminal practices within the FBI, whereby members of the FBI had been collecting compromising material about USA elected members from the Congress.

6. The compromising material however had not been used to start criminal proceedings by the FBI, but had seemingly been collected in order to be able to blackmail the members concerned.

7. Furthermore it had been revealed in the past, that not only would (officials within) the FBI have tried to use the compromising dossiers against the members of Congress (and members of the USA judiciary at all levels, such as Judges and Attorneys etc, etc,) themselves, but that compromising files about USA officials had been sold to colleagues from certain foreign powers (like a certain close USA ally in the Middle East).

8. So collusion within the USA security services with the aim of blackmailing a wide range of representatives from the USA Legislative, the Executive and the Judiciary, are to be supposed a common practice.

9. In addition, the apparent preference by a number of actors in the field of the Intelligence Community (both national and foreign) for the election of Trump (and a GOP majority in  both Houses of Congress) might appear to have been the base for a possible scenario, whereby the services had been involved in a dirty tricks campaign against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

10. In  other comments on the shock-result, I already spoke of my (educated) guess, about the real possibility, that elements from within some of the secret services of the USA (closely accompanied by some foreign (interest) services) might for instance have been trying to influence the results of the election(s) by manipulating some of the ICT related voting machinery in the most crucial swing-states, in the favor of Trump.

11. What I also mentioned in this respect - and with considerable more substance indeed - had been the gigantic efforts by the Jewish-Zionist axis Mercer - Adelson - Singer and Kushner to have the USA electorate manipulated by an apparently unbeatable combination of News manipulation and Voters manipulation.

12. These well-coordinated machinations had been dominated by the (non-accidental) circumstance, that Robert Mercer (and his daughter Rebekah) have been in the possession of a majority stake at both Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, which assets they brilliantly appear to have managed to lead right into the shock-election result of the 2016 USA Presidential and ditto Congress elections.

13. Since Mercer et al. - no doubt in close cooperation with foreign security services like the Mossad - have been factually handing both Trump and the GOP their respective positions of political (and military and judicial) power, both "winners" have been dictated the wished-for political and personal conditions from the aforementioned Zionist Axis.

14. Conditions such as a free ride for Likud and its political allies leading up to the realization of the next fase in the century old colonization process of Palestine, culminating into the further annexation of the West-Bank and the Golan, including the wholesale transfer of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine towards Jordan.

15. Do also render a degree of attention to the fact, that some of the accused in the Steele Report are being identified as "some USA-Jewish businessman" allegedly being involved into the treachery business of plotting with a foreign power (Russia) against the interests of the USA democracy.

16. Do also pay some attention to the rather crucial fact, that Cambridge Analytica has been a subsidiary of the UK private contractor SLC, which in its turn had been active for years for NATO (and therefor the CIA) in activities like : Election engineering (as a more sophisticated variation on the more commonly regime change tactics by the ever Imperial West)

17. So if one has been curious lately, about the possibility, that also (elements from within) the CIA and NATO - although at this point in time, Russia-friendly Trump seems to be hardly able to be accused of particularly pleasing the proverbial political-military-industrial complex-partners like the CIA and NATO - have been involved in a possible plot, of rendering the election victory to the GOP and Trump, these lines of engagement might be some leading clues.

18. Another clue in this respect might be the deliberation, that the USA secret services - extremely well equipped with state of the art institutions like the NSA - apparently had not been able to identify and subsequently stop the assumed hostile activities from foreign powers like Russia to undermine the USA election process, which after all, might be considered a core-task of secret services like the CIA and the Federal Police Counterintelligence Unit.

19. Do - being my final and concluding point - understand well in general, that the more credibility the messengers (i.e Steele and Simpson and others) will generate, the more plausible the message will become that they are delivering.

20, That message might indeed become fatal for President elect Trump, who might in the end not only be prevented of further executing the Presidency (by not surviving an eventual Impeachment Procedure), but even might be tried for High Treason (for plotting with a main foreign power, in order to corrupt the democratic institutions of the USA) and handed a long prison sentence or even a death sentence as a result...