WASHINGTON (AP) – It was a bombshell story, emerging on the eve of Donald Trump’s first news conference as president-elect: U.S. intelligence officials had presented Trump with unsubstantiated claims that Russia had amassed compromising personal and financial allegations about him.
The purported Russian efforts were described in a newly released and uncorroborated dossier produced in August. But they had circulated more widely in Washington in October – following early reports and opaque warnings from elected officials that something was afoot involving the Kremlin and Trump.
In October, Mother Jones magazine described how a former Western spy – assigned to look into Trump’s Russian ties for a private American firm – had presented his findings to the FBI in August. Those findings, the magazine said, were produced for political opposition research and said that Russian intelligence had compromised Trump during his visits to Moscow – information that, if true, could be used to blackmail him or undermine his presidency.
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday identified the dossier’s author as Christopher Steele, a director of London-based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., whom the Journal said declined repeated requests for interviews through an intermediary. Another Orbis director told the Journal he wouldn’t “confirm or deny” that Orbis had produced the report.
Efforts to reach him by The Associated Press were not immediately successful. There was no answer after hours at Orbis Business Intelligence, at a five-story stone building across from London’s Lower Grosvenor Gardens, about two blocks from Buckingham Palace. There was no listed number for Steele’s address in Wokingham, about 30 miles west of London.