Clinton team ‘funded ex-MI6 spy’s sleazy Trump dossier’
‘Too afraid of germs’
HILLARY Clinton’s presidential campaign team funded a sleazy dossier compiled by a former British spy into Donald Trump’s alleged links with Russia, it was claimed yesterday.
The 35-page dossier compiled by ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, which was leaked in January, alleged the US President had been cavorting with Russian prostitutes.
Among the revelations was a claim that Mr Trump ordered call girls to urinate on him – a depraved sex act known as a ‘golden shower’ – during a visit to a Moscow hotel in 2013. According to the Washington Post, Marc E Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC), hired US firm Fusion GPS, for whom Mr Steele compiled his dossier, to conduct the research.
Fusion GPS’s work was initially funded by an unknown Republican consulting firm, which pulled the plug once Mr Trump received the party’s nomination.
It is claimed Mr Elias’s law firm Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC from April last year through to October, days before the US election.
After being hired, Fusion GPS are understood to have enlisted the services of Mr Steele, 52, who spent almost two decades as one of MI6’s Russia specialists.
The DNC said its new leadership had nothing to do with creation of the dossier.
Reacting to the claims on Twitter yesterday, Mr Trump sent a message which said he was ‘the victim’ of collusion between Mr Steele and Mrs Clinton’s campaign team.
Citing Fox News, he said: ‘Clinton campaign & DNC paid for research that led to the antiTrump Fake News Dossier. The victim here is the President.’ House Press secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted: ‘The real Russia scandal? Clinton campaign paid for the fake Russia dossier, then lied about it & covered it up.’
House Speaker Paul Ryan – the most powerful Republican in Congress – accused the FBI of ‘stonewalling’ over the dossier in the wake of the latest revelations.
Mr Ryan said: ‘I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to learn through the media information that Congress has been requesting from the executive branch for a long time.
‘So the FBI needs to comply with the document requests that Congress has on their desk right now, and they need to do it immediately.’
In January, news website Buzzfeed caused a sensation when it published Mr Steele’s dossier on the internet ten days before Mr Trump entered the White House.
It contained allegations the Kremlin had cultivated the billionaire tycoon over five years – collecting information to blackmail him.
The dossier claimed the Russians held ‘compromising’ personal and financial information on Mr Trump, as well as evidence of him attending sex parties in St Petersburg.
Most salacious was the suggestion the Kremlin may have secretly filmed a supposed encounter in 2013 in the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow.
According to the dossier, Mr Trump ordered prostitutes to urinate on him while he was lying on the bed where Barack Obama and his wife Michelle had slept during their stay.
Mr Trump ridiculed the salacious claims, insisting that he was too afraid of germs.
Responding to the claims, a DNC spokesman said: ‘[Chairman] Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organisation.
Mr Elias and Fusion GPS declined to comment on the arrangement.
Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said he was not aware Fusion GPS had been hired in the runup to last year’s presidential election..