Trump given unusual intelligence report
WASHINGTON — The chiefs of U.S. intelligence agencies last week presented President Obama and Presidentelect Donald Trump with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Trump, two officials with knowledge of the briefing said.
The summary is based on memos generated by political operatives seeking to derail Trump’s candidacy. Details of the reports began circulating in the fall and were widely known among journalists and politicians in Washington.
The two-page summary, first reported by CNN, was presented as an appendix to the intelligence agencies’ report on the Russian hacking of the election, the officials said. The material was not corroborated, and the New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims. But intelligence agencies considered it so potentially explosive that they decided Obama, Trump and congressional leaders needed to be told about it and that the agencies were actively investigating it.
Intelligence officials were concerned that the information would leak before they informed Trump of its existence, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the summary is classified and talking about it would be a felony.
On Tuesday night, Trump responded on Twitter: “FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!”
In an appearance recorded for NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” Trump’s spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, said of the claims in the opposition research memos, “He has said he is not aware of that.”
The decision of top intelligence officials to give the president, the president-elect and what is called the Gang of Eight — Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress and the intelligence committees — what they know to be unverified, defamatory material was extremely unusual.
The appendix summarized opposition research memos prepared mainly by a retired British intelligence operative for a Washington political and corporate research firm. The firm was paid for its work first by Trump’s Republican rivals and later by supporters of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The Times has checked on a number of the details included in the memos but has been unable to substantiate them.
The memos suggest that for many years, the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin has looked for ways to influence Trump, who has traveled repeatedly to Moscow to investigate real estate deals or to oversee the Miss Universe competition, which he owned for several years. Trump never completed any major deals in Russia, though he discussed them for years.
The former British intelligence officer who gathered the material about Trump is considered a competent and reliable operative with extensive experience in Russia, U.S. officials said. But he passed on what he heard from Russian informants and others, and what they told him has not yet been vetted by U.S. intelligence.
The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes with Trump in a 2013 visit to a Moscow hotel. The videos were supposedly prepared as kompromat ,or compromising material, with the possible goal of blackmailing Trump in the future.
The memos also suggest that Russian officials proposed various lucrative deals, essentially as disguised bribes, in order to win influence over the real estate magnate.
The memos describe several purported meetings during the 2016 presidential campaign between Trump representatives and Russian officials to discuss matters of mutual interest, including the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.