Some questions in Trump-Russia dossier now finding answers
No one has painted a more vivid portrait of a purported alliance between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia than a former British spy named Christopher Steele.
Steele’s once-confidential campaign memos were published just before Trump’s inauguration, unleashing tales of cavorting prostitutes and conniving campaign aides on secret sorties with agents of the Kremlin. Ever since, the credibility of these Democratic-funded memos — the so-called Steele dossier — has remained the subject of both official investigation and political sniping.
In the 18 months since the dossier’s release, government inquiries, criminal cases and authoritative news reports have begun to resolve at least some of the questions surrounding the memos.
As a whole, the Steele dossier now appears to be a murky mixture of genuine revelations and repurposed history, likely interspersed with snippets of fiction or disinformation, an Associated Press review finds.
Steele’s 17 memos laid out an extraordinarily detailed narrative of how the Russian government supposedly collaborated with the Trump campaign in an elaborate operation to tilt the 2016 presidential race in his favor.
Some of the dossier’s broad threads have been independently corroborated. U.S. intelligence agencies and the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference did eventually find that Kremlin-linked operatives ran an elaborate operation to promote Trump and hurt his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as the dossier says in its main narrative.
The dossier first told of a clandestine partnership between the Trump campaign and Russian officials in a memo dated June 2016, the month before the FBI began investigating that very possibility.
Steele laid out details of a secret Moscow meeting between the Russians and Trump adviser Carter Page months before FBI suspicions about Page and news reports about just such a meeting forced him to leave the campaign.
The dossier’s portrait of a cooperative campaign also has been bolstered by developments it did not specifically foretell: Legal cases and authoritative reporting have exposed Trump’s son Donald Jr. and another aide as receptive to Russian overtures to supply dirt on Clinton.
However, the dossier makes other sensational, unverified claims. It reports that Trump provided intelligence to the Kremlin on wealthy Russians in the U.S. The Russian government, in return, was said to supply Trump with secrets about his political rivals while collecting compromising information on him, including recording him with prostitutes who supposedly urinated on a bed in a Moscow hotel.
It remains unclear if the Trump campaign, in the end, secretly acquired Russian information and, if so, whether Trump himself was aware and involved.
For his part, Trump has dismissed the memos as “fake news” and parlayed “no collusion” into the Twitter tagline of his presidency. Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied his government meddled in the election.
In libel lawsuits, four wealthy Russians take more specific exception to the dossier.
The Russians sued Steele and BuzzFeed, the online news outlet that published the memos in January 2017. Three of the men — all owners of the Moscow-based financial-industrial conglomerate called Alfa Group — also have sued Fusion GPS, the research company that enlisted Steele under a contract with a law firm connected to the Democrats.
Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa Group owners — Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan — all say they had nothing to do with the events described in the dossier.
Gubarev and the Alfa Group owners are named in two separate Steele memos, both of which are seemingly out of alignment with the rest of the dossier, as their lawyers have said in court filings. Their questionable relevance raises the possibility that they were motivated by someone with a different agenda who perhaps fed false information to the former spy.
In the Alfa Group memo, the billionaire owners were said to perform unspecified political favors for Putin. And the Gubarev memo said his business “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data” in an operation against Democratic Party leaders.
Any actions ascribed to the four Russians have never been independently confirmed by official investigations or authoritative news reports.
Unlike the other memos, Steele’s Alfa Group write-up concentrates on internal Russian affairs, with no direct connection to the U.S. election. “Mr. Fridman, Mr. Aven and Mr. Khan have absolutely nothing to do, in any way, with the issue that is the theme of the dossier — alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign,” the trio’s lawyer, Alan Lewis, said in an interview.
Oddly, the memo about Gubarev is dated five weeks after the election. “Why the heck did he even bother to continue writing this stuff?” said Gubarev’s lawyer, Valentin Gurvits.
Representatives of both Steele and Fusion GPS chief executive Glenn Simpson declined to comment for this story.
BuzzFeed’s legal arguments don’t rely primarily on the truth of the memos. Instead, they cast the dossier as something that was under review by multiple layers of government and thus subject to news coverage as an official document, whether true or not.
BuzzFeed News spokesman Matt Mittenthal said “the fact that these allegations were being taken seriously at the highest levels of government was in itself a real story here.”
Contributing to this report were researchers Rhonda Shafner and Randy Herschaft in New York and reporter Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow.