TRUMP ROCKED BY BRITISH SPY
Ex-MI6 officer reports sensational claims he was filmed in Moscow hotel room watching prostitutes’ sordid sex act
A FORMER British spy has been sensationally revealed as the author of a dossier on Donald Trump’s alleged sexual perversions. American newspapers last night suggested the agent was Christopher Steele, an ex-MI6 officer who worked in the UK embassy in Moscow.
He is said to have gone into hiding, terrified of Russian reprisals. The 35-page dossier alleges Mr Trump had been cosying up to Vladimir Putin and cavorting with Russian prostitutes.
It says the Kremlin cultivated the billionaire tycoon over five years – collecting information to blackmail him.
Although not verified, the report caused a sensation when it was leaked on the internet ten days before Mr Trump enters the White House.
The president-elect lashed out during a bad-tempered press conference yesterday, branding the dossier phony and ‘fake news’. He ridiculed the idea that he had ordered call girls to perform a depraved sex act – insisting that he was too afraid of germs.
And he poured scorn on allegations the Kremlin may have a secret film of the supposed encounter in 2013 in the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Moscow in which he ‘defiled’
the bed where Barack Obama and his wife Michelle had slept.
Yesterday he demanded: ‘Does anyone really believe that story? I’m also very much of a germophobe by the way, believe me.’
The dossier claims the Russians hold ‘compromising’ personal and financial information on Mr Trump, as well as evidence of him attending sex parties in St Petersburg.
The tycoon raged about the ‘fake and phony’ news and accused America’s own intelligence agencies of ‘disgracefully’ leaking it to the public. However, the claims in the dossier were considered sufficiently credible by US spy chiefs for them to give President Obama a briefing and two-page summary last week.
Married father-of-three Mr Steele, 52, spent almost two decades as one of MI6’s Russia specialists, also working in Paris. A diplomatic service list shows that the ex-spy was posted to the UK’s Moscow embassy in 1990 with the title of ‘second secretary’, serving under ambassador Sir Rodric Braithwaite.
Mr Steele’s business partner Christopher Burrows was also named as a former MI6 agent, but has not been linked to the dossier. Liverpool University-educated Mr Burrows, 58, was a Brussels and India expert with the security service.
He describes himself as a former Foreign Office ‘counsellor’ on his LinkedIn page.
The pair are now the co-directors of Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based firm which gathers ‘strategic insight and intelligence’ for corporate clients. They were named by the Wall Street Journal last night.
The American newspaper said it had spoken to Mr Burrows at his home outside London yesterday.
It said he would not ‘confirm or deny’ that Orbis had produced the Trump report.
A neighbour of Mr Steele’s said he was away for a few days. The Journal said it had also approached Mr Steele through an intermediary, who had said the subject was ‘too hot’ for Mr Steele to speak about.
Both men were named as MI6 agents in 1999 when they appeared on a list published online by former British spy Richard Tomlinson in 1999. Mr Steele was said to have been hired first by Mr Trump’s opponents within the Republican Party and then by supporters of Hillary Clinton after it became clear he would be her rival in the race for the White House.
The dossier uncovered ‘ an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit’.
It claims Moscow has been ‘cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years’. But it said the Russians had simultaneously been spying on him to obtain humiliating information which it could use to blackmail him if he won office.
The salacious dossier says a plot by the Federal Security Bureau, the successor to the KGB, to exploit Mr Trump’s ‘personal obsessions and sexual perversion’ to obtain compromising material on him had ‘borne fruit’.
There were also sordid sex parties in St Petersburg that Mr Trump allegedly attended, it was said.
And there were accusations he had been offered lucrative business opportunities in Russia. It alleged Mr Trump had been given briefings on Mrs Clinton and other political opponents by Kremlin sources.
The dossier’s author was said to have tipped off the FBI in August, more than two months before the election, after becoming alarmed at unearthing claims that Moscow was gathering information on Mr Trump which could compromise him in the White House.
When he heard nothing further from the FBI – which was conducting a high-profile investigation into Mrs Clinton’s use of a private email server – he went to journalists with his material instead. He met David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of news website Mother Jones, which published extracts.
Yesterday news website Buzzfeed published the whole 35 pages – and Mr Trump went on the attack.
He told reporters at his New York press conference that Buzzfeed was ‘a failing pile of garbage’ and added: ‘They’re going to suffer the consequences’. He started shouting at a Buzzfeed reporter in the hall, pointing at him and repeating: ‘Fake news.’
Contrary to reports, Mr Trump denied being briefed about the Russian blackmail dossier claims last week when he met intelligence chiefs. Extraordinarily, he then launched a
blistering attack on America’s own spy agencies, accusing them of ‘disgraceful’ behaviour for ‘maybe’ leaking the dossier – setting himself up for an ugly clash with his intelligence chiefs when he becomes president.
Saying the situation was ‘like Nazi Germany’, he ranted: ‘It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen. And it was gotten by opponents of ours – sick people, and they put that crap together.
‘ It was disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false, and fake, out. I think it’s a disgrace and that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done, and did do.’
Mr Trump ridiculed the notion of being filmed with prostitutes, saying he knew there were hidden cameras in hotel rooms.
He said: ‘I am extremely careful. I always tell my people be very careful, because in those rooms you have cameras in the strangest places – you can’t see them and you won’t know. You better be careful or you will be watching yourself on nightly television.’
In Moscow, President Putin’s spokesman rubbished all the claims as ‘ nonsense’ and ‘ pulp fiction’. When the story broke, a furious Mr Trump had posted a series of tweets in capital letters, including: ‘ TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT’ and ‘I HAVe NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DeALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!’
His bombastic appearance yesterday was his first press conference since winning the election, and he answered wide-ranging questions over 58 minutes.
Referring to himself frequently in the third person, he said of Russia’s president: ‘If Putin likes Donald Trump I consider that an asset, not a liability, because we have a horrible relationship with Russia.’
He told critics of his conflicts of interest he was turning over ‘complete and total control’ of his business empire – although not ownership – to his sons Donald Jnr and eric. But he said he still would not be releasing his tax returns because ‘no one cares’.
The president-elect also said he thought the hacking of Mrs Clinton’s emails during the election
‘I have nothing to do with Russia’
campaign had been done by the Russians. He said hacking was ‘bad’, but added it had also been ‘in the public interest’.
It was claimed the dossier was also passed to the FBI by Republican grandee John McCain who got it from a former British ambassador to Moscow. In echoes of the Cold War, the former envoy is said to have been given the report after being instructed to look for a man ‘with a copy of the Financial Times’.
Theresa May is now under huge pressure to reassure the president-elect that Britain had nothing to do with the dossier.
Trump supporters have also questioned the credibility of the report because it contains a number of spelling mistakes.
It also has mistaken references to areas of Moscow an expert on the city might be expected to get right, and its claims are not backed up with evidence.
At his press conference, Mr Trump also turned on CNN for reporting the story, and mocked the BBC – labelling the corporation ‘another beauty’.
A statement on the Orbis website says: ‘ethical business practice is a fundamental value for the Orbis Business Intelligence team. Our documented procedures, developed in conjunction with external legal counsel, ensure compliance with relevant UK, US and eU legislation.’
Additional reporting: LARISA BROWN