The dossier claims, based on anonymous sources, that Russia collected a file of compromising information on Donald Trump and that his presidential campaign conspired to cooperate with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
[2][3] Trump and his allies have falsely claimed[4][5][6] the Crossfire Hurricane FBI probe into Russian interference was launched due to Steele's dossier.
[7] The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee concluded in an April 2018 report that the FBI probe had been triggered by previous information from Trump adviser George Papadopoulos; the February 2018 Nunes memo reached the same conclusion.
[8][9] Christopher David Steele was born in the Yemeni city of Aden (then part of the British-controlled Federation of South Arabia), on 24 June 1964.
[12] He returned to London in 1993, working again at the FCO until his posting with the British Embassy in Bangkok in 1998 and then shortly after to Paris in the same year, where he served under diplomatic cover until 2002.
[23] In 2012, Orbis was subcontracted by a law firm representing Oleg Deripaska,[24] who was also a "person of interest" to the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into Russia's election interference.
[10] Steele ran an investigation dubbed "Project Charlemagne", which noted Russian interference in the domestic politics of France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
The OCCRP wrote: A private intelligence firm working for a disgraced U.S. healthcare operator fed what appears to be false information to a British politician, leading him to claim in parliament that a well-known businessman was a Russian agent, leaked communications show.
[27][31] Steele's research indicated that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin had rigged the bidding of the 2018 World Cups by employing bribery.
[10] Steele contributed to a privately commissioned report that alleged China attempted to influence key figures in British politics and business.
Fusion GPS was subsequently hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through their shared attorney at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias.
Steele said he decided to provide his dossier to both British and American intelligence officials after concluding that the material should not solely be in the possession Trump's political opponents, but was a matter of national security for both countries.
[44] In relation to a defamation lawsuit filed by Aleksej Gubarev against BuzzFeed, regarding their publication of the dossier, Senior Master Barbara Fontaine said Steele was "in many respects in the same position as a whistle-blower" because of his actions "in sending part of the dossier to Senator John McCain and a senior government national security official, and in briefing sections of the US media".
[45] Steele first became a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI in 2013 in connection with the investigation of the FIFA corruption case, but he considered the relationship as contractual.
Simpson and Fritsch described their reaction: "Comey's bombshell prompted the Fusion partners to decide they needed to do what they could to expose the FBI's probe of Trump and Russia.
"[48] The founders of Fusion GPS were very upset by what they claimed was a misleading 1 November 2016, New York Times article "published a week before the election with the headline: 'Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia'.
[50] Steele has disputed this description: "And to correct the Danchenko trial record, we were not offered $1 million by the FBI to ‘prove up’ our Trump-Russia reporting.
[10][59] On 11 January 2017, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Steele was the author of the dossier about Trump, citing "people familiar with the matter".
Brenton expressed some doubts due to discrepancies in how the dossier described aspects of the hacking activities, as well as Steele's ability to penetrate the Kremlin and Russian security agencies, given that he is an outsider.
[74] In late February 2018, a rebuttal memo by Democrats in the House Intelligence Committee stated that "Christopher Steele's reporting ... played no role in launching the counterintelligence investigation ...
"[75][76] In April 2018, the House Intelligence Committee, then under Republican control, released a final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election; the report said the House Intelligence Committee had found that "in late July 2016, the FBI opened an enterprise CI [counterintelligence] investigation into the Trump campaign following the receipt of derogatory information about foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos".
[78] In August 2018, Representative Devin Nunes, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, travelled to London in an attempt to meet with the heads of MI5, MI6, and GCHQ for information about Steele, but was rebuffed by the three agencies.
[87] In August 2017, lawyers for Gubarev demanded Steele give a deposition regarding the dossier, as part of a libel lawsuit against BuzzFeed News[88][89] filed in February.
The judge stated that Steele's dossier also inaccurately claimed that Aven and Fridman provided foreign policy advice to Putin.
[99][100][101][102] Because the referral is based on classified FBI documents, the context in which the Republican senators allege Steele to have lied is limited to references that he discussed the dossier with media outlets.
"[101] Veteran prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg called the referral "nonsense" because "the FBI doesn't need any prompting from politicians to prosecute people who have lied to them.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified to the House Judiciary Committee that, despite having made 17 mistakes in their applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), the FBI showed no political bias during the investigation of Trump and the Russian government.
[110] From information in the report, ABC News determined that Steele and Ivanka Trump had had a business and personal relationship from 2007 for a number of years.
[47] Following the dossier's release, Steele completely avoided on-camera interviews until he participated in an ABC News documentary that was aired on Hulu on October 18, 2021.
He calls the Republican Party and the former president who dominates it 'the gravest threat to Western democracy and the rule of law … increasingly the willing handmaidens for Putin.