Confirmed: “Unknown” Republican, Democrat Paid For Anti-Trump Report
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Jan 13, 2017
Having learned previously both the identity of the former British intelligence officer who compiled the “Trump dossier”, revealed by the WSJ earlier this week as former MI-6 staffer Christopher Steele, currently director of London-based Orbis Business Intelligence, and that John McCain was the person who delivered the report to the FBI, one question remained: who commissioned the original report meant to uncover a material,i.e., campaign-ending, weakness in Donald Trump’s past.
We now have an answer, or least a partial one. But first, a brief detour into just how Steele allegedly went about compiling his data.
In a report in Mother Jones, David Corn, who first broke the story that a former Western counterintelligence official had sent memos to the FBI with troubling allegations related to Donald Trump, writes about Steele’s experience shortly after being retained in June by a “private research firm” to look into Trump’s activity in Europe and Russia. Steele recalls that “It started off as a fairly general inquiry.” One question for him, he said, was, “Are there business ties in Russia?”
Corn then writes that the former intelligence official went to work and contacted his network of sources in Russia and elsewhere.
He soon received what he called “hair-raising” information. His sources told him, he said, that Trump had been “sexually compromised” by Russian intelligence in 2013 (when Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe contest) or earlier and that there was an “established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.” He noted he was “shocked” by these allegations. By the end of June, he was sending reports of what he was finding to the American firm.
The former spy said he soon decided the information he was receiving was “sufficiently serious” for him to forward it to contacts he had at the FBI. He did this, he said, without permission from the American firm that had hired him. “This was an extraordinary situation,” he remarked.
The Rest…HERE
