From the section
The original document, published by Christopher Steele, was dated 30 January 2017
BBC’S Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Claims that US President Donald Trump secretly worked with Russia during his 2016 presidential campaign – and was subsequently granted a ‘dual mandate’ to try to ‘bungee jump’ Moscow back into the global order – have been publicly unearthed for the first time in the vast trove of emails gathered by former British spy Christopher Steele.
As he files his lawsuit in Federal District Court on Friday (US time), Mr Steele’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, describes the result of his client’s investigations into the activities of the Trump presidential campaign as “the most explosive document of our age”.
Mr Steele’s dossier, published by BuzzFeed on 7 January 2017, drew up a series of links between then US President Barack Obama, the Kremlin and Trump’s associates. The dossier also contained unsubstantiated claims that Russia offered the US government assistance in “tamping down” the Magnitsky Act, an anti-corruption law that targeted Russian officials with Magnitsky-like offences.
Mr Steele originally sent a dossier to the FBI detailing these claims in July 2016 and was subsequently instructed by the agency to investigate further.
The FBI investigation found “no evidence” to support claims that Donald Trump conspired with Russia, Russian officials said, but agents’ interest in the document and its author continued to intensify in 2017 as allegations of Russian interference in the presidential election swirled around the campaign and shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President.
That investigation led to investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
The FBI took over the lead from the US Department of Justice’s National Security Division in late May when the use of an unproven document for surveillance in the FISA court resulted in a split between the two agencies.
However, according to the FISA surveillance court application and re-submission described above, the FBI viewed Christopher Steele’s dossier as so reliable it decided to use the report in its attempts to surveil several members of the Trump campaign.