Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy identified as producing the ‘dirty dossier’ on Trump, reportedly worked for nothing on the document according to a source.
Washington-based political research company FusionGPS initially paid him £130,000 to dig into Trump. It is believed that one of the presidential opponents in the Republican Party financed the initiative.
It is believed that after Trump won the nomination in June 2016, a Democratic funder carried on paying for the dossier to be produced.
After Trump won, Steele is said to be extremely concerned about Trump’s links with the Kremlin that he carried on working and digging into Trump’s dealings, even though he was not getting paid.
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It is fairly standard practice to dig into political dealings of presidential candidates, and this first started in September 2015, when FusionGPS was hired. It is owned by a man called Glen Simpson a former Wall Street Journal reporter.
According to The Independent Newspaper, Simpson carried on working after the assignment closed to without being paid.
Reports have said that Steele discovered that Trump’s team knew of the hacking operation against the Democrats, and that the campaign team “agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/Nato defence commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”
He put all this in a memo to the FBI.
He also passed the information on to MI6 due to its importance.
At this point the FBI had not really pursued the information as they did not want to affect the election result. To Steele’s frustration they also were more focused on the Clinton campaign emails.
Eventually, Steele turned to the media to get the story in the public eye.
Steele’s report contains largely unverified information. He has currently gone into hiding, fearing for his life.
