Disgraced spy Christopher Steele has emerged from the shadows with a new tall tale, this time alleging that the British government knew about Vladimir Putin’s “likely hold” over Donald Trump. Why would anyone trust him?
In secret testimony to British MPs, Steele alleged that then-Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson turned a blind eye to reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a “likely hold” over US President Donald Trump, and covertly funded the Brexit campaign.
The former spook accused May of suppressing the information, so as to avoid souring trade negotiations with the Trump administration. “Political considerations,” he said, “seemed to outweigh national security interests.”
Steele’s testimony is revealed in a forthcoming book by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, a writer who’s made a career out of telling scary stories about Moscow-backed mischief. His latest effort purports to reveal in gory detail Russia’s “remaking of the west,” and Steele’s comments were revealed in an exclusive Guardian article on Monday.
His claims are damning. However, Steele’s reputation as a Russia “expert” – evidenced in his contribution to Westminster’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report on “Kremlin interference into British politics” – is somewhat overshadowed by his reputation as a fabricator and exaggerator.
Branching into the private sector after a career with MI6, Steele was hired in 2016 to conduct opposition research into then-candidate Donald Trump, a job funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The former spy delivered the goods and then some, compiling a dossier stuffed with salacious allegations about the potential president. Among them was the claim that Trump was caught on camera urinating on two prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, and that the Kremlin kept these tapes and ran a half-decade blackmail campaign against him.
OMG, how could anyone ignore the master sleuth who alleged that Putin had a pee tape of Trump and whose own primary source told the FBI that he had "misstated or exaggerated" his claims? https://t.co/47kn25lS5M
You know who else ignored these allegations? Robert Mueller.
Every healthy and sober person eventually recognized the conspiratorial madness of Christopher Steele's Cold War fantasy that the Kremlin "had a 'likely hold' over Donald Trump." 3 years wasted on deranged bullshit. https://t.co/GepCvjCSMj
Also mentioned were claims that Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, traveled to Prague to solicit Russian help rigging the 2016 election; and that Kremlin operatives offered bribes to a number of Trump campaign officials to shape the administration’s foreign policy to their liking.
The only problem with these claims, is that none of them were true. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report threw cold water on all of the above assertions; Steele’s own “primary sub-source”described his quotes in Steele’s dossier as “misstated or exaggerated;” and former FBI Director James Comey admitted under oath that his agency never bothered to corroborate its findings, even after they used the dossier to justify a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign.
Even Steele himself admitted in 2018 that the dossier was compiled so that HIllary Clinton could have a legal basis to challenge the results of the 2016 election.
But sure, the British public should trust Steele’s latest yarn. That’s a big ask, but they do have the help of Harding here, whose previous book, entitled ‘Collusion’, presented Steele’s dossier as evidence that “Russia helped Trump win the White House.”
Boris Johnson, now prime minister, has been accused of delaying the publication of the ISC first before last December’s general election, and afterwards as his government negotiates its withdrawal from the European Union. Steele, however, has seen his credibility tank since he briefed MPs on Russia’s so-called “hold” over Trump.
Yet, like the most committed ‘Russiagaters’ out there – MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, and Hillary Clinton, to name but a handful – Steele apparently isn’t ready to stop flogging a dead horse any time soon.