Former British spy Christopher Steele communicated with Ivanka Trump nearly a decade before he compiled a dossier on her father’s alleged links to Russia.
The president’s daughter met Steele at a dinner in 2007 and began talking about working together in the future, according to ABC News.
The report coincides with the release of a Justice Department watchdog assessment on the Russia investigation, in which Steele, 55, denied being biased against President Trump, asserting he had “been friendly” with a member of the Trump family for years before he compiled an unverified dossier on the president.
Emails show that in 2008, Steele and Ivanka Trump discussed meeting near Trump Tower. In one exchange, they talked about dining at a restaurant blocks away from the tower.
At the time, Ivanka Trump, who is now 38, was an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, managing real estate projects, including in parts of the world where Steele’s firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, had expertise. The two discussed how Steele’s firm could help the Trump Organization in its expansion into foreign markets.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a 476-page report on Monday detailing his investigation into allegations of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse to monitor onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, focusing on FBI applications that relied on Steele’s dossier.
Horowitz began his investigation in March 2018 after Republicans alleged the FBI did not sufficiently convey to the FISA court Steele’s anti-Trump bias and Democratic benefactors. In Horowitz’s report, Steele denied that he was biased against Trump, noting that he had been friendly with a member of the president’s family.
“Steele called the allegation that he was biased against Trump from the start ‘ridiculous,’” the report said. “He stated that if anything, he was ‘favorably disposed’ toward the Trump family before he began his research because he had visited a Trump family member at Trump Tower and ‘been friendly’ with [the family member] for some years.
“He described their relationship as ‘personal’ and said that he once gifted a family tartan from Scotland to the family member.”
Horowitz did not name the family member in the report.
Steele was hired in 2016 by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was employed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to collect information on Trump.
