A former British diplomat who made headlines for discussing an anti-Trump dossier with Sen. John McCain does not believe its author, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, made up the allegations it contained.
Sir Andrew Wood, who was ambassador to Russia from 1995 to 2000, was asked on Tuesday to respond to a forensic analysis of the former MI6 officer’s dossier about President Trump’s ties to Russia by Rupert Allason, a former member of Parliament who is also an author specializing in espionage using the pen name Nigel West. Upon completing that assessment, according to the Sunday Times, Allason determined there was “a strong possibility that all Steele’s material has been fabricated.”
In a brief email exchange, Wood was asked if he stood by his comments to BBC Radio 4 in 2017 when he characterized the allegations as “dangerous knowledge”: “I do not think [Steele] would make things up,” he said, adding: “I do not think he would necessarily always draw correct judgements — but that is not the same thing at all.”
“I have no reason to change my judgement,” he told Washington Examiner.
Wood, 80, held a number of diplomatic posts for the United Kingdom, including head of mission in Moscow for five years. He retired from diplomatic service in 2000 and is now an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House.
Following Trump’s election victory in November 2016, Wood talked to McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, at an international security conference in Halifax, Canada, about Steele’s dossier. The senator wrote in his book The Restless Wave that Wood approached him at the conference and, in their impromptu meeting, “charged with a strange intensity,” they discussed the dossier.
It was after this discussion that McCain sent his associate, David Kramer, a former State Department official, to London to retrieve a copy. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and close friend of McCain’s, told reporters last year that he urged McCain to send the dossier to the FBI. McCain, who died of brain cancer in August 2018, gave a copy of Steele’s research to then-FBI Director James Comey, although the bureau had already begun receiving Steele’s dossier in installments starting in July 2016.
Wood told the Independent in 2017 that while he knew Steele and believed him to be “very professional,” he had not seen the dossier when he spoke to McCain. Still, he said they did discuss Trump and Russia, including the issue of whether the Kremlin had “kompromat,” the Russian term for compromising material, on Trump that could be used as blackmail, as was detailed in Steele’s dossier.
The 35-page dossier was a collection of reports about Trump’s ties to Russia, including allegations of a conspiracy and the Russians having a video of Trump with prostitutes urinating on a bed in a Moscow hotel room, compiled after Steele was commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.
The dossier played a role in the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017.
A report released by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December criticized the FBI for its reliance on the unverified dossier to obtain warrants for wiretapping onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. It revealed that the FBI interviewed Steele’s primary Moscow-based source, beginning in January 2017, who “raised significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting.”
In his assessment, Allason also took issue with Steele’s sourcing, writing that from “a professional intelligence perspective, the dossier as a whole is profoundly troubling and cannot be taken at face value.”
Steele’s private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, accused Allason of writing a “politically motivated” report, as it was reportedly commissioned by a Republican law firm, which was not identified. Orbis, which also claimed “much of the dossier has been proven” since 2017, added: “We stand by the integrity and quality of our work.”
Wood told the Washington Examiner that he is not sure which law firm backed Allason’s report.
“Allason knows that I have, in fact, never read the dossier precisely because I have never been in a position to confirm or refute its contents. But it would not on the face of it be surprising if the Times were right to suggest that Allason/West was commissioned as reported,” he said.
