An associate of late Republican Sen. John McCain, Ariz., gave a copy of the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News in December 2016.
Former State Department official David Kramer, an executive at the McCain Institute, met with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger on Dec. 29, 2016, according to a court filing released Wednesday that the Daily Caller reviewed. BuzzFeed published the dossier less than two weeks later, on Jan. 10, 2017, after getting it from Kramer.
The court filing was submitted as part of a final report before U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro, who ruled in favor of BuzzFeed in a defamation lawsuit.
The judge said one unsettled question is whether Kramer gave it to the BuzzFeed reporter or whether the reporter took pictures of it while Kramer was out of the room. But the judge did say that Kramer “had no objection to Bensinger taking a hard copy and had provided hard copies to other journalists.”
McCain sent Kramer to London to meet with Steele in November 2016 after the two became aware of his investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump.
Following that meeting, Kramer obtained copies of the dossier from Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS. That’s the firm that hired Steele on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee.
Kramer met and went over the document with McCain and his chief of staff Christopher Brose.
“Kramer advised McCain to share the reports with the FBI and the CIA,” according to Ungaro.
