The leaders of MI5 and MI6, the United Kingdom’s top intelligence agencies, were briefed about British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier shortly after 2016 election, learning about its salacious and unverified claims about President-elect Trump’s ties to Russia before the incoming commander in chief was told about them, according to a new report.
Sources told the Telegraph that Steele, an MI6 officer from 1987 until 2009 and former head of the MI6’s Russia desk, met with Charles Farr, also a former MI6 officer and then the chairman of the U.K.’s Joint Intelligence Committee, after Trump won the presidency. Farr died in February of this year.
Steele is said to have briefed Farr at least twice — in mid-November and late-November 2016 — telling him about the research he’d compiled in his dossier. The first meeting was at Farr’s Wimbledon home in South London a week after Trump won and the second meeting was roughly 10 days later.
The material was treated so seriously that Farr quickly passed it up the chain of command. Both Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, as well as Alex Younger, the chief of MI6, were briefed on the contents of the dossier sometime around late November. Sources told the Telegraph that the dossier material was “marked up to the top” but that Prime Minister Theresa May herself was not briefed on it.
Concerned about national security, Steele told friends, “We did our duty,” in passing along his research.
If the highest reaches of British intelligence were indeed aware of the dossier’s contents by late November 2016, that means they knew about it more than a month before Trump was told about some of the most salacious claims in the dossier by then-FBI Director James Comey during a meeting at Trump Tower in New York City.
A meeting between Trump, Comey, and other top intelligence officials took place on Jan. 6, 2017, and it was quickly leaked to the press. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and Comey briefed Trump on the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, but Comey stayed behind after the meeting to tell Trump about some of the dossier’s claims.
Days later, on the afternoon of Jan. 10, 2017, CNN ran a story about the meeting titled “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.” Later that evening, BuzzFeed posted Steele’s dossier online with the title “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia.”
Republicans have been calling for investigations into possible politically motivated criminal leaks of classified information for years now. In an interview with Fox News that aired Friday, Attorney General William Barr said “one of the things we want to look into” is “the handling of the meeting on Jan. 6, 2017 between the intelligence chiefs and the president and the leaking of information subsequent to that meeting.”
Last week, former FBI General Counsel James Baker admitted the bureau was worried that Comey would appear to be “blackmailing” Trump during the January 2017 briefing at Trump Tower.
The dossier, which was packed with unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, formed a key part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications that were used to justify surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Steele was working for Fusion GPS, which was receiving funding through the Perkins Coie law firm from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Steele’s Democratic benefactors were revealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
British intelligence wasn’t the only group outside the FBI that was receiving briefings from Steele about his dossier. Steele briefed a number of journalists on the dossier including Michael Isikoff, whose subsequent Yahoo News article was used by the FBI to bolster the FISA applications. Steele also provided the dossier to former McCain associate David Kramer, who got in contact with over a dozen journalists and media outlets, including BuzzFeed, about its contents. Steele was eventually cut off as a confidential human source by the FBI because of his leaking to the press.
Steele also personally briefed State Department official Kathleen Kavalec about it in October 2016, prior to the first FISA application. Her notes said Steele admitted that he was encouraged by his client, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, to get his research out before the 2016 election.
The FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier has come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks, and there are at least three federal investigations into alleged FISA abuse and other matters related to the way that the FBI and DOJ conducted the Trump-Russia investigation.
