Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy who wrote the Russia “dossier,” told a London court that a Democratic law firm paid him to create a foundation to challenge the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election should Donald Trump win.
His scenario is contained in a sealed Aug. 2 declaration in a defamation law suit brought by three Russian bankers in London. The trio’s American attorneys filed his answers Tuesday in a libel lawsuit in Washington against the investigative firm Fusion GPS, which handled the former British intelligence officer.
In an answer to interrogatories, Mr. Steele wrote: “Fusion’s immediate client was law firm Perkins Coie. It engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election.
“Based on that advice, parties such as the Democratic National Committee and HFACC Inc. (also known as ‘Hillary for America’) could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election.”
Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, who broke the story on the anti-Trump Steel dossier was asked in an interview over the weekend if the dossier he first detailed in 2016 has been vindicated. He responded that it hasn’t.
Isikoff also said that he suspects many of the allegations made in former British spy Christopher Steele’s collection of memos to likely be false.
Yahoo chief investigative reporter Michael Isikoff was one of the journalists who met with Steele during the 2016 campaign. On Sept. 23, 2016, he wrote an article about former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, which outlined how Page had attracted law enforcement’s attention for allegedly trying to establish back channels between the campaign and Russia and for discussing the lifting of sanctions with Moscow-linked officials. The article was frequently cited during congressional investigations into whether the Justice Department and FBI abused surveillance powers by gathering information on Page, a U.S. citizen, after obtaining warrants based on Steele’s unverified work.
Despite reporting accusations made by Steele, Isikoff told John Ziegler’s Free Speech Broadcasting podcast that many of the claims had still not been corroborated.
“In broad strokes, Christopher Steele was clearly onto something, that there was a major Kremlin effort to interfere in our elections, that they were trying to help Trump’s campaign, and that there was multiple contacts between various Russian figures close to the government and various people in Trump’s campaign,” Isikoff said Saturday. “When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, we have not seen the evidence to support them, and, in fact, there’s good grounds to think that some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven and are likely false.”
Steele’s dossier was funded in part by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, conservative outlet the Washington Free Beacon, the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It contained unsubstantiated claims that Russian intelligence operatives filmed President Trump with prostitutes urinating on a Moscow hotel bed and that Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague in August 2016 to make arrangements with agents of Moscow to hack data beneficial to then-candidate Trump. Trump and Cohen have vehemently denied the accusations. The FBI’s inquiry into connections between the Trump campaign and Russia eventually led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.
According to newly unearthed British legal filings, Christopher Steele testified that the DNC/Clinton campaign funneled cash to him to help them "challenge the validity of the outcome" of the 2016 election in the event Hillary Clinton lost. https://t.co/Z7MTRaqBNb pic.twitter.com/sm4i4VaKGF
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) December 17, 2018
Source: Washington Times, Washington Examiner
Image: Steele/Isikoff
