Former British agent Christopher Steele is in the news from two directions this morning. The New Yorker has an extended profile, showing again the depth of Steele’s experience in Russia and the extent to which he was trusted by agencies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Steele had spent more than twenty years in M.I.6, most of it focussing on Russia. For three years, in the nineties, he spied in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Between 2006 and 2009, he ran the service’s Russia desk, at its headquarters, in London. He was fluent in Russian, and widely considered to be an expert on the country.
But while Steele is an expert on Russian deceptions and dirty tricks, he failed to appreciate just how many of the same techniques would be applied to him in the United States.Especially when Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham decided that filing a criminal referral against Steele would be a nice little distraction for Trump.
And so Steele, on that January night, was stunned to learn that U.S. politicians were calling him a criminal. He told Christopher Burrows, with whom he co-founded Orbis, that the sensation was “a feeling like vertigo.”
Because Steele, despite his Russian experience, naively expected that in the United States such a charge would involve something like evidence, and couldn’t be pushed for purely political purposes. The extent to which Trump’s lapdog Devin Nunes, or the state media at Fox News would go in attempting to smear Steele hit him by surprise. Even though Nunes’ statement accusing Steele of collaborating with both Hillary Clinton and the Russians is a demonstrable lie, and every bit of new information that appears seems to corroborate Steele’s research.
But it also appears that Steele may have another surprise for Donald Trump — something that’s not in his published memos, but which he did discuss with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy—and an incoming President.
And of course Trump went on to appoint Rex Tillerson — a man whose entire resume consisted of his ability to reach a deal that would make billions for Moscow, and also a man who had a personal stake in having the Ukraine-related sanctions lifted.
What the New Yorker profile highlights again is just why Nunes, Grassley, Graham, and everyone at Fox has been going so hard against Christopher Steele and the information in his memos. It’s not because they seem Steele as a weak link in the case against Trump. It’s exactly because he is not.
Steele is credible, experienced, exacting in his statements, and damning in his results. Unlike much of the information that’s been collected from other witnesses, Steele’s information requires drawing no connections between “dots.” The behavior he details is criminal on its face.
It’s vital for the right to condemn Christopher Steele. Because if Steele’s information is treated seriously, it will certainly condemn Donald Trump.
It’s too early to make a final judgment about how much of Steele’s dossier will be proved wrong, but a number of Steele’s major claims have been backed up by subsequent disclosures. His allegation that the Kremlin favored Trump in 2016 and was offering his campaign dirt on Hillary has been borne out. So has his claim that the Kremlin and WikiLeaks were working together to release the D.N.C.’s e-mails. Key elements of Steele’s memos on Carter Page have held up, too, including the claim that Page had secret meetings in Moscow with Rosneft and Kremlin officials. Steele may have named the wrong oil-company official, but, according to recent congressional disclosures, he was correct that a top Rosneft executive talked to Page about a payoff.
Adding Steele’s information to the rest of what Mueller has already established, gives something close to a complete picture of Trump’s long-standing relationship with Moscow — one in which Trump is willing to put America at risk to protect himself and satisfy Putin.