Steele Dossier

In 2017, it was revealed that the dossier was commissioned by Marc Elias, a lawyer at Perkins Coie law firm in Washington, DC, and once represented Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Elias hired the Fusion GPS opposition research firm on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Fusion GPS, in turn, hired former British spy Christopher Steele and his private intelligence to compile a dossier comprising 17 memos that were written from June to December 2016 Steel was a former head of the Russia Desk for British intelligence (MI6), now gone into 'private' (i.e. plausibly deniable) business.

Event Timeline

• Christopher Steele met with the FBI’s Peter Strzok in July 2016.

• During the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally.

• CIA Director John Brennan then briefed Senate Minority leader Harry Reid in August 2016 on the Steele dossier.

• By this process of washing dubious information, this briefing then led Reid to send FBI Director James Comey a letter demanding an investigation of the collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians.

• The Steele dossier was also a key foundation for the FISA warrant issued to spy on Trump's close aide Carter Page, in the hope of finding incriminating information, or getting Page to prejudice himself in police interviews by giving statements conflicting with the tapes.

Source

In July 2020, the identify of the primary source for Christopher Steele was revealed by the Wall Street Journal. The main source was Igor Danchenko, a Russian-born analyst living in the United States, who had worked for five years at the Brookings Institution as a Russia analyst. Noticably, he is directly linked to prominent Democrats closely tied to Hillary Clinton, in particular, Strobe Talbott, the leader of Brookings.