By President Elect trump yesterday at his first News Conference since july. Today, he tweeted that the Us Intelligence service said it was phoney and falsely circulated. In fact, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, effectively distanced the Us Intelligence agency from the unverified video, saying it didnt leak it and hadnt made a judgement on its reliability. Since then, the spotlight has been shone on the man credited with producing the memo Christopher Steele, a former mi6 officer respected by British Intelligence agencies, the cia and the fbi. He has since gone to ground. The focus is now on what British Intelligence knew and whether anything made its way onto ministers desks. But the wider question persists is this a scandal of watergate proportions, or one of the biggest smears in the history of politics . Heres our diplomatic editor, mark urban. Were learning more about the world of private intelligence gathering and how information gleaned from across the globe