communication with the kremlin. that s an amazing piece of story telling in terms of the communication between these two guys but what s the underlying story there? part of our assignment was to understand this guy christopher steele who had these two assignments, one for a private sector client in fact representing hillary clinton and her campaign and another, a guy who felt he had an obligation as he described it to friends, an obligation to tell authorities and alert people to what he had found. he claims, at least to his friends and associates, that he was dismayed by what he found. we wanted to check this out. so we talked to a guy who was his former boss at mi6, richard dearlove, and he told us that indeed steele and his partner christopher boroughs had come to him during 2016 asking for advice, they unburdened
represents hillary clinton and the democratic national committee. tom, you mentioned senator lindsey graham there. there has been this effort by senator graham and senator grassley to refer christopher steele to the justice department for possible prosecution and you have a striking report on that tonight. i m going to quote from your article friends and former colleagues say steele has been dismayed by the attacks on him, particularly about a criminal referral that two u.s. senators made to the justice department. the move was moved by some british lawmakers and long time intelligence officials as an affront to the special bond between the united states and britain. could you talk about that, why the british are so affronted by what senator graham and senator grassley are doing? well, i think rachel, there are a couple things that we learned in talking to some of steele s former associates in the british intelligence community and we also talked with some members of parliament.
friday, it did not go off like the bomb they hoped and promised it would, but it did make clear that what the white house and congressional republicans think is their best shot at derailing the russia investigation, derailing robert mueller s special counsel investigation, they think their best shot at it is to try to tarnish the fbi s whole investigation of the russia attack, to tarnish the whole counterintelligence and criminal investigation of the trump campaign for its potential cooperation in that attack, they want to tarnish that investigation, discredit it, and thereby try to make it go away by trying to claim that the whole fbi investigation was based on information given to the fbi by this guy, christopher steele, the former lead agent on russia matters for mi6 in britain. attacking him really appears to be the centerpiece if not the whole game plan for what is now a republican full court press to try to save this presidency and stop the investigation into him that has already
post has published a whole bunch of new reporting we have never seen before about what actually happened between this guy christopher steele and the fbi. quoting from the lede here, in the fall of 2016, a little more than a month before donald trump was elected president, christopher steele had the undivided attention of the fbi. for months, the british former spy had been working to alert the americans to what he believed were disturbing ties trump had to russia. he d grown so worried about what he learned from his russia network about the kremlin s plans that he told colleagues it was like sitting on a nuclear weapon. he was now being summoned to rome where he spent hours in in a discreet location telling american officials, some of whom had flown in from the united states, about his findings. the russians had damaging information about trump s personal behavior and finances that could be used to pressure the gop nominee. what s more, the kremlin is carrying out an operation with
did get permission from mr. steele s associates to mention the fact that we had talked with him during the campaign. one of the things and because we had talked to him in september and october of 2016, we thought that, obviously we ve been following what he s had to say and read the dossier as everyone else did when buzzfeed published it some months later. we, like the rest of the country and many investigators, have been wondering is this dossier with its salacious detail about donald trump, could this be true? can it be corroborated? it s a huge question. what s happened now, rachel, is that christopher steele is sort of moved to the center of the polarized fight that we re seeing so you have the nunes memo from the house intelligence committee that suggests that the fbi really didn t appropriately alert the fisa court, the court that granted a search warrant for monitoring carter page.