feeding trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including democratic presidential candidate hillary clinton for several years. a new link has surfaced between the president s name sake and a russian lawyer. we now know at least nine trump associates had contacts with russian officials during the campaign or the transition. meetings happened in new york, in washington, in europe, in russia. former trump adviser carter page has told congressional investigators that despite his previous denials, he did meet with high-ranking russians in moscow in july 2016. christopher steele had reported as much. at the time in the dossier. been forced to acknowledge he had encounters with senior russian officials continuing to say it was meaningless and wasn t about collusion and the things in the dossier are not true but the account significantly changed. what is now the most notorious trump campaign/russia meeting happened in june 2016 at trump tower. donald trump jr., paul
weeks later in july 2016, steele sent off his second trump memo. this was the headline russia: secret kremlin meetings attended by trump adviser carter page in moscow. according to steele s sources those meetings involved a move to lift ukraine-related western sanctions against russia. on the day that report was filed, the republican national convention was getting under way in cleveland, ohio. at the time, a few american journalists were starting to see the vague outlines of a trump/russia story. trump s appointment of paul manafort as his campaign chair raised eyebrows because manafort spent years working for pro-putin politicians. what really started to give the russia story some traction was paul manafort s role. reporter: michael isikoff is a veteran investigative reporter who writes for yahoo news.
what was fast becoming the worst kept secret in washington. the question we ask ourselves, why would we keep this from our audience? reporter: at 5:20 p.m. on january 10th, buzzfeed hit publish. all 35 pages of the dossier went online with a warning that the allegations are unverified and the report contains errors. and that was really our main goal in our summary of it, was to say very, very clearly, we haven t verified this. there are some, as you say, minor, but real errors in it that could give you pause and here s what we know about where it comes from. reporter: it was explosive stuff, and not just the lewd allegations. there were other serious charges, names named in black and white. the public was seeing it all for the first time. according to the dossier s unnamed sources, campaign chairman paul manafort managed a conspiracy of cooperation with the russians. foreign policy adviser carter
this from our audience? reporter: at 5:20 p.m. on january 10th, buzzfeed hit publish. all 35 pages of the dossier went online with a warning that the allegations are unverified and the report contains errors. and that was really our main goal in our summary of it, was to say very, very clearly, we haven t verified this. there are some, as you say, minor, but real errors in it that could give you pause and here s what we know about where it comes from. reporter: it was explosive stuff, and not just the lewd allegations. there were other serious charges, names named in black and white. the public was seeing it all for the first time. according to the dossier s unnamed sources, campaign chairman paul manafort managed a conspiracy of cooperation with the russians. foreign policy adviser carter page served as an intermediary with the russians. trump s personal lawyer michael
feeding trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including democratic presidential candidate hillary clinton for several years. a new link has surfaced between the president s name sake and a russian lawyer. we now know that at least nine trump associates had contacts with russian officials during the campaign or the transition. meetings happened in new york, in washington, in europe, in russia. former trump adviser carter page has now told congressional investigators that despite his previous denials, he did meet with high-ranking russians in moscow in july, 2016. christopher steele had reported as much at the time in the dossier. he s been forced to acknowledge that he had encounters with senior russian officials. now he tips to say this was meaningless and it wasn t about collusion and the things asserted about him in the dossier are not true. but nonetheless, the account is significantly changed from when we first heard about this trip.