https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/15/how-trump-walked-into-putins-web-luke
McCain believed it was impossible to verify Steele’s claims without a proper investigation. He made a call and arranged a meeting with Comey. Their encounter on 8 December 2016 lasted five minutes. Not much was said. McCain gave Comey the dossier.
McCain’s intervention now made some kind of bureaucratic response inevitable. This was no longer just an FBI affair; it required co-ordination across the top levels of US intelligence. A highly classified two-page summary of Steele’s dossier was compiled. It was attached to a longer, restricted briefing note on Russian cyber interference in the 2016 election. The US’s most senior intelligence chiefs mulled what to do.
Their next task was an unenviable one. As former CIA director Michael Hayden put it to me, the situation was “off the map in terms of what intelligence is asked to do. I didn’t envy them”. Of the dossier, Hayden said: “My gestalt idea, when I saw it, was that this looks like our stuff.”
The dossier was on its way to the desk of the man who was still, for now, the world’s most powerful person: President Barack Obama.
It was also going to his successor, the next guy in the Oval Office. He wasn’t going to like it much.
McCain believed it was impossible to verify Steele’s claims without a proper investigation. He made a call and arranged a meeting with Comey. Their encounter on 8 December 2016 lasted five minutes. Not much was said. McCain gave Comey the dossier.
McCain’s intervention now made some kind of bureaucratic response inevitable. This was no longer just an FBI affair; it required co-ordination across the top levels of US intelligence. A highly classified two-page summary of Steele’s dossier was compiled. It was attached to a longer, restricted briefing note on Russian cyber interference in the 2016 election. The US’s most senior intelligence chiefs mulled what to do.
Their next task was an unenviable one. As former CIA director Michael Hayden put it to me, the situation was “off the map in terms of what intelligence is asked to do. I didn’t envy them”. Of the dossier, Hayden said: “My gestalt idea, when I saw it, was that this looks like our stuff.”
The dossier was on its way to the desk of the man who was still, for now, the world’s most powerful person: President Barack Obama.
It was also going to his successor, the next guy in the Oval Office. He wasn’t going to like it much.
