The New Yorker Magazine have recently published a lengthy article by Jane Mayer called ‘Christopher Steele The Man Behind The Trump Dossier’ - ( A Reporter At Large - March 12, 2018 issue)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-behind-the-trump-dossier
The article is based on in-depth interviews with Christopher Burrows who is Chris Steele’s business partner, and the co-founder of the Orbis Business Intelligence consultancy which they started together in 2009 after they left their employment at MI6 - the British foreign intelligence service where Chris Steele had been the head of the Russian affairs desk.
The New Yorker article provides the most detailed and thoughtful account I have yet read of how the Steele dossier came to be written, and the mixed reception it received when Chris Steele tried to share his concerns with his former career-long partners in the FBI and US State Department.
Far from being eagerly seized on as a weapon by some ‘Deep State’ conspiracy, Steele actually had the dispiriting experience of being repeatedly shrugged off and told to go and see somone else, while his dossier was carefully placed in a locked safe and forgotten about. For Chris Steele, watching the 2016 presidential election was a slow motion car-crash where the alarm bells only began to ring and his dossier belatedly drawn to the attention of President Obama in December 2016, after the election had already been won by Donald Trump.
The most extraordinary part of Jane Mayer’s article occurs right at the end. The Steele dossier was a collection of seventeen separate reports. But there was a final eighteenth report written in late November 2016 that wasn’t included with the rest:
Credited to just one source, an un-named senior Russian official, the final report says that the Kremlin intervened to stop Donald Trump from appointing Mitt Romney as the new US Secretary of State. American press had widely reported that Donald Trump as president elect was contemplating offering Mitt Romney the State Department, and had even invited him to a private dinner in New York to discuss the proposal.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/trump-romney-dinner-secretary-of-state-2016-11
Mitt Romney had previously been defeated as the Republican US presidential candidate in 2012. He was widely seen as a traditional hawk who would be unsympathetic to Russia’s strategic interests and international agenda. The source claimed that the Kremlin intervened and asked Donald Trump to appoint Rex Tillerson the CEO of ExxonMobil and a personal friend of Vladimir Putin instead.
