When the Intelligence and Security Committee’s (ISC) Russia Report was finally published last week, the name of one person who gave evidence will have leapt out for many people. Among the ‘external expert witnesses’ listed was none other than a certain ‘Mr Christopher Steele, Director of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd’.
Steele, you may remember, was the official author of the dossier on Donald Trump that was commissioned on behalf of the US Democratic Party in the run-up to the 2016 US election and which acquired a second life when it was published by Buzzfeed shortly before Trump’s inauguration. If you don’t remember that dossier, you probably will, when I mention that it included allegations about ‘golden showers’ and prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz Carlton – allegations strenuously denied by Mr Trump.
Anyway, in the list of experts set out towards the end of the ISC’s report, Steele’s name appeared alongside half a dozen inveterate cold warriors, such as Bill Browder (of Magnitsky fame), the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, and a clutch of others with similarly well-known views.
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