Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Luke Harding

The new U.S. president designate was, it was whispered, a traitor. To find a plot that crazy, you had to turn to fiction: Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, about a Soviet-Chinese operation to seize the White House. Or a largely forgotten thriller by the writer Ted Allbeury, The Twentieth Day of January.

Putin was practically the only person on the planet to escape Trump’s sweeping invective, delivered in semiliterate exclamatory style via Twitter, at a time when most sane people were in

Was Trump a multibillionaire, as he flamboyantly claimed? Or was he in fact broke and overleveraged, owing large sums of money to banks abroad?

The other lead was more solid. We had documentary evidence that high-ranking Russian bureaucrats and well-connected insiders had laundered $20 billion.

“You need to look at the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals that Trump did. Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” Steele told us.

During the primaries, conservative website The Washington Free Beacon commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump.

Steele put out his Trump-Russia query. He waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing, “hair-raising.” As he told friends, “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.”

Comey had the thankless job of briefing President-elect Trump. Trump, it was clear, would dismiss the dossier as a piece of trash. This strategy was problematic for various reasons and would look increasingly ridiculous in the months ahead. For example, Trump’s team had indeed met with Russians in the run-up to the vote, as Steele’s sources had alleged and GCHQ and others had detected.

According to an “associate,” Sechin was so keen to lift personal and corporate Western sanctions that he offered Page an unusual bribe. This was “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return.” In other words, a chunk of Rosneft was being sold off.

There was also a stick. The stick was flourished during Page’s alleged second meeting, with Diveykin. The official reportedly told Page that the Kremlin had assembled a dossier of compromising material on Clinton and might possibly give it to Trump’s campaign. However, according to Steele, Diveykin also delivered an ominous warning. He hinted—or even “indicated more strongly”—that the Russian leadership had damaging material on Trump, too. Trump “should bear this in mind” in his dealings with Moscow, Diveykin said. This was blackmail, clear and simple.

Putin and Trump were united in their repudiation of Steele’s work. They were using the same phrases, the same angry rhetoric, the same nyet—as if a baton were being passed from New York to Moscow and back again to New York.

Behind the scenes the FBI was establishing that much of the Steele dossier was true. At several key moments it was uncannily accurate.