Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's frustration as FBI sat on Donald Trump Russia file for months: Steele was so concerned by revelations he worked without payment after Trump's election victory in November

It's coming out now due to a sequence of events occurring in the past few days.

Basically, a lot of organizations—e.g., various media outlets, the FBI—had this dossier. Mother Jones mentioned it back in October, but the article didn't get much coverage, and they didn't push the issue. No other media outlet wanted to report on it because the information is largely unverified. Maybe that's because it's totally false, maybe that's just because the nature of it makes it hard to verify (it's probably hard to get in touch with a bunch of shadowy people that an ex-spy knows). Whatever the case, no one wanted to risk reporting on it, because if it turned out to be false, their reputations would be dragged through the mud and they might have legal repercussions to boot. So the media outlets were probably trying, mostly or entirely in vain, to verify the information.

(What the FBI was doing with it is unknown. Maybe they were also trying to verify it. Maybe it was being covered up, like Steele thought. At this point, who knows?)

Anyway, this document is floating around, but no one can verify the information. However, at some point, the CIA gets wind of it. And a week or so ago, they thought it was important enough to include in an intelligence brief for Obama and Trump. Doesn't mean they verified it, of course, but they at least thought that the President and President-Elect should know about it. Maybe that means the CIA thinks its credible, or maybe they just want to let POTUS and PEOTUS know that it exists.

Somehow, CNN learns that this dossier was included in the intelligence brief. So they report on that. BuzzFeed jumps the gun and publishes the entire dossier. That got the ball rolling on the events of the past few days.

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - independent.co.uk