The Steele dossier author promises more Trump dirt. Will anyone buy it?

The phrase is borrowed from Steele’s nemesis, Donald Trump, who was the subject of the former British intelligence officer’s famous — or infamous, depending on where you sit — dossier alleging that the Russians were interfering in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, had contact with Trump’s campaign and may have scandalous material that could be used to manipulate him.

Steele tried mightily, and with only minimal success, to get the news media to chase leads from the dossier, which he surreptitiously fed to select reporters in hopes they would publish blockbusters before the 2016 presidential election. The dossier was eventually leaked — Steele says without his permission — to BuzzFeed News, which published it in January 2017, shortly before Trump took office after defeating former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

A firestorm ensued. Steele’s authorship of memos that collectively became known as “the Steele dossier” was soon revealed. He went into hiding. The news media and eventually congressional investigators set about picking apart the dossier, which Steele compiled through his private research and intelligence company, Orbis Business Intelligence, while he was working for a D.C.-based company under contract with a law firm connected to the Clinton campaign.

Steele’s name became forever associated with an alleged sex tape, the dossier’s most salacious allegation, which involved the Russians possibly holding blackmail video of Trump engaged in a kinky and less-than-sanitary sex act with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel. Trump, noting that he is a germaphobe, made great use of the never-proven allegation to undercut the credibility of the entire dossier and to distract from its core theme — later widely accepted by the news media and the U.S. intelligence community — that the Russians interfered in the election in hopes of helping Trump win.

Given the general mockery of the sex tape claim and the fact that no proof of it has emerged in the seven years since the dossier was made public, I asked Steele whether he would include it if he were writing the original dossier today.

“Call me a stick in the mud,” he said via Zoom from his London offices, “but probably, yes.”

Until his book rollout, Steele had largely disappeared from the spotlight, resurfacing only occasionally for interviews. He may have quietly faded into history, one figure among many in the crowded annals of Trump-era scandals — and a tarnished one at that, because his dossier is often referred to as discredited. But the publication of his book — especially smack in the October-surprise season, less than one month from an election that will determine whether Trump returns to office — once again brings into the light the things he says he has learned in the shadows. The question is whether anyone believes him anymore — or whether they ever did.

The book, part score-settling memoir and part global threat analysis, at times reads like a Steele Dossier 2.0. He says he uncovered the new tidbits while working for unnamed wealthy individuals in the 2020 campaign cycle and other stuff he dug up while working for corporate clients after Trump was defeated in 2020 by Joe Biden. Without going into any of the sometimes baroque details — after all, the new material is unverified — it generally has to do with similar themes of Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, nefariously contemplating schemes large and small to get Trump elected in 2020 and in the current campaign.

In the book, Steele predicts a “new world disorder” if Trump wins back the presidency in November, and portrays him as more dangerous than U.S. adversaries such as China and Iran. He calls the Republican Party and the former president who dominates it “the gravest threat to Western democracy and the rule of law … increasingly the willing handmaidens for Putin.”

Even before the book’s release, the Trump campaign has been dismissive of it.

“Any new information by this foreign agent who peddled the debunked Steele dossier should be wholly dismissed, and any media outlet that entertains anything he has to say is just the continuation of election interference intended to meddle in the campaign,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in response to The Washington Post’s request for comment.

In carefully phrased passages in “Unredacted,” Steele defends his frequently disparaged original dossier, particularly as it pertains to Trump, saying he still thinks that the “original intelligence was obtained from credible sources” and that the claims have not been disproved in court. He also doesn’t disavow one of the dossier’s best known allegations about Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, traveling to Prague to meet with Kremlin officials before the 2016 election. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation cast doubt upon the claim; Cohen repeatedly and vigorously denied it.

What may have been lost in all the hubbub about the original dossier is that it was an intelligence report for a private client, the sort of thing that investigators put together without vouching for every detail. Steele points out in “Unredacted” that even good intelligence reports tend to be not much more than 70 percent accurate.

Of course, there’s a big difference between an eyes-only intelligence report for a government or private sector client and a 300-plus-page book released by a major publisher that includes new allegations about a major party candidate before an election. In a sense, Steele has done an end run around all those persnickety journalists from major news organizations who insisted on such old-fashioned conventions as confirming information before publishing it back in 2016.

Steele says he has weighed the risks — including the risk of harm to Trump — and concluded that it’s in the public interest to publish, even “if the allegations I reference in the work are untrue.”

Steele, 6o, was born in Aden in what is now Yemen, the son of a civilian weather forecaster attached to the British Ministry of Defense. In telling his own story, Steele — who worked with a ghostwriter he declined to identify — leans heavily into metaphor plainly intended to portray himself as a danger-loving guy (he thrilled as a youth at the risk of slipping and falling on seaside rocks) who is also intent on sounding alarms to protect the citizenry.

After his family returned to England, he was a choirboy in a suburb about 35 miles west of London who became adept at ringing church bells and “loved making such a loud noise.” Though some might think church bells are about musical harmony, he informs readers that their original purpose was “to communicate important and often urgent news to the local population.”

He attributes his close “personal and emotional” attachment to the United States by discussing — for the first time, he says — his American uncle, who had met Steele’s aunt while serving in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division before D-Day. Steele went to Cambridge and eventually was recruited to join the British intelligence services, which posted him in Moscow at the age of 25 and later promoted him to head its Russia desk.

He has beefs about British intelligence — about “people in government who knew nothing about intelligence or even, frankly, much about Russia” — telling him what to do. He is equally perturbed years later about what he perceives as the tardiness of U.S. intelligence agencies to recognize threats posed by Russia to the U.S. electoral process.

While he was thinking of leaving the intelligence services to start his own firm, he writes that he met Trump’s daughter Ivanka at a dinner. Like many businesspeople, she was exploring opportunities in Russia. In 2010, a year after going into the private sector, he met with her at Trump Tower, the heart of the business empire of the man who would become the target of his investigative work, and discussed the sorts of services his firm offered. Steele recalls Donald Trump Jr. popping in during their chat and letting Steele hold his baby for a few moments. Years later, when Steele’s dossier became public, his critics suggested that it was all about a vendetta because he never got hired by the Trumps — a charge he denies.

The dossier that brought notoriety to Steele was born from a call in the spring of 2016 from Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who operates the D.C.-based Fusion GPS, an investigative outfit that was digging into Trump for the law firm of the general counsel of Clinton’s campaign.

Steele was already working for a client on a project in the Trump orbit, delving into the finances of Paul Manafort, who would become Trump’s campaign manager. As hard as it might be for a layperson to swallow, both Simpson — who has written his own book about the dossier — and Steele have said Steele didn’t ask and wasn’t told that the Clinton campaign was the ultimate client. But Steele says it seemed obvious to him that the work was related to the Democratic Party and the presidential campaign.

Soon, Steele was at it, and his prized source — a “collector” in his parlance — was contacting him with what the man called some “pretty hot stuff.” (That source, Igor Danchenko, was acquitted in a Virginia federal court of lying to the FBI in a case stemming from a special counsel inquiry into the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign.)

When Steele was preparing the memos that would become known as the Steele dossier, his business partner, former British intelligence officer Chris Burrows, and his wife warned him not to include “the most embarrassing bits.”

The most potentially embarrassing bit being, of course, the supposed Moscow sex tape. I asked him why he did it anyway.

“We know it happens. Anyone who knows Russia and Russian counterintelligence knows about honey traps and about the filming of things in hotel rooms and hookers, and all the rest of it is just part of — part of the scene in Russia,” he said. “And so the actual thing itself is entirely credible. The truth of it would have to be built up through … careful investigation, which is difficult now. It was slightly easier back then. And, as I say, we didn’t just take one source’s word for it. We interviewed other people that we felt might have knowledge of it.”

Once he had a draft of the dossier, he went to great lengths to persuade prominent reporters to do their own reporting and to get U.S. law enforcement interested. He and Simpson rented a room at the Tabard Inn in Washington and invited reporters — at staggered times, to ensure that the journalists didn’t bump into one another — for briefings on some of the findings in the dossier. He also went to The Post to do the same with a team of seasoned reporters.

He didn’t get much out of those meetings or subsequent talks with journalists — merely stories in Yahoo News and Mother Jones by well-known and experienced reporters that received little attention.

He was also frustrated by efforts to get the FBI — which he says had paid him for investigative work by sending agents with bags of cash to his office — or the U.S. State Department to jump on his leads. (In our interview, he asserted that he’s still owed $50,000 by the FBI for work related to Trump, which he never expects to receive because the agency has cut ties with him.) An FBI spokesperson declined to comment.

After the eventual publication of his full dossier, Steele says his blood pressure spiked. In numerous conversations, his friend Mark Medish — an international strategy consultant and former White House National Security Council official — advised him to stick to the themes of Russian election interference in the aftermath of the leak rather than attempt to defend every claim in the dossier.

“His instinct is to do the latter,” Medish said in an interview. “I chalk it up to him being a fighter.”

Steele and the target of his sleuthing have gripes about the news media: Steele because he thinks journalists did not — and continue to not — do enough research into Russia’s interference in U.S. affairs; Trump because he thinks the news media did too much with the dossier.

“The media gave it breathless airtime and print space because they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesman, said in an email. “This was election interference in every sense of the word and the media colluded with Democrats and partisans who made an entire cottage industry of talking about this fake dossier.”

Steele’s friends, among themselves, lament his decision to write a book and once again subject himself to criticism from Trump allies and the glare of skeptical journalists, according to a friend who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

But Steele was determined to do so, even though he told me that he wouldn’t be surprised if Trump sued him — again. (In February, a U.K. court threw out a lawsuit Trump filed against Steele, who says the former president has yet to pay him a judgment of more than $300,000 ordered in the case.) A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

In our interview, Steele said he hopes his book will serve as a warning about Trump and address what he considers failures and gaps in investigations by the government and the news media before the 2016 election. That includes his hope for more inquiries about the purported sex tape, which he still thinks might exist.

“I think it’s just not really been properly bottomed out,” he said. “Excuse the pun.”

At one point in our conversation, the room went dark for a moment, and Steele’s face disappeared.

“Occasionally the lights go out,” he said. “Both physically and metaphorically, probably.”