By Chuck Ross
Daily Caller News Foundation
Christopher Steele provided the FBI with details about a
longtime Clinton associate’s efforts to track down a purported
sex tape of Donald Trump in Russia, according to newly declassified
FBI documents.
Steele, a former British spy, told FBI agents in September 2017
that
Cody Shearer, the Clinton crony, met in Istanbul and New York
with a source who claimed to have ties to Russian intelligence.
Shearer and his source were “actively discussing” a deal for
the purported tape of Trump, according to Steele.
Shearer, a former journalist who has long been connected to the
Clintons, compiled a dossier that contained allegations about Trump
that are similar to those in a dossier that Steele himself wrote on
behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.
Both dossiers contained the uncorroborated allegation that
Russian intelligence operatives filmed Trump with Russian
prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013.
While details of Steele’s work have spilled into public view
over the past several years, far less was known about Shearer’s
dossier.
And while it has also been revealed that Steele was paid
$170,000 by a law firm for Democrats to investigate Trump, it is
unclear whether Shearer was paid for his work.
Steele, a former MI6 officer, obtained Shearer’s dossier from
Jonathan Winer, a longtime adviser to John Kerry who was an
official at the State Department until the end of the Obama
administration. Sidney Blumenthal, another longtime Clinton
insider, had given the document to Winer.
Steele in turn provided Shearer’s dossier to the FBI on Oct.
19, 2016. At the time, Steele was providing the FBI with
information about Trump as part of the bureau’s investigation
into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian
government.
In his dossier, Shearer discusses information he said he
received from a man who claimed to have links to Russia’s foreign
intelligence service, the FSB. The dossier, which is made up of two
memos, does not identify the purported Russian spy or the Turkish
businessman who connected him to Shearer.
Steele provided their names to the FBI, saying that he obtained
the information from Winer.
“SHEARER is also friends with a Turkish-American businessman
with the last name KHAN. KHAN was in touch with RUSLAN MANSIMOV,
aka ASLAN TURAN, aka ASLAN TURANCI,” read the FBI notes, which
were
first published by Just the News.
The FBI document is part of a batch of records that President
Trump declassified as one of his final acts in office.
Steele told the FBI agents that Shearer’s intermediary, Khan,
brokered contact between Shearer and Mansimov in New York and
Istanbul.
Steele also said during the interview that Mansimov had recently
reconnected with Khan and “was offering to provide tapes of
President TRUMP.”
“At least one of those tapes was related to the Miss Universe
event and involved urine,” the FBI notes say.
Steele said that Khan brokered contact between Shearer and
Mansimov. They were both “actively discussing a deal for the
tapes,” the note say.
“SHEARER and MANSIMOV met in Istanbul and are considering an
upcoming meeting in Spain within the coming weeks,” read the
notes, which also say that Mansimov sought “money and good
standing.”
Steele said he was skeptical of Shearer’s information even
though it closely matched the salacious scene from his own dossier.
He said that one “plus” of the Shearer documents were that the
allegation about Trump in Moscow “chimed” with the allegations
in his own dossier.
Steele reported in a now-infamous June 20, 2016, memo that
Russian intelligence had filmed Trump in a Moscow hotel room with
prostitutes who were urinating on each other. Steele also alleged
that the Kremlin was blackmailing Trump with the tape.
Steele alleged in later memos that the Trump campaign was
engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with
the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.
Steele’s conspiracy allegation has since been debunked, and
his claim about the so-called “pee tape” remains
uncorroborated. The special counsel’s office found no evidence
that the Trump campaign conspired with Russians to influence the
2016 election.
Steele relied on a single source, a Russia analyst named
Igor Danchenko, to collect information for the Trump dossier.
Danchenko acknowledged in interviews with the FBI in January 2017
that he did not independently verify the most serious allegations
in the dossier.
Danchenko claimed he provided Steele with information he
collected from six individuals, most of whom live in Russia. One of
Danchenko’s most prolific sources, a former journalist named
Olga Galkina, has been accused of fabricating evidence in the
dossier about her former employer, Aleksej Gubarev. One source who
worked with Galkina told The Daily Caller News Foundation that she
concocted information about Gubarev that was in the dossier.
Galkina was also the source for Steele’s allegation in the
dossier that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague in
August 2016 to meet with Kremlin insiders to discuss paying off
hackers. The special counsel’s report said that Cohen never
visited Prague.
Steele told his FBI interviewers that he questioned the veracity
of some of Shearer’s dossier because of Mansimov’s
reputation.
“The ‘minus’ of the reporting was the fact that MANSIMOV
was, according to STEELE, neither the most sophisticated nor
impressive person,” the FBI notes say.
Steele said that he wanted to keep Shearer’s operation “at
an arms length,” and that he was not certain whether the
information Shearer had collected was legitimate, fabricated or
part of a set-up.
“STEELE opined that SHEARER was not acting discreetly. STEELE
said that the media was ‘sniffing’ around MANSIMOV,” the
notes say.
Little is publicly known about Mansimov. Turkish
news
outlets reported in the 2000s about a scandal involving
Mansimov and a Turkish energy company. Mansimov also allegedly paid
bribes to gain citizenship in Turkey.
One person who was briefed on the Shearer memos during the 2016
campaign told The Daily Caller News Foundation in 2018 that they
viewed the allegations as a “rope-a-dope” scheme “where the
FSB throws this stuff out there, sucks people in, tries to get
money.”
A U.S. official who was told about Shearer’s memos in August
2016 told the DCNF that they were viewed skeptically because
Shearer considered “not a guy with a whole lot of
credibility.”
“The whole thing stinks,” the official said.
No tapes of Trump have ever surfaced. Shearer denied to the DCNF
in 2018, before reports of his dossier surfaced, that he had any
connection to the Steele dossier.
An FBI spreadsheet that analyzed allegations from both the
Steele and Shearer dossiers made reference to the sex tape.
The spreadsheet said that on Jan. 14, 2017, four days after the
Steele dossier was made public, a confidential human source for the
FBI reported that a person was willing to defect to the U.S.
The person “claimed to have compromising tapes on President
Donald Trump,” the spreadsheet says.
Shearer did not respond to a request for comment. Winer has not
responded to multiple requests for comment.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News
Foundation.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation
is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can
provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our
original content, please contact
[email protected].
The post
2nd ‘dossier’ was in the works, declassified FBI documents
confirm appeared first on WND.
