WaPo | Steele told associates that he was so nervous about the explosive
nature of the information that he sent the memo via a commercial courier
to Washington, rather than electronically.
In short order,
Steele made another fateful decision: that he needed to confide in U.S.
law enforcement officials. He contacted a Rome-based FBI official with
whom he had worked on the FIFA case and asked him to visit him in London
in July, according to people familiar with the matter.
Steele
told Simpson of his plan to meet with the FBI, describing it as an
obligation rooted in his past work for the British government.
“ ‘I’m
a former intelligence officer, and we’re your closest ally,’ ” Steele
told Simpson, according to testimony Simpson later gave to the House
Intelligence Committee. “ ‘You know, I have obligations, professional
obligations. If there’s a national security emergency or possible
national security issue, I should report it.’ ”
Simpson said he
did not question Steele’s judgment: “He’s the spy,” Simpson said. “I’m
the ex-journalist.” Simpson declined to comment to The Post.
On
July 5, 2016, the Rome-based FBI agent met with Steele and Burrows in
Orbis’s London offices, housed in a five-story Georgian-style building
in the Victoria neighborhood.
Later that month, Steele reached
out to a State Department contact in Washington, according to Nuland,
who said officials decided his allegations were best left to the FBI.
In
late July, Steele told friends he was rattled when WikiLeaks released
thousands of internal Democratic National Committee emails on the eve of
the Democratic National Convention, material that U.S. law enforcement
officials said was hacked by Russia. Then Trump — who had repeatedly
praised Putin on the campaign trail — publicly called on Russia to hack
and release a cache of missing Clinton emails.
Steele, who had
researched Russian attempts to interfere in European elections for
another client, began to fear that the Americans were not taking the
Kremlin’s efforts seriously enough, associates said.
In the
early fall, he and Burrows turned to Dearlove, their former MI6 boss,
for advice. Sitting in winged chairs at the Garrick Club, one of
London’s most venerable private establishments, under oil paintings of
famed British playwrights, the two men shared their worries about what
was happening in the United States. They asked for his guidance about
how to handle their obligations to their client and the public, Dearlove
recalled.
Dearlove said their situation reminded him of a
predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for
British intelligence in Washington and alerted U.S. authorities to
British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in
communication with the Kremlin.
He said he advised Steele and
Burrows to work discreetly with a top British government official to
pass along information to the FBI.
At the time of the meeting, Dearlove said he did not know whether Steele had approached the FBI.
Burrows declined to comment.
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