US intelligence officials told the incoming president in a classified briefing last week that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information on President-elect Donald Trump,according to CNN.
The intelligence officials gleaned their information from a former British intelligence operative who provided the FBI with a series of memos in August 2016 detailing how Russia has tried to cultivate Trump for at least five years.
The British spy’s findings — which were apparently based on conversations he had had with Russian intelligence sources — were summarized in a two-page synopsis that was appended to the US intelligence agency’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, CNN said.
Only President Barack Obama, Trump, and top lawmakers received the version of the report with a summary of the British operative’s memos.
The operative collected the information from Russian intelligence sources while he was doing opposition research for a project financed by anti-Trump Republicans. The information that the operative collected indicated that Russia had compromising information both Trump and Clinton but chose to release information that was potentially damaging only to the Clinton campaign.
CNN said it is working to confirm the details contained in the memos composed by the unidentified British operative, who is apparently considered trustworthy by US intelligence officials.
But BuzzFeed, which noted that the memos have been circulating around Washington for months, published the full dossier on Tuesday night “so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.”
Mother Jones cited the dossier in a report on the alleged Trump-Russia connection in October.
The memos claim that the Trump campaign and the Kremlin had established an “exchange of information” of “mutual benefit,” and that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him.”
“Russians apparently have promised not to use ‘kompromat’ they hold on Trump as leverage, given high levels of voluntary cooperation forthcoming from his team,” the memo states, noting that the Kremlin has “been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.”
“Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance,” it says.
In October, Nevada Senator Harry Reid wrote an open letter to FBI Director James Comey calling on him to release the “explosive information” he possesses about the “close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States.”
Reid’s spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that Reid had seen the documents before writing the letter.
When asked about reports that Trump’s campaign had contact with Russia during the election, Comey told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday that he could “not comment in an open forum” on whether his agency is pursuing an investigation into the alleged ties.
Carl Bernstein, who contributed reporting to CNN’s story on the British spy’s revelations, tweeted in December that it is “essential for citizens/Congress to know holdings and debts and partners in Russia (especially) of Donald Trump and his companies.”
Trump said frequently during the campaign that he supported mending ties with Russia. Recently, he said that the US intelligence community should “move on” from its focus on the hacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.
As reported by Business Insider