Christopher Steele, the former head of the MI6 Russia desk who authored a controversial opposition research report on Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election, has offered a pointed message to the disgraced former US president ahead of his possible indictment by a New York City grand jury.
In a video posted to Twitter, investigative journalist and ex-BBC presenter John Sweeney revealed that he’d run into Mr Steele, who served the Secret Intelligence Service under diplomatic cover in Moscow from 1990 to 1993 and later investigated the fatal poisoning of ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvenenko in London.
The former spy’s research into Mr Trump, which the ex-president’s supporters falsely claim jumpstarted the long-running FBI probe into ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government, made him such a hate object among the American right that Mr Steele has said he cannot travel to the US out of concern for his own safety.
With Mr Trump poised to be the first American ex-president to face criminal charges, Mr Steele said he had a message for Mr Trump.
“Do f*** off,” he said.
Mr Steele, who left MI6 in 2009, was running a private business intelligence service in 2015 when he was contracted to conduct opposition research on Mr Trump for a number of GOP primary candidates and a right-wing news outlet, the Washington Free Beacon.
He later resumed the project under contract for a law firm retained by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, producing what later became known as the “Steele Dossier”.
The salacious document, which later made its way to the FBI and was published by Buzzfeed News, leveled wild allegations about Mr Trump having been cultivated by Soviet intelligence since the 1980s, and suggested that Mr Trump was susceptible to blackmail by Russian intelligence services.
