# Christopher Steele Former British intelligence officer — twenty-two years in [[MI6]], the last three running its Russia desk — who in 2016, as a private investigator, wrote the [[Steele Dossier]] on Donald Trump's ties to Russia. No single document did more to shape both sides of the Trump–Russia fight: for Trump's opponents it was an early warning that turned out right in its broad strokes; for Trump's defenders it is the founding forgery of the "Russia hoax," and its author the proof that the investigation was a political operation. ## MI6 (1987–2009) Born in Aden, Yemen, in 1964, Steele read social and political sciences at Cambridge and was president of the Cambridge Union. MI6 recruited him on graduation. He served under diplomatic cover in Moscow from 1990 to 1993, as the Soviet Union collapsed, then in Paris, and from 2006 to 2009 headed the service's Russia desk. In 2006 he was the case officer for the investigation into the poisoning of [[Alexander Litvinenko]] — the first time the service had to work out, in London, how the Kremlin kills. ## Orbis (2009– ) In March 2009 he co-founded **Orbis Business Intelligence**, a London corporate-intelligence firm, with fellow MI6 veteran Chris Burrows. Its early work included research on corruption in FIFA in 2010, which brought him into contact with the [[FBI]]; he became a confidential source for the Bureau, and between 2014 and 2016 helped an FBI effort to cultivate the Russian oligarch [[Oleg Deripaska]]. ## The dossier (2016) In June 2016 [[Fusion GPS]], then being paid through the law firm [[Perkins Coie]] on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, hired Orbis to investigate Trump's Russian connections. Fusion's earlier Trump research had been funded by the [[Washington Free Beacon]] during the primaries, but Steele's work came only in the Democratic-funded phase. Over the next six months he produced 17 memos — the [[Steele Dossier]]. | Date | Event | |---|---| | July 5, 2016 | Hands his first report to FBI agent Michael Gaeta in London | | Sept–Oct 2016 | Briefs journalists; on Oct 31, *Mother Jones* publishes the first public account of the dossier's claims | | Nov 2016 | The FBI formally closes him as a confidential source for talking to the press | | Jan 10, 2017 | BuzzFeed publishes the dossier | | Jan 11, 2017 | *The Wall Street Journal* names him as the author; he goes into hiding | | Jan 2018 | Sens. [[Chuck Grassley]] and [[Lindsey Graham]] refer him to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation over his statements to the FBI; no charges followed | | June 2019 | Interviewed for 16 hours by the Justice Department's inspector general, who found his account "sufficiently credible" | | Dec 9, 2019 | The inspector general's report finds the dossier played a "central and essential role" in the FBI's surveillance applications on [[Carter Page]] — and that those applications contained 17 significant errors and omissions | ## After the dossier **Lawsuits.** Russian and Trump-world figures sued him in London with mixed results. In July 2020 the High Court ordered Orbis to pay £18,000 each to [[Alfa Bank]] owners Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman under data-protection law for inaccurate claims about them; later that year a Russian technology executive, Aleksej Gubarev, lost his libel case because Steele had not caused BuzzFeed's publication. Trump himself sued Orbis in London; on **February 1, 2024** the High Court threw the case out as "bound to fail" — the claim was filed too late and the dossier was never meant for publication — and ordered Trump to pay about **£300,000** in costs. **Standing by it.** In an October 2021 ABC interview, his first on camera, he defended the dossier's thrust, including the claims about [[Michael Cohen]] in Prague and the "kompromat" tape that investigators never corroborated. His 2024 memoir, *Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy*, repeats and extends those arguments. In February 2026, after the U.S. release of the Epstein files, he told LBC that [[Jeffrey Epstein]] had been "recruited by Russian organised criminals" and that it was "quite likely, although I suspect that some of these files have been destroyed," that they held compromising material on Trump. ## How to read him The record supports three statements at once. Steele was a serious Russia professional whose central warning — that the Kremlin was working to elect Trump and cultivating people around him — was confirmed by U.S. intelligence, the Mueller investigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee. His specific allegations, gathered secondhand through a single main collector ([[Igor Danchenko]]), were largely never corroborated, and some were wrong. And he has kept defending the uncorroborated ones long after investigators moved on — which is why the right can use his name as shorthand for the whole Russia inquiry, and why the [[Grand Conspiracy Probe]] of 2025–26 treats the dossier as its origin story. ## See Also - [[Steele Dossier]] · [[Igor Danchenko]] · [[Fusion GPS]] · [[Glenn Simpson]] - [[Crossfire Hurricane]] · [[Carter Page]] · [[FISA Court]] · [[Release the Memo]] - [[MI6]] · [[Alexander Litvinenko]] · [[Oleg Deripaska]] - [[Grand Conspiracy Probe]] · [[Trump-Russia Arc Timeline]]