Yulia Latynina: Christopher Steele's Trump dossier is completely fake

Recently The New York Times has written that in the period from 2014 to 2016 the FBI and the US Justice Department tried to establish cooperation with 5-6 richest Russians with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In particular, they tried to make Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska their informant, offering him assistance in obtaining a US visa and solving legal problems in exchange for the information about Russian organized crime and possible Russian involvement in the Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. According to the newspaper, Briton Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Trump-Russia dossier, and an employee of the US Justice Department Bruce Ohr took part in these attempts to «recruit» Deripaska. In her new column for The Business Courier a journalist Yulia Latynina writes why these attempts proved unsuccessful and shares her opinion on the Steele dossier. 

I’ll begin by saying that it happened a long time ago and all rich Russians naturally told spies to get lost.

To be honest, I don’t think that Western intelligence workers are that much different from their Russian counterparts. I’m thinking of the example of Christopher Steele who wrote a completely fake dossier about Trump. Hi did it in two weeks because, as we now know, he got the order at the beginning of June, baked up the first memo on June 20 and managed to bring his creation to the FBI on July 5 already. In this dossier he, apart from everything else, told us about prostitutes who pissed on themselves to desecrate the bed on which Obamas slept. More than two years have passed since then, but during all this time neither FBI with its staff numbering several thousand people, neither CIA with a similar number of workers and a total budget of about 30 billion dollars couldn’t repeat this amazing intelligence feat of Mister Steele who cobbled his dossier together for 168 thousand dollars.

If this person really headed the Russia section before leaving MI-6, this leads to the most wicked suspicions that all intelligence services in the world are the same, that those who work there aren’t like James Bonds, the way they’re shown on TV, but more like Khlestakovs.

Suffice to remember that the whole story of Deripaska’s recruitment is also directly related to Christopher Steele. Steele claimed to have agents everywhere, except maybe among archangels, including inside the Russian Foreign Ministry, Kremlin, FSB, around Sechin and in the President’s administration. And all these sources are high-ranking. However, when Steele along with his friend Bruce Ohr approached Deripaska, Deripaska immediately showed them the door, laughing. Steele approached Deripaska only because the latter had hired some lawyers in London who in their turn hired Steele’s little firm to clean up Deripaska’s reputation. But instead of doing that, this ostensibly great Steele took advantage of the situation to befriend some of the Deripaska’s lawyers and start blackmailing his de facto employer.

So although the Western intelligence services don’t kill people, and that’s a huge difference between our countries, when it comes to professionalism, I tend to think that they haven’t come very far from each other. That’s why nobody should have any business with them, be they from the West or the East, because all these people see the world as one huge scam, and any contact with them would be interpreted as an opportunity to milk you and set you up. Who needs it? Any Russian oligarch knows that very well. That’s why they tell all spies to get lost.

The information on attempts to recruit Russian was published precisely for the sake of covering for Steele who looks increasingly ludicrous in this whole story and to somehow explain that his friendship with the officials from the US Justice Department was an innocent thing. Nobody, except for Democrats, has any illusions about Steele. It’s horrible to imagine what such a person would do if he worked for the GRU. And if Petrov and Boshirov worked for the MI-6, they’d probably write a Trump dossier. Countries are different, but people are absolutely the same – it’s the same psychology on both sides.

The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of The Business Courier