A day after Donald Trump held a press conference to decry Buzzfeed’s reporting, spout nonsensically about how he doesn’t do treason, and claim that he wouldn’t take part in a golden shower party because he’s a germaphobe, the Wall Street Journal has reported the identity of the British spy who helped compile the explosive dossier.
Christopher Steele is the 52-year-old owner of a London-based private security company, but he previously served in MI6, posing as a diplomat in Russia and Paris. The English FA hired Steele’s private security firm to investigate FIFA corruption while it was still in the running to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cups. England was unsuccessful in its attempts to delegitimize Russia or Qatar’s bids, but in the summer of 2010, Steele reportedly supplied the FBI with information about the widespread corruption within FIFA.
According to Reuters, the FBI came to him in 2010 and the information he supplied helped spur on the FBI’s investigation:
Emails seen by Reuters indicate that, in the summer of 2010, members of a New York-based FBI squad assigned to investigate “Eurasian Organized Crime” met Steele in London to discuss allegations of possible corruption in FIFA, the Zurich, Switzerland-based body that also organizes the World Cup tournament.
That investigation ultimately toppled comically corrupt former FIFA chief Sepp Blatter and also revealed widespread corruption in the soccer world; American officials, it appears, take Steele’s latest dossier seriously because he previously helped them out. Two senior national security officials wrote in a CNN op-ed that they’d known Steele for 20 years and that people should not “question his integrity, excellence, and diligence in intelligence work.”
However this affects your estimate of the likelihood that Trump employed prostitutes to pee on a bed the Obamas slept in, we should all be able to agree that Steele sounds like a hero.