An associate of late Arizona Sen. John McCain described in detail his contacts with a dozen journalists and several government officials regarding the infamous Steele dossier, according to a transcript of a court deposition unsealed Thursday.
David Kramer, a former State Department official, said in a deposition on Dec. 13, 2017 that he provided a copy of Christopher Steele’s dossier to reporters from McClatchy, NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed and CNN’s Carl Bernstein.
He also shared the report with State Department official Victoria Nuland, Obama National Security Counsel official Celeste Wallander and Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
Kramer’s deposition sheds new light on the campaign by Steele and his employer, Fusion GPS, to disseminate the dossier to the press and government officials.
In the deposition, Kramer suggests that Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson sought to use him and McCain as conduits to pass the dossier to the FBI.
Sir Andrew Wood, a former British diplomat, first briefed Kramer and McCain in November 2016 on the dossier, authored by Steele. Kramer flew to London on Nov. 29, 2016 to meet with Steele. The next day, in the U.S., he obtained a copy of the dossier from Simpson. On Dec. 9, 2016, McCain briefed then-FBI Director James Comey on the salacious report.
Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson listens as his lawyer, Joshua Levy, speaks to members of the media following a meeting with members of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committee in the Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill on Oct. 16, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)
Kramer said he believed McCain was sought out in order to provide more “oomph” in terms of attracting the FBI’s attention.
“I think they felt a senior Republican was better to be the recipient of this rather than a Democrat because if it were a Democrat, I think that the view was that it would have been dismissed as a political attack,” said Kramer.
In some cases, according to the deposition, Kramer shared the dossier with reporters with Steele’s and Simpson’s knowledge.
Kramer said Steele asked him to meet with CNN’s Bernstein and BuzzFeed’s Ken Bensinger.
BuzzFeed published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017. The website made the controversial decision hours after CNN, in a story co-authored by Bernstein, reported that then-President-elect Donald Trump had been briefed on the salacious allegations in the dossier on Jan. 6, 2017.
“I met with Mr. Bernstein at Mr. Steele’s request. And I believe Mr. Bernstein had been in touch with Mr. Steele and so Mr. Steele asked me if I would meet with him and talk with him about it. Since Bernstein was in the U.S. and Steele was in London,” said Kramer, who was an executive at the McCain Institute.
He said he met with Bernstein on Jan. 3 or Jan. 4, 2017.
Kramer said he also met Mother Jones’s David Corn, The Guardian’s Julian Borger, and Washington Post reporters Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman. Kramer also said that ABC News’s Brian Ross showed him a copy of some of Steele’s memos.
Kramer’s contact at McClatchy was Peter Stone, a reporter who worked on two debunked stories about former Trump attorney Michael Cohen that are based on allegations from Steele’s dossier.
Kramer said that two of the reporters, Corn and Borger, appeared to have inside knowledge about McCain’s plans to meet with Comey regarding the dossier.
Fusion GPS attempted to plant the dossier with various news outlets prior to the 2016 election. Simpson, Fusion’s founder, met with New York Times reporters, as well as Yahoo! News reporter Michael Isikoff. Corn and Isikoff were the only two reporters to publish stories before the election sourced directly to Steele’s reports.
