British spy chiefs were told about Steele dossier before Trump was briefed

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Yes, it was a conspiracy

The leaders of MI5 and MI6, the United Kingdom’s top intelligence agencies, were briefed about British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier shortly after 2016 election, learning about its salacious and unverified claims about President-elect Trump’s ties to Russia before the incoming commander in chief was told about them, according to a new report.

Sources told the Telegraph that Steele, an MI6 officer from 1987 until 2009 and former head of the MI6’s Russia desk, met with Charles Farr, also a former MI6 officer and then the chairman of the U.K.’s Joint Intelligence Committee, after Trump won the presidency. Farr died in February of this year.

Steele is said to have briefed Farr at least twice — in mid-November and late-November 2016 — telling him about the research he’d compiled in his dossier. The first meeting was at Farr’s Wimbledon home in South London a week after Trump won and the second meeting was roughly 10 days later.

The material was treated so seriously that Farr quickly passed it up the chain of command. Both Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, as well as Alex Younger, the chief of MI6, were briefed on the contents of the dossier sometime around late November. Sources told the Telegraph that the dossier material was “marked up to the top” but that Prime Minister Theresa May herself was not briefed on it.

Concerned about national security, Steele told friends, “We did our duty,” in passing along his research.

If the highest reaches of British intelligence were indeed aware of the dossier’s contents by late November 2016, that means they knew about it more than a month before Trump was told about some of the most salacious claims in the dossier by then-FBI Director James Comey during a meeting at Trump Tower in New York City.

 

More at the Washington Examiner

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Seems those with this information were careful not let anyone that might sense political peril in pursuing false information and may council verifying it before using it for maximum effect.