The five most interesting claims in the Donald Trump dossier

Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled the notorious dossier that included allegations of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russia, says he believes that between 70% and 90% of the information in the 35-page document of memos is true.

In the book Collusion: How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, by The Guardian journalist Luke Harding, the former MI6 agent is quoted as telling friends he thinks the dossier will be vindicated and that his reports were based on sources cultivated in more than 30 years of working in the intelligence community, The Guardian reports.

“I’ve been dealing with this country for thirty years,” Steele says in Collusion. ”Why would I invent this stuff?”

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Trump dismissed the dossier as “fake news” and claimed he was a victim after it was revealed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign partly funded the report. It was initially commissioned by his Republican rivals, seeking material they could use to discredit him.

Here are five of the most interesting claims made about the US President in the dossier:

He was ‘compromised’ by his sexual activities in Moscow

A former top Russian intelligence officer told Steele the Russian security service FSB “compromised Trump through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts, which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.”

The document also claims the FSB has a video of Trump successfully requesting prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed in a room once occupied by former president Barack Obama and first lady Michelle, Newsweek reported.

The Independent says this claim is one of the hardest to verify or believe as it seems unlikely someone in a position of power would engage in sexual activity knowing the FSB would be monitoring his behavior.

Russia admitted responsibility for stealing Democrats’ emails

The document alleges that Russian agents admitted hacking into the email account of John Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign, and that they acted with the Trump campaign’s full support. In return, Trump’s team agreed to drop Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue, it claims.

Russia supported Trump because he was “viewed as divisive in disrupting the whole US political system, anti-establishment; and a pragmatist with whom they could do business”, the dossier says.

Vladimir Putin ‘sought to cultivate’ Trump for five years

The document says that from 2011, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government offered Trump real-estate deals that he declined and that the Russians have compromising information on both him and Clinton.

According to The Independent, Russia promised not to use the compromising information against Trump because of how “helpful and cooperative” he had been over the years.

The Washington Post says Trump’s relationship with Russia began decades ago. “In 2011, Trump was flirting with running for president, including by attacking President Barack Obama’s nativity,” the paper reports. “By 2013, he’d partnered with a businessman named Aras Agalarov to host the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

“It was Agalarov and his son Emin who were later the vehicle for orchestrating a meeting between a Kremlin-backed lawyer and Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016.”

Viktor Yanukovych told Putin he paid Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort

A Trump associate claimed the payments to former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, which were supposed to be untraceable, were a deciding factor in Manafort’s exit from the campaign (which came soon before the document was published). However, that may not have been the only reason: Manafort also came under pressure to leave from former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the Post reports.

Trump’s lawyer played a ‘key role’ in Russia-Trump relationship

Michael Cohen, a lawyer who had worked for Trump’s business for many years, allegedly met Russian agents in an attempt to cover up ties between Trump and Russia, including Manafort’s involvement in Ukraine. According to the dossier, he also allegedly traveled to Prague in August 2016 to further “coordinate” the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia and to clean up the evidence of collusion and how to make final payments from both Russia and Trump to hackers.

Cohen denies these meetings, saying his only trip to Europe in 2016 was to Italy, a claim he says is supported by stamps in his passport. He says he was visiting the University of Southern California with his son during the time of the alleged trip.