Dossier author feared Donald Trump was being blackmailed

The author of the explosive pre-election dossier on Donald Trump reported to the FBI in July 2016 that he was concerned Trump was being blackmailed by the Kremlin, according to testimony by Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS, the company that commissioned the report.

Simpson made the claim during a closed-door session with the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, where he was questioned for 10 hours over the dossier and its author, former British spy Christopher Steele.

“He [Steele] thought from his perspective there was an issue – a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed,” Simpson said.

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The BBC reports that Simpson was “cagey on the origins of claims in the dossier” during the interview. Simpson’s lawyer interrupted questioning on that topic to explain that “Somebody's already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier.”

CNN reports that Simpson also talked down Trump’s claims that the contents of the dossier were “totally made up” and “phony”.

“It’s political rhetoric to call the dossier ‘phony,’” he said. “The memos are field reports of real interviews that [Steele’s] network conducted and there’s nothing phony about it.”

The full 312-page transcript of that interview was released by the senior Democrat on the committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, yesterday, in defiance of Republican committee members and amid a “fierce debate about transparency surrounding the whole Russia-collusion investigation,” The Guardian says.