Russia had Trump ‘over a barrel’, claims former British spy
The man paid by the Democrats to compile a dossier on Donald Trump is said to have tried to alert the FBI and Justice Department when he believed the Republican presidential candidate was possibly compromised
A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel”, according to several people familiar with the encounter.
The lawyer, Bruce Ohr, also says he learned that a Trump campaign aide had met higher-level Russian officials than the aide acknowledged, the people said.
The details of the July 30, 2016, breakfast with Christopher Steele, which Ohr described to lawmakers this week in a private interview, reveal an exchange of potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.
They add to the public understanding of those pivotal summer months as the FBI and intelligence community scrambled to untangle possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. And they reflect the concern of Steele, a long-time FBI informant whose Democratic-funded research into Trump’s alleged ties to Russia was compiled into a dossier, that the Republican presidential candidate was possibly compromised and his urgent efforts to convey that anxiety to contacts at the FBI and Justice Department.
