Christopher Steele Defends Russia Dossier, Says Trump Golden Shower Tape “Probably Does” Exist

Earlier this month, Donald Trump announced to a room full of Republican donors that his sexual kinks do not involve being peed upon. Why did he do this? Had someone in the audience raised their hand during a Q&A session and asked, “I was just wondering, do you enjoy having women pee on you?” According to a report from The Washington Post, the ex-president offered the information totally unprompted, which, it has to be said, is a very odd thing to do if you’re trying to assure people you don’t enjoy being treated like a toilet.

Perhaps, though, he was just trying to get ahead of the fact that on Sunday, the author of the infamous Russia dossier sat down for his first major interview, during which he told George Stephanopoulos that he does believe there is a tape out there of Trump, circa 2013, employing a gaggle of prostitutes to perform a golden shower show for him on a Moscow hotel room bed. Speaking to ABC News, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the subject of a new documentary out today, said that despite the immense criticism the dossier has come under since it was leaked, he “stand[s] by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it.”

Per ABC News:

Steele’s dossier has come under immense scrutiny since its release. And yet in many ways, it proved prescient. The Mueller probe found that Russia had been making efforts to meddle in the 2016 campaign, and that Trump campaign members and surrogates had promoted and retweeted Russian-produced political content alleging voter fraud and criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton. Investigators determined there had been “numerous links—i.e. contacts—between Trump campaign officials and individuals having ties to the Russian government.” And, proof emerged that the Trump Organization had been discussing a real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. All were findings that had been signaled, at least broadly, in Steele’s work.

Steele continues to defend the inclusion of some of the dossier’s more controversial claims, including that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and self-described fixer, traveled to Prague in 2016 for secret meetings with Russian interlocutors—a claim that Cohen has vehemently denied, and that the FBI later determined not to be true.

Asked if he thinks it hurts his credibility that he won‘t accept the FBI’s conclusion in the case of Cohen, Steele told Stephanopoulos: “I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100% accurate. I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them.” (In a statement, Cohen told ABC News, “I’m pleased to see that my old friend Christopher Steele, a/k/a Austin Powers, has crawled out of the pub long enough to make up a few more stories. I eagerly await his next secret dossier which proves the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and that Elvis is still alive.”)

While Steele acknowledged that no corroborating evidence has been found for many of his dossier claims, he argued that very little contradictory evidence exists either—a line of defense that his critics have found problematic. Perhaps the most attention-grabbing headline from the Steele dossier—and another claim that remains uncorroborated—was a report of the supposed existence of a “pee tape” allegedly collected by Russian intelligence services. According to the dossier, the tape purportedly shows Trump “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him” on a bed where the Obamas supposedly once stayed.

Steele told ABC News he believes the alleged tape “probably does” exist—but that he “wouldn’t put 100% certainty on it.”

Trump, of course, has vehemently denied the existence of the tape in question, claiming last week that Melania Trump told him, “I don’t believe that one”—though, according to former FBI director James Comey, the 45th president was obsessed with having the bureau investigate its alleged existence and told Comey, “If there’s even a one percent chance my wife thinks that’s true, that’s terrible.”

Asked by Stephanopoulos why, if the tape really exists, it hasn’t been released, Steele responded: “I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.”

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