Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the infamous Donald Trump Russia scandal “dossier” that contained, among other serious allegations, the Trump “pee tape” story, was the target of an assassination plot ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, a leading newspaper in the United Kingdom reported on Saturday night.

The Steele Dossier, which was published online by BuzzFeed in January of 2017, has become perhaps the most controversial element in the ongoing, multiple investigations into Trump’s Russia connections and possible collusion with Russia to help him win the 2016 presidential election.

While the dossier remains a point of contention between Trump’s defenders and investigators, numerous details contained in Steele’s dossier have been corroborated, and none have been definitively disproven, as CBS News reported, though many of the allegations the document contains remain murky.

The most widely publicized allegation claims that Trump hired prostitutes to perform a “golden showers” urination show for him in a Moscow hotel in 2013, and that Russian intelligence officers filmed the incident to use as blackmail material against Trump, as the Inquisitr has reported.

According to Saturday’s blockbuster report by Britain’s Mirror, Putin himself took the dossier seriously enough to order a hit on its author. The hit was to be carried out by poisoning Steele with the Russian-made nerve agent, novichok, the same chemical weapon used in an assassination attempt against former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in England earlier this year.

Accused Russian government hit man Alexander Mishkin, aka Alexander Petrov. Featured image credit: Metropolitan Police Getty Images

In fact, one of the two men now accused of carrying out the attempted assassination of Skripal and his daughter — Alexander Petrov, whose real name as Inquisitr has reported is believed to be Alexander Mishkin — was ordered by Putin to kill Steele with novichok in February of 2017, about a month after BuzzFeed published the document and the retired British spy was revealed as its author.

The new allegation published by the Mirror comes from a another former Russian spy, Boris Karpichkov, who, according to The Guardian, defected to the U.K. in 1998, two years before Putin took power in Russia.

“I was told Steele was to be liquidated using the same stuff as the Skripals. The ­assassins ­initially conducted surveillance both on Steele’s house in Farnham, Surrey, and at his London office,” the 59-year-old Karpichkov told the paper. “The operation was aborted when they realised the house was guarded with a lot of CCTV. As they also quickly established he was not appearing at his office, they concluded it was too risky to carry out the operation.”

Petrov, aka Mishkin, has denied taking part in the attempted hit on Skripal, saying that he was a mere “tourist” in Great Britain, not a Russian agent. Trump has called the Steele dossier, “phony and discredited,” and condemned Steel himself as a “lowlife,” in a Twitter post.