Former Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has been forced to deny a claim that he ordered the outlandish ‘dirty dossier’ on President-elect Donald Trump.

The BBC initially named Bush, one of Trump’s opponent in the 2016 Republican primary, as having enlisted the services of Washington-based political research firm FusionGPS to look into Trump's business dealings.

FusionGPS later hired ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele to dig further into Trump’s connections with Russia.

‘He (Steele) was compiling this report on behalf of initially Trump's opponent Jeb Bush,’ the BBC said on Wednesday.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has denied he has any links to the Trump 'dirty dossier' or the British ex-MI6 agent who compiled it

Bush's spokesman, Kristy Campbell, categorically denied any involvement between Bush and Steele. ‘It is absolutely not true that Governor Bush had any knowledge or involvement with this gentleman and his allegations,’ Campbell told Reuters.

‘It's nothing we've ever seen before.’

However, Bush’s camp have not specifically ruled out any contact with FusionGPS.

On Thursday, the former Governor of Florida said it's unlikely he'll run for office again.

Bush said that 'life goes on' and that he's focused on building up his business again and working with the foundation he created to push for changes in education policy. He's also ruling out running again for governor in his home state.

It seems what started in September 2015 as a fairly standard political research mission to scrutinize the business dealings of a presidential candidate unexpectedly spiralled into a series of increasingly bizarre and lurid claims, none of which are verified.

The company that was hired to dig into Trump, FusionGPS, is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, and advertises itself as providing ‘premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence services’.

Outlandish allegations about Trump contained in the discredited document were compiled from memos by Chris Steele - a Russia specialist posted to Moscow in the 1990s

Glenn Simpson is pictured speaking at UC Berkeley School of Journalism in 2009. In a video of the speech, he said he launched his new company 'to keep investigations going and keep doing things in the public interest' after newspapers slashed budgets for investigations

As part of his ferocious denials Trump tweeted: 'Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to 'leak' into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?'

Simpson left the Wall Street Journal in 2009 to launch an investigations company with fellow reporter Sue Schmidt.

The company was called SNS Global LLC and the pair were also affiliated with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a nonprofit foundation focused on security issues.

Schmidt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, told Politico at the time that they were 'sort of shifting gears'. He reportedly said they were 'going to do some public interest work and some consulting.'

It was in 2011 that Simpson, who is a graduate from The George Washington University, became the chief executive of FusionGPS.

His profile on the International Assessment and Strategy Center says he has 20 years experience of investigating financial crime.

The award-winning reporter also co-authored the 1995 book titled Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics.

The book's online blurb says: 'Political corruption in America is worse today than it has been since the Watergate era.

Who is the man behind the 'dirty dossier'? Chris Steele's firm Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd was reportedly recruited to help Mr Trump's Republican rivals Christopher Steele was once MI6’s top spy on Russian affairs and lived in the shadows until being unmasked as the alleged author of the ‘dirty dossier’ on Donald Trump. Mr Steele was born in 1964 in Aden – his father was in the military – and grew up in Surrey before attending Girton College, Cambridge, and becoming president of the Cambridge Union debating society in 1986 – the same year in which Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was president of the Oxford Union. The 52-year-old joined MI6 after graduating from Cambridge where he was described as a ‘confirmed socialist’. As a young intelligence officer in Moscow, he was frequently harassed by the KGB – once even complaining they had stolen his wife Laura’s high-heeled shoes from their flat. Steele, 52, was described as a 'confirmed socialist' as a Cambridge student, circled in 1985 with, among others, DJ Paul Gambaccini (second from right, front row) and That's Life star Chris Seale (front row, centre left) The couple faced down Russian tanks after the fall of the Soviet Union and ‘highly capable’ Mr Steele went on to become head of MI6’s Russia desk – meaning he was one of the Secret Intelligence Service’s most senior spies. It was no wonder he was considered hot property when he quit MI6 in 2009 to set up his own spies-for-hire firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. Co-founded with another former MI6 officer, Christopher Burrows, it has earned £1million over the past two years and was instrumental in exposing corruption at world football body Fifa. Advertisement

The individual who commissioned a former British spy to draw up the 'dirty dossier' on Donald Trump (pictured) is yet to be identified, but fingers have been pointed at his enemies in both the Republican and Democrat parties

Some of the allegations relate to a 2013 visit to Moscow of the Miss Universe competition where Trump is alleged to have paid two prostitutes to defile a bed during a bizarre sex act

'Americans know it, and the politicians have known it for years. Urgent calls for reform have become standard fare, but nothing changes.

‘A Democrat President and a Republican Congress were both elected on the strength of their promises of reform. Neither has delivered. Americans contemplate the tottering remains of our ethically bankrupt political system with despair.'

In 2004, Simpson successfully exposed criminal activity at Riggs Bank, which ultimately led to the 170-year-old bank’s demise. In recent years he has turned his attention to Russian corporate crime and criminal organizations.

His firm, FusionGPS, was previously enlisted to find dirt on 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's campaign donors.

However, the company, like other similar firms, never reveals who its clients are.

Its website is simply one page with a brief description and an email contact address.

Dossier of unverifiable sleaze Lurid sex claims The report states that in 2013 Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed of the Presidential Suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton, where he knew Barack and Michelle Obama had previously stayed. It says: 'Trump's unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.' Trump ridiculed the idea, pointing out that Russian hotel rooms are known to be rigged with cameras and describing himself as a 'germophobe'. Property 'sweeteners' The document states that Trump had declined 'sweetener' real estate deals in Russia that the Kremlin lined up in order to cultivate him. The business proposals were said to be 'in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament'. Russia 'cultivated' Trump for five years The dossier claimed that the Russian regime had been 'cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years'. According to the document, one source even claimed that 'the Trump operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin' with the aim being to 'sow discord'. A dossier on Hillary Clinton At one point the memo suggests Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov 'controlled' another dossier containing compromising material on Hillary Clinton compiled over 'many years'. Elsewhere in the document, it is claimed that Putin was 'motivated by fear and hatred of Hillary Clinton.' Peskov poured scorn on the claims today and said they were 'pulp fiction'. Clandestine meetings At one point the memo says there were reports of 'clandestine meetings' between Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen and Kremlin representatives in August last year in Prague. However, Trump's counsel Michael Cohen today spoke out against allegations that he secretly met with Kremlin officials - saying that he had never been to Prague. It has now emerged that the dossier was referring to a different person of the same name. Advertisement

It’s likely when Simpson was first contacted about the Trump task he would have seen it as any other political research mission.

The Times reports FusionGPS was specifically asked to investigate Trump’s vast business dealings in a bid to find any links between them and organized crime in the US.

After all, it was September 2015 - a time when Kremlin involvement in the US election was not widely known to be an issue.

In June 2016, the research took a change in direction when news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked.

The DNC said that hackers working for Russia broke into the DNC's computer network, spied on internal communications and stole research on Trump.

It was around this time that FusionGPS is believed to have called on the services of London-based firm Orbis Business Intelligence, however the Telegraph reports the company may have been involved as early as December 2015.

Orbis is run by ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele, a man who spent years under diplomatic cover working for the agency in Russia and Paris and at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

After he left the spy service in 2009, Steele supplied the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with information on corruption at FIFA, international soccer's governing body.

It was his work on corruption in international soccer that lent credence to his reporting on Trump's entanglements in Russia, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

Steele’s gold-plated contacts in Moscow that led wealthy opponents of Trump to the black door of Orbis’s discreet Belgravia office. They commissioned him to research Mr Trump’s dealings in Russia.

However, when the billionaire businessman became the Republican party’s nominee in July 2016, the Republican donors who were believed to be funding the research ended the deal with FusionGPS, the Telegraph reports.

It is then alleged that Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton took over paying for Steele’s investigation and his information was circulated to Democratic Party figures and members of the media.

Steele's dealings with the FBI on Trump, initially with the senior agent who had started the FIFA probe and then moved to a post in Europe, began in July.

However, Steele cut off contact with the FBI about a month before the November 8 election because he was frustrated by the bureau's slow progress.

The FBI opened preliminary investigations into Trump and his entourage's dealings with Russians that were based in part on Steele's reports, according to people familiar with the inquiries.

However, they said the bureau shifted into low gear in the weeks before the election to avoid interfering in the vote. They said Steele grew frustrated and stopped dealing with the FBI after concluding it was not seriously investigating the material he had provided.

The Belgravia building where offices of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd are located, in central London

Pictured: Mr Steele's empty £1.5million home in Farnham, Surrey, bristles with CCTV cameras

Steele's reports, which claim Russia has tapes of Trump engaging in 'perverted sexual acts' while in a Moscow hotel room, circulated for months among major media outlets but neither the news organizations nor U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been able to corroborate them.

BuzzFeed published some of Steele's reports about Trump on its website on Tuesday, but the President-elect and his aides later said the reports were false. Russian authorities also dismissed them.

Associates of Steele said on Wednesday he was unavailable for comment. Christopher Burrows, a director and co-founder of Orbis with Steele, told The Wall Street Journal, which first published Steele's name, that he could not confirm or deny that Steele's company had produced the reports on Trump.