The details emerging about the origin of the "fake news" dossier about President-Elect Trump's supposed ties to Russia, show clearly that the entire operation was run by British Intelligence. From what has now come out in various press reports, it is clear that the allegation that Russia interfered in the U.S. election on behalf of Trump was cooked up in Britain, funneled into the FBI and supporters of Hillary Clinton, and then pushed into the U.S. media by British Intelligence. In sum, it is Britain that is corrupting U.S. politics. That is the real scandal.

The "fake news" dossier that was leaked earlier this week, began to be compiled during the Democratic and Republican primaries as a project commissioned by a wealthy Republican donor who was opposed to Trump. The BBC reports that this person was supporting Jeb Bush, although that is not confirmed. That donor hired a D.C.-based opposition research firm named "Fusion GPS," which was founded and headed by Glenn Simpson, a former Wall St. Journal reporter. Fusion GPS had been hired by Obama operatives to conduct opposition research against Mitt Romney in 2012, and had also been hired by Planned Parenthood in 2015. However, Simpson is also tied to neo-con networks. He is a Senior Fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (IASC), where he specializes in corruption and transnational crime. According to the IASC website, Simpson has written extensively about corruption in Russia. According to the New York Times, Simpson is known to be anti-Putin.

After Trump secured the Republican nomination, funding for the project temporarily stopped. At that point, Fusion GPS was hired by supporters of Hillary Clinton to continue their opposition research against Trump. In June 2016, the DNC announced it had been hacked, and blamed the hacking on Russia. The source for this original allegation of Russian involvement in the DNC hacking was also British Intelligence. According to the Guardian, in August 2015, British Intelligence contacted the FBI to tell them the DNC had been hacked. The FBI in turn contacted the DNC, but the DNC did not believe them. It wasn't until May-June 2016, after Trump had secured the Republican nomination, and after Fusion GPS had been hired by Hillary Clinton supporters, that the DNC had a private security firm announce publicly that they had been hacked, and that the Russians had allegedly done it.

It was at that point that Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, to work on the dossier. Steele had worked undercover in Moscow and Paris for MI6, and was also known to be anti-Putin. The FBI was also familiar with Steele, who had supplied the "Eurasian Organized Crime" squad of the New York office of the FBI with information about corruption in the international soccer federation, FIFA. This information led later to indictments of top FIFA officials, which was also aimed at Russia. On behalf of Fusion GPS, Steele hired contacts in Russia to gather information for Fusion GPS from his former MI6 informants. During the Summer and Fall of 2016, Steele wrote memos to Fusion GPS which now comprise the 35-page "fake news" dossier that was leaked this week.

Steele's memos were circulating in Washington throughout the Summer and Fall of 2016 among political circles and news organizations in the U.S., but no one would publish them, because they were so obviously phony. According to the New York Times, the memos were given to the FBI by Steele through an FBI agent in Rome, whom Steele knew from his MI6 days. When Trump won the election, Fusion GPS was no longer being paid for its work, but Simpson and Steele continued their investigation and their promulgation of the phony dossier anyway. In December they arranged for Senator John McCain to obtain it. McCain personally passed it on to FBI director James Comey, even though Comey already had it from Steele's channels. The dossier was so obviously phony that it was never aired publicly, until DNI Clapper and CIA Director Brennan elevated it from mere gossip to "news," by including a summary of it in their report to Obama and Trump on Russian influence on the U.S. election. Once given the imprimatur of "intelligence" in this way, it was then finally disclosed by CNN and published in whole by "BuzzFeed."