There’s a row of Victorian terraced houses on a side street in London’s Belgravia district, each projecting a dowdy respectability with its stone front steps leading to a pair of alabaster pillars and then a glossy black door. And at 9–11 Grosvenor Gardens there is a small, rectangular brass plate adjacent to the formidable door. Its dark letters discreetly announce: ORBIS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, LTD. By design, the company’s title was not very forthcoming. Orbis, of course, is Latin for “circle” and, by common parlance, “the world.” But “intelligence”—that was more problematic. Just what sort of international business information was the company dealing in? Advertising? Accounting? Management consulting? For a select well-heeled set scattered across the globe, no further explanation was necessary. Orbis was a player in a burgeoning industry that linked refugees from the worlds of espionage and journalism to the decision-makers who ran the flat-earth multi-national corporations and who also, from time to convenient time, dabbled in politics. In their previous lives, the founding partners of Orbis, trained and nurtured by the Secret Intelligence Service, had been in the shadowy business of finding out secrets in the name of national interest. Now they performed more or less the same mission, only they had transferred their allegiance to the self-interests of the well-paying customers who hired them. And so, on a warm day last June, Christopher Steele, ex-Cambridge Union president, ex-M.I.6 Moscow field agent, ex-head of M.I.6’s Russia desk, ex-adviser to British Special Forces on capture-or-kill ops in Afghanistan, and a 52-year-old father with four children, a new wife, three cats, and a sprawling brick-and-wood suburban palace in Surrey, received in his second-floor office at Orbis a transatlantic call from an old client. Video: Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest “It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” Steele would recall in an anonymous interview with Mother Jones, his identity at the time still a carefully guarded secret. But over the next seven incredible months, as the retired spy hunted about in an old adversary’s territory, he found himself following a trail marked by, as he then put it, “hair-raising” concerns. The allegations of financial, cyber, and sexual shenanigans would lead to a chilling destination: the Kremlin had not only, he’d boldly assert in his report, “been cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump for years but also had compromised the tycoon “sufficiently to be able to blackmail him.” And in the aftermath of the publication of these explosive findings—as nothing less than the legitimacy of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was impugned; as congressional hearings and F.B.I. investigations were announced; as a bombastic president-elect continued to let loose with indignant tirades about “fake news”; as internal-security agents of the F.S.B., the main Russian espionage agency, were said to have burst into a meeting of intelligence officers, placed a bag over the head of the deputy director of its cyber-activities, and marched him off; as the body of a politically well-connected former F.S.B. general was reportedly found in his black Lexus—Christopher Steele had gone to ground. A Call to London 
 
 But in the beginning was the telephone call. In many defining ways, it was as if Glenn Simpson, a former investigative reporter, and Christopher Steele, a former intelligence operative, had been born under the same star. Simpson—like the onetime spy, according to those who know him—was the embodiment of the traits that defined his longtime occupation: tenacity, meticulousness, cynicism, an obsession with operational secrecy. Also like Steele, who had filed for retirement from the Secret Intelligence Service in 2009, when he realized an old Russian hand would not get a seat at the high table in the Age of Terror, Simpson, approaching middle age and in mid-career, had walked away from journalism at about the same time after nearly 14 years doing political and financial investigations at The Wall Street Journal. And both men, suddenly footloose but guided by their training, talents, and character, had gravitated to similar businesses for the second acts of their careers. In 2011, Glenn Simpson, along with two other former Journal reporters, launched Fusion GPS, in Washington, D.C. The firm’s activities, according to the terse, purposefully oblique statement on its Web site, centered on “premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence.” In September 2015, as the Republican primary campaign was heating up, he was hired to compile an opposition-research dossier on Donald Trump. Who wrote the check? Simpson, always secretive, won’t reveal his client’s identity. However, according to a friend who had spoken with Simpson at the time, the funding came from a “Never Trump” Republican and not directly from the campaign war chests of any of Trump’s primary opponents. But by mid-June 2016, despite all the revelations Simpson was digging up about the billionaire’s roller-coaster career, two previously unimaginable events suddenly affected both the urgency and the focus of his research. First, Trump had apparently locked up the nomination, and his client, more pragmatic than combative, was done throwing good money after bad. And second, there was a new cycle of disturbing news stories wafting around Trump as the wordy headline splashed across the front page of The Washington Post on June 17 heralded, INSIDE TRUMP’S FINANCIAL TIES TO RUSSIA AND HIS UNUSUAL FLATTERY OF VLADIMIR PUTIN. Simpson, as fellow journalists remembered, smelled fresh red meat. And anyway, after all he had discovered, he’d grown deeply concerned by the prospect of a Trump presidency. So he found Democratic donors whose checks would keep his oppo research going strong. And he made a call to London, to a partner at Orbis he had worked with in the past, an ex-spy who knew where all the bodies were buried in Russia, and who, as the wags liked to joke, had even buried some of them. Large photograph © Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters/Zuma Press. Source Code 
 
 ‘Are there business ties in Russia?” That, Steele would offer to Mother Jones, was the bland initial thrust of his investigation after he was subcontracted by Fusion for a fee estimated by a source in the trade to be within the profession’s going rate: $12,000 to $15,000 a month, plus expenses. Steele had known Russia as a young spy, arriving in Moscow as a 26-year-old with his new wife and thin diplomatic cover in 1990. For nearly three years as a secret agent in enemy territory, he lived through the waning days of perestroika and witnessed the tumultuous disintegration of the Soviet Union under Boris Yeltsin’s mercurial and often boozy leadership. The K.G.B. was onto him almost from the start: he inhabited the spy’s uncertain life, where at any moment the lurking menace could turn into genuine danger. Yet even at the tail end of his peripatetic career at the service, Russia, the battleground of his youth, was still in his blood and on his operational mind: from 2004 to 2009 he headed M.I.6’s Russia Station, the London deskman directing Her Majesty’s covert penetration of Putin’s resurgent motherland. And so, as Steele threw himself into his new mission, he could count on an army of sources whose loyalty and information he had bought and paid for over the years. There was no safe way he could return to Russia to do the actual digging; the vengeful F.S.B. would be watching him closely. But no doubt he had a working relationship with knowledgeable contacts in London and elsewhere in the West, from angry émigrés to wheeling-and-dealing oligarchs always eager to curry favor with a man with ties to the Secret Service, to political dissidents with well-honed axes to grind. And, perhaps most promising of all, he had access to the networks of well-placed Joes—to use the jargon of his former profession—he’d directed from his desk at London Station, assets who had their eyes and ears on the ground in Russia. How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump. Source E was “an ethnic Russian” and “close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump.” This individual proved to be a treasure trove of information. “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot,” the talkative Source E “admitted there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.” Then this: “The Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to the WikiLeaks platform.” And finally: “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltic and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.” Then there was Source D, “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,” and Source F, “a female staffer” at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel, who was co-opted into the network by an Orbis “ethnic Russian operative” working hand in hand with the loquacious Trump insider, Source E. These two sources told quite a lurid story, the now infamous “golden showers” allegation, which, according to the dossier, was corroborated by others in his alphabet list of assets. It was an evening’s entertainment, Steele, the old Russian hand, must have suspected, that had to have been produced by the ever helpful F.S.B. And since it was typical of Moscow Center’s handwriting to have the suite wired up for sound and video (the hotel’s Web site, with unintentional irony, boasts of its “cutting edge technological amenities”), Steele apparently began to suspect that locked in a Kremlin safe was a hell of a video, as well as photographs. Steele’s growing file must have left his mind cluttered with new doubts, new suspicions. And now, as he continued his chase, a sense of alarm hovered about the former spy. If Steele’s sources were right, Putin had up his sleeve kompromat—Moscow Center’s gleeful word for compromising material—that would make the Access Hollywood exchange between Trump and Billy Bush seem, as Trump insisted, as banal as “locker-room talk.” Steele could only imagine how and when the Russians might try to use it. The Greater Good 
 
 What should he do? Steele dutifully filed his first incendiary report with Fusion on June 20, but was this the end of his responsibilities? He knew that what he had unearthed, he’d say in his anonymous conversation with Mother Jones, “was something of huge significance, way above party politics.” Yet was it simply a vanity to think that a retired spy had to take it on his shoulders to save the world? And what about his contractual agreement with Simpson? Could the company sue, he no doubt wondered, if he disseminated information he’d collected on its dime? In the end, Steele found the rationale that is every whistle-blower’s sustaining philosophy: the greater good trumps all other concerns. And so, even while he kept working his sources in the field and continued to shoot new memos to Simpson, he settled on a plan of covert action. THE MEMOS BY THE FORMER SPY “BECAME ONE OF WASHINGTON’S WORST-KEPT SECRETS.” The F.B.I.’s Eurasian Joint Organized Crime Squad—“Move Over, Mafia,” the bureau’s P.R. machine crowed after the unit had been created—was a particularly gung-ho team with whom Steele had done some heady things in the past. And in the course of their successful collaboration, the hard-driving F.B.I. agents and the former frontline spy evolved into a chummy mutual-admiration society. It was only natural, then, that when he began mulling whom to turn to, Steele thought about his tough-minded friends on the Eurasian squad. And fortuitously, he discovered, as his scheme took on a solid operational commitment, that one of the agents was now assigned to the bureau office in Rome. By early August, a copy of his first two memos were shared with the F.B.I.’s man in Rome. “Shock and horror”—that, Steele would say in his anonymous interview, was the bureau’s reaction to the goodies he left on its doorstep. And it wanted copies of all his subsequent reports, the sooner the better. His duty done, Steele waited with anxious anticipation for the official consequences. From the Shadows 
 
 There were none. Or at least not any public signs that the F.B.I. was tracking down the ripe leads he’d offered. And in the weeks that followed, as summer turned into fall and the election drew closer, Steele’s own sense of the mounting necessity of his mission must have intensified. As his frustration grew, the mysterious trickle from WikiLeaks of the Democratic National Committee’s and John Podesta’s purloined e-mails were continuing in a deliberate, steadily ominous flow. He had little doubt the Kremlin was behind the hacking, and he had shared his evidence with the F.B.I., but as best he could tell, the bureau was focusing on solving the legalistic national-security puzzle surrounding Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. With so much hanging in the balance—the potential president of the United States possibly being under Russia’s thumb—why weren’t the authorities more concerned? He decided it was time for desperate measures. “Someone like me stays in the shadows,” Steele would say, as if apologizing for what he did next. It was an action that went against all his training, all his professional instincts. Spies, after all, keep secrets; they don’t disclose them. And now that the F.B.I. had apparently let him down, there was another restraint tugging on his resolve: he didn’t know whom he could trust. It was as if he were back operating in the long shadow of the Kremlin, living by what the professionals call “Moscow Rules,” where security and vigilance are constant occupational obsessions. But when he considered what was at stake, he knew he had no choice. With Simpson now on board, in effect, as co-conspirator and a shrewd facilitator, Steele met with a reporter. In early October, on a trip to New York, Steele sat down with David Corn, the 58-year-old Washington-bureau chief of Mother Jones. It was a prudent choice. Corn, who had measured out a career breaking big stories and who had won a George Polk Award in the process, could be imperious, a ruthless man in a ruthless profession, but he was also a man of his word. If he agreed to protect a source, his commitment was unshakable. Steele’s identity would be safe with him. Related Video: Vladimir Putin’s Impact on the 2016 Election Corn accepted the terms, listened, and then went to work. He began to investigate, trying to get a handle on Steele’s credibility from people in the intelligence community. And all the while the clock was ticking: the election was just a month away. On October 31, in what one of Corn’s colleagues would describe as “a Hail Mary pass,” he broke a judicious, expurgated version of the story—“A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.” But in the tidal wave of headlines and breaking news in the weeks before the election, the story got swamped. It was, after all, the silly season. First, the F.B.I. exonerated Hillary Clinton over possible charges involving an insecure e-mail server. Then, 11 days before the election, F.B.I. director James Comey said, in effect, not so fast. Perhaps, he announced gravely, there was a smoking gun on the computer belonging to, of all improbable individuals, disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner. The press swarmed to the story. And attention was busily paid to the final jabs the two candidates were taking at each other. There were simply too many unsubstantiated claims in Corn’s story for other journalists to check out, and the fact that the primary source was an unnamed former spook, well, that didn’t make the reportorial challenges less daunting. In early November, Corn shared a bit of what he knew with Julian Borger, of The Guardian. And Simpson, during a sandwich lunch with Paul Wood in the BBC’s Washington radio studio, reached into his briefcase and handed over to the British journalist a redacted version of Steele’s initial report. It wasn’t long before, as The New York Times would write, the memos by the former spy “became one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, as reporters . . . scrambled to confirm or disprove them.” Then, on November 8, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Within hours of the president-elect’s victory speech, Vladimir Putin went on Russian state television to offer his congratulations. And the Popular Front, a political movement founded by the Russian president, slyly tweeted, “They say that Putin once again beat all.” Moscow Rules 
 
 On a bright autumn weekend in late November in Nova Scotia, about 300 deep thinkers—a collection of academics, government officials, corporate executives, and journalists from 70 countries—settled in for a couple of ruminative days at the annual Halifax International Security Forum. There were cocktail parties, elaborate dinners, a five-K run, a seemingly endless schedule of weighty discussion groups, and nearly constant feverish chatter about the new, improbable American president-elect. It was at some point in this busy weekend that Senator John McCain and David J. Kramer, a former State Department official whose bailiwick was Russia and who now toils at Arizona State University’s Washington-based McCain Institute for International Leadership, found themselves huddling with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia. Sir Andrew, 77, had served in Moscow for five years starting in 1995, a no-holds-barred time when Putin was aggressively consolidating power. And in London Station, the M.I.6 puppeteer pulling all the clandestine strings was Christopher Steele. Sir Andrew knew Steele well and liked what he knew. And the former diplomat, who always had a few tough words to say about Putin, had heard the rumors about Steele’s memo. Had Sir Andrew arrived in Halifax on his own covert mission? Was it just an accident that his conversation with Senator McCain happened to meander its way to the findings in Steele’s memos? Or are there no accidents in international intrigue? Sir Andrew offered no comment to Vanity Fair. He did, however, tell the Independent newspaper, “The issue of Donald Trump and Russia was very much in the news and it was natural to talk about it.” And he added, “We spoke about how Mr. Trump may find himself in a position where there could be an attempt to blackmail him with kompromat.” Any further answers remain buried in the secret history of this affair. Neither McCain nor Kramer would comment on the specifics of the meeting; all that can be firmly established is that McCain and Kramer listened with a growing attentiveness to Sir Andrew’s summary of what was purportedly in these reports—and the two men came to realize they had to see them with their own eyes. Kramer, the good soldier, volunteered to retrieve them. On an evening about a week later, using a ticket purchased with miles from his own account, Kramer flew out of Washington and landed early the next morning at Heathrow. Once on the ground, as per stern instructions, he operated on Moscow Rules. Told to meet a man loitering outside baggage claim holding a copy of the Financial Times, Kramer engaged in an exchange of word code. At last satisfied, Christopher Steele whisked him off in a Land Rover to the security of his house in Surrey. They talked for hours. And Steele passed him his report. Was this the identical, somewhat sputtering 35-page memo that had already been making the rounds among reporters? Or, as some intelligence analysts believe, was it a longer, more expertly crafted and sourced document, the final work product of a well-trained M.I.6 senior deskman? Neither McCain nor Kramer would comment, but what is known is that Kramer flew back to Washington that same night, guarding his hard-won prize with his life. On December 9, McCain sat in the office of F.B.I. director James Comey and, with no other aides present, handed him the typed pages that could bring about the downfall of a president. Afterward, the senator would issue a statement that amounted to little more than a hapless shrug, and a disingenuous one to boot: he had been “unable to make a judgment about their accuracy” and so he’d simply passed them on. But there were consequences. In the waning days of the Obama administration, both the president and congressional leaders were briefed on the contents of the Steele memos. And in early January, at the end of an intelligence briefing at Trump Tower on Russia’s interference in the presidential election conducted by the nation’s top four intelligence officials, the president-elect was presented with a two-page summary of Steele’s allegations. And with that mind-boggling moment as a news peg, the dominoes began to fall with resounding thuds. First, BuzzFeed, full of journalistic justifications, posted the entire 35-page report online. Then The Wall Street Journal outed Christopher Steele as the former British intelligence officer who had authored the Trump dossier. And next Steele, who in his previous life had directed the service’s inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the former F.S.B. officer who was fatally poisoned by a dose of radioactive polonium-210, quickly gathered up his family, asked a neighbor to look after his three cats, and headed off as fast as he could to parts unknown—only to return nearly two months later to his office, refusing to say little more than that he was “pleased to be back.” His arrival was, in its guarded way, as mysterious as his disappearance. World of Doubts 
 
 ‘Walking back the cat” is how those in the trade refer to the process of trying to resolve the bottom-line question in any piece of intelligence: Is it true? And against the unsettling background of the early months of the Trump administration, the nation’s intelligence analysts—as well as eager journalists and just plain concerned citizens—have been grappling with whether or not the allegations in Steele’s report are accurate. There are certainly items in the dossier that would leave any burrower shaking his head. The allegation that Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, had traveled to Prague last August for a clandestine meet with Kremlin officials appears false, as Cohen insists he has never been to Prague. And the repeated misspelling of the name of Alfa Bank—the largest privately owned commercial bank in Russia—as “Alpha Bank” does little to reinforce the report’s unsubstantiated charges of the bank’s illicit cash payoffs. But some things do tally. CNN has reported that U.S. intelligence intercepts of conversations between senior Russian officials and other Russian nationals occurred on the same day and from the same locations cited in the memos. And the Trump campaign engineered, as one early memo warned, a Republican platform that steadfastly refused to give lethal defensive weapons to troops in Ukraine fighting the Russian-led intervention. A grim case can also be made that the Russians are taking the memos seriously. Oleg Erovinkin—a former F.S.B. general and a key aide to Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister who now heads Rosneft, the giant Russian oil company, and whose name is scattered with incriminating innuendo through several memos—was found dead in his car the day after Christmas. The F.S.B., according to Russian press reports, “launched a large-scale investigation,” but no official cause of death has been announced. Was this the price Erovinkin paid for having apparent similarities to Steele’s Source B, “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin”? And, no less ominous, after both Steele and U.S. intelligence officials made their cases for the Kremlin’s involvement in the election hackings, the F.S.B. arrested two officers in the agency’s cyber-wing and one computer security expert, charging them with treason. Were these three the sources that Steele relied on? Further supporting evidence of Steele’s claims can perhaps also be found in the press reports of ongoing federal investigations. Three members of the Trump election team were mentioned in the dossier for their alleged ties to Russian officials—Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman; Carter Page, an early foreign-policy adviser; and Roger Stone, a longtime ad hoc adviser. All are under investigation, but no charges have been filed, and all three men have vehemently denied any wrongdoing. And according to The Washington Post, the F.B.I. in the weeks before the election grew so interested in the contents of the dossier that the bureau entered into a series of conversations with Steele to discuss hiring him to continue his research. Once the report became public, however, the discussions ended, and Steele was never compensated. But ultimately, in any examination of the veracity of an intelligence report, professionals weigh the messenger as heavily as the news. Steele’s credentials were the real thing and, apparently, impressive enough to scare the hell out of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, James Comey, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, and Admiral Mike Rogers, the N.S.A. director. How else can one explain their collective decision to pass on the still-unverified dossier to the president and the president-elect? Finally, but not least, there is Steele’s own tacit but still eloquent testimony. Retired spies don’t go to ground, taking their families with them, unless they have a damned good reason. In from the Cold ||||| The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said. 
 
 Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research. 
 
 After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. 
 
 Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS's research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary. 
 
 The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS's research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day. 
 
 Fusion GPS gave Steele's reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele. One person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS's role. 
 
 
 
 Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele compiled the dossier on President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. (Victoria Jones/AP) 
 
 The dossier has become a lightning rod amid the intensifying investigations into the Trump campaign's possible connections to Russia. Some congressional Republican leaders have spent months trying to discredit Fusion GPS and Steele and tried to determine the identity of the Democrat or organization that paid for the dossier. 
 
 Trump tweeted as recently as Saturday that the Justice Department and FBI should "immediately release who paid for it." 
 
 Elias and Fusion GPS declined to comment on the arrangement. 
 
 A DNC spokeswoman said "[Chairman] Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization. But let's be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened." 
 
 Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said he wasn't aware of the hiring during the campaign. 
 
 
 
 Marc E. Elias of Perkins Coie represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) 
 
 "The first I learned of Christopher Steele or saw any dossier was after the election," Fallon said. "But if I had gotten handed it last fall, I would have had no problem passing it along and urging reporters to look into it. Opposition research happens on every campaign, and here you had probably the most shadowy guy ever running for president, and the FBI certainly has seen fit to look into it. I probably would have volunteered to go to Europe myself to try and verify if it would have helped get more of this out there before the election." 
 
 Some of the details are included in a Tuesday letter sent by Perkins Coie to a lawyer representing Fusion GPS, telling the research firm that it was released from a ­client-confidentiality obligation. The letter was prompted by a legal fight over a subpoena for Fusion GPS's bank records. 
 
 People involved in the matter said that they would not disclose the dollar amounts paid to Fusion GPS but that the campaign and the DNC shared the cost. 
 
 Steele previously worked in Russia for British intelligence. The dossier is a compilation of reports he prepared for Fusion GPS. The dossier alleged that the Russian government collected compromising information about Trump and that the Kremlin was engaged in an effort to assist his campaign for president. 
 
 U.S. intelligence agencies later released a public assessment asserting that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to aid Trump. The FBI has been investigating whether Trump associates helped the Russians in that effort. 
 
 [FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossier] 
 
 Trump has adamantly denied the allegations in the dossier and has dismissed the FBI probe as a witch hunt. 
 
 Officials have said that the FBI has confirmed some of the information in the dossier. Other details, including the most sensational accusations, have not been verified and may never be. 
 
 Fusion GPS's work researching Trump began during the Republican presidential primaries, when the GOP donor paid for the firm to investigate the real estate magnate's background. 
 
 Fusion GPS did not start off looking at Trump's Russia ties but quickly realized that those relationships were extensive, according to the people familiar with the matter. 
 
 When the Republican donor stopped paying for the research, Elias, acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, agreed to pay for the work to continue. The Democrats paid for research, including by Fusion GPS, because of concerns that little was known about Trump and his business interests, according to the people familiar with the matter. 
 
 Those people said that it is standard practice for political campaigns to use law firms to hire outside researchers to ensure their work is protected by attorney-client and work-product privileges. 
 
 The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in "legal and compliance consulting'' since November 2015 — though it's impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS. 
 
 At no point, the people said, did the Clinton campaign or the DNC direct Steele's activities. They described him as a Fusion GPS subcontractor. 
 
 Some of Steele's allegations began circulating in Washington in the summer of 2016 as the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into possible connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Around that time, Steele shared some of his findings with the FBI. 
 
 After the election, the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering intelligence about Trump and Russia, but the bureau pulled out of the arrangement after Steele was publicly identified in news reports. 
 
 The dossier was published by BuzzFeed News in January. Fusion GPS has said in court filings that it did not give BuzzFeed the documents. 
 
 Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that Steele was respected by the FBI and the State Department for earlier work he performed on a global corruption probe. 
 
 In early January, then-FBI Director James B. Comey presented a two-page summary of Steele's dossier to President Barack Obama and President-elect Trump. In May, Trump fired Comey, which led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia matter. 
 
 Congressional Republicans have tried to force Fusion GPS to identify the Democrat or group behind Steele's work, but the firm has said that it will not do so, citing confidentiality agreements with its clients. 
 
 Last week, Fusion GPS executives invoked their constitutional right not to answer questions from the House Intelligence Committee. The firm's founder, Glenn Simpson, had previously given a 10-hour interview to the Senate Judiciary Committee. 
 
 Over objections from Democrats, the Republican leader of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), subpoenaed Fusion GPS's bank records to try to identify the mystery client. 
 
 Fusion GPS has been fighting the release of its bank records. A judge on Tuesday extended a deadline for Fusion GPS's bank to respond to the subpoena until Friday while the company attempts to negotiate a resolution with Nunes. 
 
 Julie Tate contributed to this report. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 What the Trump dossier says — and what it doesn’t 
 
 Hillary Clinton’s disingenuous dossier outrage 
 
 Trump suggests FBI may have ‘paid for’ dossier alleging Russia ties ||||| Exclusive: memo written by former journalist Cody Shearer independently sets out some of the allegations made by ex-spy Christopher Steele 
 
 The FBI inquiry into alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election has been given a second memo that independently set out some of the same allegations made in a dossier by Christopher Steele, the British former spy. 
 
 Play Video 1:03 Democrats criticize Trump over lack of Russian sanctions – video 
 
 The second memo was written by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s. 
 
 Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with scepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organisations before the election. 
 
 However, the Guardian has been told the FBI investigation is still assessing details in the “Shearer memo” and is pursuing intriguing leads. 
 
 One source with knowledge of the inquiry said the fact the FBI was still working on it suggested investigators had taken an aspect of it seriously. 
 
 It raises the possibility that parts of the Steele dossier, which has been derided by Trump’s supporters, may have been corroborated by Shearer’s research, or could still be. 
 
 The revelation comes at a moment when Donald Trump and some Republican lawmakers have been seeking to cast doubt on the credibility of the Mueller inquiry and the motivation of the FBI in examining Russian collusion, including unproven allegations that investigators had a bias in favour of Hillary Clinton when the investigation was initially launched before November. 
 
 Republicans vote to release contentious memo attacking FBI over 2016 election Read more 
 
 Republicans on the House intelligence committee voted on Monday night to release a highly contentious memo, commissioned by the Republican chairman of the committee, Devin Nunes. The memo reportedly claims the FBI had an anti-Trump bias when it sought a warrant from the US foreign intelligence surveillance court to collect intelligence on Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump campaign. The Fisa court is a secret court that examines law enforcement requests to surveil Americans suspected of acting as foreign agents. 
 
 The Republican memo reportedly alleges that the FBI relied on the Steele dossier, which was partly paid for using Democratic funds, in seeking the Carter Page warrant, according to the New York Times. 
 
 Democrats have said that the Republican allegations are misleading and based on selective use of classified materials. Justice department officials have said the release of the document, because of the classified elements, would be “extraordinarily reckless”. 
 
 Trump now has five days to decide whether the Nunes document should become public. 
 
 The Shearer memo was provided to the FBI in October 2016. 
 
 It was handed to them by Steele – who had been given it by an American contact – after the FBI requested the former MI6 agent provide any documents or evidence that could be useful in its investigation, according to multiple sources. 
 
 The Guardian was told Steele warned the FBI he could not vouch for the veracity of the Shearer memo, but that he was providing a copy because it corresponded with what he had separately heard from his own independent sources. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Robert Mueller, the former FBI director leading the investigation. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters 
 
 Among other things, both documents allege Donald Trump was compromised during a 2013 trip to Moscow that involved lewd acts in a five-star hotel. 
 
 The Shearer memo cites an unnamed source within Russia’s FSB, the state security service. The Guardian cannot verify any of the claims. 
 
 Shearer is a controversial figure in Washington. Conservative outlets have accused him of being part of a “hatchet man” and member of a “secret spy ring” and within Clinton’s orbit. There is no evidence that the Clinton campaign was aware of the Shearer memo. 
 
 But other people who know Shearer say he is not just a Democratic party hack and there is no evidence that his memo was ever sought by Clinton campaign officials. 
 
 Sources say that while he lacks the precision and polish of a seasoned former spy like Steele, Shearer has also been described as having a large network of sources around the world and the independent financial means to pursue leads. 
 
 The White House has vigorously denied allegations that the US president was ever compromised and has rejected claims that campaign officials ever conspired with the Kremlin before the 2016 election. 
 
 Steele’s dossier, his motives for writing it and his decision to share it remain controversial among Republicans. 
 
 He says he approached the FBI about concerns he had about links between Russia and the Trump campaign after he was commissioned to investigate the matter by a private investigative firm called Fusion GPS on behalf of the firm’s clients. 
 
 Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, told congressional investigators that Steele approached the FBI out of a sense of duty and concern for US national security. 
 
 Republican supporters of Trump have derided it as “fake news”. Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa and ally of Trump, has called for an investigation into Steele amid unspecified allegations about the former spy’s conduct. 
 
 Democrats have said the campaign against Steele is part of an effort to seek to discredit him in order to shift attention away from allegations about Trump and Russia. 
 
 Spokespeople for the FBI and the US special counsel leading the criminal investigation into the Trump campaign declined to comment. Shearer did not return emails and calls for comment. 
 
 A federal criminal investigation into the Trump campaign has so far resulted in four indictments. Two former Trump campaign officials, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, have pleaded guilty to perjury and are cooperating with Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is leading the ongoing investigation.
– The author of the explosive dossier dogging Donald Trump less than 10 days before his inauguration has been named as a former British intelligence officer—but the investigative firm he co-directs won't confirm or deny his involvement. Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that the document was prepared by Christopher Steele, a former Russia expert in Britain's spy service who founded the Orbis Business Intelligence research firm in 2009. The New York Times, in a look at how the dossier came to light, reports that Steele was hired by Washington research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by a wealthy GOP donor in the fall of 2015 to compile anti-Trump material. After Trump became the presumptive nominee, the GOP donor no longer needed the research firm's services, but wealthy Democratic donors stepped in, and Steele continued to send monthly memos detailing alleged Russian efforts to both compromise Trump and assist his campaign, per the Times' sources. In other coverage: The Guardian looks at John McCain's involvement, which apparently included clandestine efforts to obtain the dossier after hearing about it from a diplomat during a conference in Canada. "Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI," McCain said in a statement Wednesday. The AP reports that it has been unable to contact Steele. A neighbor of the former spy, who lives outside London, says Steele and his family are away and it's not clear when they will return. Intelligence chiefs are defending their decision to take the very unusual step of attaching a summary of the unverified dossier to last week's briefing on Russian hacking, the Washington Post reports. "Part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Wednesday. He said he spoke with Trump and expressed dismay at the "extremely corrosive" leaks in the press. Early Thursday, Trump tweeted that Clapper had called him "to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated." He added: "Made up, phony facts.Too bad!" Politico looks at how Democrats are dealing with Trump's Russia troubles. So far, senators have been more restrained than House members, some of whom have started referring to Trump as "Moscow Donald." The New York Times reports that Trump is facing a backlash from Jewish groups for wondering if we "are living in Nazi Germany" when he was criticizing intelligence agencies' handling of what he called "fake news." At the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald calls the dossier "farcical" and warns that this episode could backfire badly for Democratic operatives and others treating the dossier as gospel. He warns that if it is proved false, it will "forever discredit ... future journalistic exposés that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing."