Former MI6 officer Christopher Steele has warned the United States can no longer be regarded as a reliable intelligence ally, following the election of Donald Trump as President.
Speaking at the Byline Festival, Steele said, “ ex CIA, ex NSA, FBI, and State Department officials who I speak to on a regular basis are sounding the alarm bells.
“American security architecture - and the FBI and the Department of Justice in particular, which deal with foreign agents, foreign interference, kleptocracy, foreign corruption - have been frozen or dismantled under this government in the last six months.
“I don't think they can be trusted, from my experience, for keeping the identities of sources secret or out of the public domain. I certainly would not trust the American government or the American services with any intelligence at the moment in any form.”
Steele previously ran the Russia desk at the UK’s Special Intelligence Service before setting up Orbis, a private business consultancy. In that capacity, his team compiled a dossier highlighting links between the Kremlin and Trump’s 2016 election team.
“We had was a well established network of sources in and on Russia, and when we went in and tested the water on this, we found some pretty shocking results,” Steele said.
“We found there was a wholescale Russian campaign to interfere in the US election, designed to damage Hillary Clinton and to benefit Donald Trump.
“There were elements of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, notably in the form of Paul Manafort, who was the pro Russian campaign manager who Donald Trump very strangely and suddenly hired as his campaign manager in 2016 for no apparent reason.”
Steele believes Russian interference operations including the use of troll farms to persuade black voters to stay at home on polling day, may may even have swung the vote decisively for the Republicans in the three key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In his book ‘Unredacted’, published in 2024, Steel warned that Trump represented “the gravest threat to democracy”.
His view was, “fundamentally based on the fact that I don't believe Trump either believes in the rule of law or democracy.
“It's not good enough to only accept the results of elections when you win, and it's not good enough to accept the results of court cases when you win and not when you lose. And I think it's very clear that in both those fundamental instances, Trump is not a democrat.”
The President has unsuccessfully tried to sue Steele, taking advantage of England’s notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws, and Steele says he is now owed around £1 million in legal costs.
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