The most explosive allegations of the Trump-Russia affair are in the Trump dossier. And the most explosive allegation in the Trump dossier is the tale of Donald Trump, in a Moscow hotel room in 2013, allegedly watching as prostitutes performed a "golden showers" routine on a bed once occupied by former President Barack Obama as hidden cameras rolled.
But now there is new reporting to suggest the dossier's creators had serious doubts about the veracity of the "golden showers" story from the very beginning. Despite those doubts, dossier author Christopher Steele included the "golden showers" account in his collection of anti-Trump intelligence, and the dubious charges set off a series of events that changed the course of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Even amid the various allegations of Trump-Russia connections, it was the "golden showers" episode that most excited those involved in the Clinton campaign-funded effort to find Russian dirt on Trump. It was the story that most excited those in the Obama administration who learned about it. (According to a new book, former national security adviser Susan Rice urged Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to "tell Obama about the 'golden showers' allegation.") At the same time, it deeply disturbed Trump. And, of course, it excited the ranks of Trump resisters on Twitter and elsewhere who long for video evidence; just look up #peepeetape.
According to Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS opposition researcher who commissioned the dossier, Steele felt the hotel sex allegation was devastating because it could lead to blackmail of a U.S. presidential candidate.
When Simpson and Steele discussed whether the information should be given to the FBI, Steele pointed to the possibility of blackmail over the alleged hotel incident as the reason to contact the bureau. "His concern … is whether or not there was blackmail going on, whether a political candidate was being blackmailed or had been compromised," Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. "He honed in on this issue of blackmail as being a significant national security issue."
Senate investigators asked Simpson why Steele felt Trump might be vulnerable to blackmail. "The alleged incident that's described here," Simpson said, referring to the hotel allegation. "It's well known in intelligence circles that the Russians have cameras in all the luxury hotel rooms and there are memoirs written about this by former Russian intelligence agents. … So that's what I'm referring to. That's what [Steele] is referring to."
So, motivated specifically by the "golden showers" story, Steele took the dossier to the FBI — and the rest is history.
Just for the record, this is how Steele wrote the sex story in the dossier:
According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP's (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.
Now, a new book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn — both of whom were personally briefed by Steele as part of the Fusion GPS effort to publicize the dossier's allegations before the election — casts serious doubt on the truthfulness of the "golden showers" story.
First, Isikoff and Corn suggest, without saying so explicitly, that the available circumstantial evidence makes the "golden showers" story very unlikely. Reconstructing Trump's time in Moscow for the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant, Isikoff and Corn report that Trump stayed just one night in Moscow. (Trump did in fact stay in the Ritz Carlton presidential suite where Obama had been a few years earlier.) After arriving in Moscow, Trump attended a brief meeting at the hotel and then left for a day of meetings elsewhere.
That night, an "exhausted" Trump went to a party at which he agreed to take part in a video shoot the next morning between 7:45 a.m. and 8:10 a.m. Trump then left the party at 1:30 a.m. "This would be his only night in Moscow," Isikoff and Corn write. Trump went to his room, where, according to aide Keith Schiller, Schiller stood guard outside for a while before leaving. The next morning, Isikoff and Corn write, Trump showed up for the video shoot and started another long day. The pageant was that night, followed by another party, after which Trump went to the airport for a private flight back to the U.S.
The schedule did not leave a lot of time for kompromat. But maybe Trump, in between arriving at the Ritz Carlton around 2:00 a.m. and being on a video set at 7:45 a.m. -- maybe he had time for the "golden showers" scene then? Anything is possible, but other evidence presented by Isikoff and Corn suggests that Steele's sources were not terribly reliable.
Much of the hotel scene was based on the word of a person Steele called "Source D." The book identifies that source as Sergei Millian, described as a "Belarusian American businessman who in the mid-2000s said he was retained to locate Russian customers for Trump properties in the United States." Isikoff and Corn report that Millian was an "unwitting source" who did not know that the hotel sex story he passed on to one of Steele's Russian "collectors" — people Steele paid to gather information — was then passed on to Steele and included in the dossier.
But what did Millian really know? From Isikoff and Corn:
The memo had described Millian as a Trump intimate, but there was no public evidence he was close to the mogul at that time or was in Moscow during the Miss Universe event. Had Millian made something up or repeated rumors he had heard from others to impress Steele's collector? Simpson had his doubts. He considered Millian a big talker.
Steele and his colleagues knew all along there wasn't much to back up the "golden showers" story. "Steele's faith in the sensational sex claim would fade over time," Isikoff and Corn continued. "As for the likelihood of the claim that prostitutes had urinated in Trump's presence, Steele would say to colleagues, 'It's fifty-fifty.'"
Who knows where Steele got that number? Perhaps he was being generous. In any event, Isikoff and Corn write that the dossier sex tale was "practically impossible to verify."
But it was precisely the sex story that applied rocket fuel to the Trump-Russia investigation. It was the reason Steele went to the FBI. The FBI's involvement was the reason some of the dossier's claims were originally reported in the press. The FBI director's January 2017 decision to brief President-elect Trump on the "salacious and unverified" allegations in the dossier led to reporting that Trump had been briefed on compromising personal information. And those reports led BuzzFeed to publish the entire dossier. And that led to … well, it led to a lot.
In his much-discussed June 2017 testimony to Congress, fired FBI director James Comey explained why he briefed Trump on the dossier during a Jan. 6, 2017, meeting at Trump Tower:
The [intelligence community] leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.
Trump was upset by the "golden showers" story. According to knowledgeable sources, when the president expressed concern to Comey about a "cloud" created by the Russia investigation, he very specifically meant a personal cloud created by the dossier's allegation of sexual misconduct in Moscow. Couldn't Comey tell the public that it wasn't true? the president wanted to know. In his June 2017 testimony, Comey described receiving a call from Trump:
On the morning of March 30, the President called me at the FBI. He described the Russia investigation as "a cloud" that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. He asked what we could do to "lift the cloud." I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn't find anything, to our having done the work well. He agreed, but then re-emphasized the problems this was causing him.
"The problems this was causing him" — it's not hard to imagine that Trump might be having some problems at home with a story like that not only floating around but in headlines and under investigation by the nation's top intelligence and law enforcement agencies. And the FBI has never lifted the "cloud" after a year and a half of investigation.
But the problems went far beyond the president's domestic life. The "golden showers" episode triggered a series of consequential events in the Trump-Russia saga, not the least of which was the kindling of Trump's resentment toward Comey that eventually led to the FBI director's firing, which of course led to the appointment of a special counsel. And at the bottom of so many events lay a story that even its author guessed had only a "fifty-fifty" chance of being true.
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