Trump-Russia inquiry: transcript reveals ex-spy and FBI's cloak-and-dagger dance

It was nine days before the 2016 US election and Christopher Steele suddenly had a bad feeling about what was going on inside the FBI.

Two months earlier, the British former spy turned private investigator had decided to take his concerns about Donald Trump’s campaign and its alleged ties to the Kremlin to senior US law enforcement officials, mostly out of a sense of duty and worry about the Republican candidate for the White House.

The findings of his research and interviews with contacts seemed to corroborate what intelligence and law enforcement officials were already hearing.

The release this week of an extensive congressional interview with Glenn Simpson, the former journalist and private investigator who hired Steele, has revealed new details about the final days before US voters elected Trump and the cloak-and-dagger dance that was playing out between Steele and US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The release of Simpson’s transcripts by Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, raises questions about what the FBI knew at that time and why federal investigators kept the information quiet.

It also raises questions about calls by Republicans including the chair of the judiciary committee, Chuck Grassley, a Trump ally, for an FBI investigation into Steele and his dealings with reporters.

It is now known that Steele was not the first person to sound an alarm about the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to the Kremlin. Months before Steele made contact with US government officials, an Australian diplomat alerted US counterparts that a young foreign policy aide, George Papadopolous, had been bragging that Russians had obtained damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent.

At around the same time, the Guardian has reported, foreign intelligence agencies, including from the UK, were quietly informing their counterparts of strange possible connections between Trump campaign officials and agents of the Kremlin.

Steele’s information seemed to bolster a case that had already been opened by the FBI. But according to the newly released transcripts, the former spy’s cooperation came to a sudden standstill on 31 October, shortly before the November election, after the publication of a New York Times scoop that suggested federal investigators had pored over the Trump campaign and vague allegations of connections to the Kremlin and found no conclusive links.

Since then four officials, including three people who worked for the campaign, have been indicted in an ongoing federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible links to the Kremlin, including Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has pleaded guilty to perjury and is cooperating with the investigation.

Simpson’s testimony revealed that the NYT report so shocked Steele – because, a source has told the Guardian, it seemed so contrary to what he believed about the FBI’s investigation – that he was convinced the FBI had been compromised.

“I understand Chris severed his relationship with the FBI out of concern that he didn’t know what was happening inside the FBI and there was a concern that the FBI was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people,” Simpson told congressional investigators. “We didn’t really understand what was going on. So he stopped dealing with them.”

A person familiar with the matter told the Guardian that around the same time, in the autumn of 2016, the FBI was becoming frustrated with Steele because of stories that had begun to appear in the press that suggested he was talking to reporters about his Russia concerns.

There are theories in Washington about why the FBI did not disclose its concerns in the New York Times article, including because prosecutors may not have wanted to jeopardise their investigation into the Trump campaign. But the transcript reveals that at least one person – Steele – was worried that the FBI investigation was intentionally being under-publicised in a way that benefited the Republican candidate.

Steele began to cooperate with the FBI again many months later after Robert Mueller, the US special counsel, took over the investigation. It is unclear why Republicans are seeking an investigation into the former spy or how the FBI will respond.