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Unverified but explosive dossier on US President-elect Donald Trump released online

Sahil Bhalla | Updated on: 12 January 2017, 0:01 IST

An unverified dossier. Unsubstantiated claims. Allegations. Donald Trump. The elections. President-elect. Republicans. Democrats. Russians. Russian government. Hacking. Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agents. Elected officials. President Barack Obama.

Just the sort of the things you expect to hear. Kremlin denying it. Russians are liars. Trump calling it 'shit' or 'fake news' or 'not good'. That's what the whole 2016 elections have been about.

Other media houses passed the dossier along due to its unverified nature. BuzzFeed News, however, didn't. In an article titled "These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia", that has since gone viral, it is reported that the dossier was compiled by a former British intelligence officer. As an anecdote, the report states that it contains errors.

Here are the highlights of the 35-page dossier.

  • Russia has been in some contact with Trump for 5 years.

  • Trump has been receiving Kremlin inside information on political opponents.

  • Russian authorities sought to "exploit Trump's personal obsessions and sexual perversion" to gain some compromising material on him.
  • Russia may have compromising information about Trump, including evidence of "perverse" sexual acts.

  • The Russian government has a dossier on Trump.

Before delving into the details of the dossier, here's Kremlin's response and Trump's latest 'tweets'. The Kremlin has said it was 'total nonsense' that"Russian officials had assembled a file of compromising information on US President-elect Donald Trump".

Four US intelligence agencies - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers - last week presented Trump with classified documents. These documents included unverified claims that there was compromising information about Trump with Russian intelligence operatives.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that this dossier was a hoax and was 'dreamt up' to harm US-Russian relations even further.

And true to his style, here's what Trump said shortly after the Buzzfeed News article went live:

And then on the morning of 11 January, 11 hours after that first tweet, he opened up to his followers again. Take a look:

The unverified dossier

One of the most explosive allegations from this dossier, if not every single dossier before, is that Trump employed a "number of prostitutes". These prostitutes performed "golden showers". (Translation: Urination as a sexual act.)

The document alleges that the women performed this in front of Trump, and that the hotel in which this was carried out was under Russian intelligence control. They had microphones and cameras all over. They could basically record anything they wanted. They apparently even urinated in the bed of the Presidential Suite of the five-star Ritz Carlton. This was the same room where Barack and Michelle Obama had stayed during one of their official visits.

According to yet another unverified claim, the Russian operatives have had "valuable intelligence on Hillary Clinton" for several years. Russia has allegedly been "cultivating, supporting, and assisting" Trump for five years. This was done so that the "western alliance" could be split.

One last claim of importance was that Trump was offered multiple 'lucrative' real estate deals with the 2018 World Cup in Russia coming up. He declined to take them, the report states.

Trump's lawyer

One of Trump's associates and lawyer Michael Cohen and advisers Paul Manafort and Carter Page allegedly had discussions with Russian officials regarding the United States presidential election.

Cohen and the three colleagues had apparently travelled in August/September of 2016 to Prague according to the memos. The meeting including discussions on paying the hackers for their work done against the Clinton campaign. Furthermore, they were briefed on how to "dismantle the attack infrastructure after the election".

Cohen himself said he had never been to Prague:

"TRUMP's associate reported that the aim of leaking the DNC e-mails to WikiLeaks during the Democratic Convention had been to swing supporters of Bernie SANDERS away from Hillary CLINTON and across to TRUMP. These voters were perceived as activist and anti-status quo and anti-establishment and in that regard sharing many features with the TRUMP campaign, including a visceral dislike of Hillary CLINTON. This objective had been conceived and promoted, inter alia, by TRUMP's foreign policy adviser Carter PAGE who had discussed it directly with the ethnic Russian associate," one memo reads.

One of the memos alleges that Russian officials and soon to be President Trump had been 'exchanging intelligence' for a whopping eight years!

What made BuzzFeed do it

Here's editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, Ben Smith, on Twitter, defending the decision to publish the 'unverified' memos. Judge for yourself.

First published: 12 January 2017, 0:01 IST
 
Sahil Bhalla @IMSahilBhalla

Sahil is a correspondent at Catch. A gadget freak, he loves offering free tech support to family and friends. He studied at Sarah Lawrence College, New York and worked previously for Scroll. He selectively boycotts fast food chains, worries about Arsenal, and travels whenever and wherever he can. Sahil is an unapologetic foodie and a film aficionado.