...Steele told ABC News that the mission expanded almost immediately into two main threads: "One was what the Russians were doing in terms of potential interference in the campaign; and two, what the links were between Trump and the Trump campaign and Russia," Steele said.
"We realized it was potentially quite a big project and potentially quite a controversial project," he added. "But when we went into it, we weren't expecting to find a great deal."
Steele soon became convinced he had wandered into something more involved, and more concerning.
The four pillars
In defending his work, Steele describes his intelligence reports as resting on "four pillars" of information that he believes have held up over time as accurate.
"One was,
there was a large-scale Russian interference campaign in the American election in 2016," he said."The second was that
this had been authorized and ordered at the highest levels, including Putin," he said."The third had been that
the objective of this was to damage Hillary Clinton and to try and get this rather unorthodox candidate, Donald Trump, elected," Steele said. "And the fourth was,
there was evidence of collusion between Trump and people around Trump and the Russians."
Part of the challenge -- and the intrigue -- of Steele's reporting is that much of it is virtually impossible for lay people to verify. When the Department of Justice's inspector general examined the dossier's claims, he concluded that what Steele described as "raw intelligence" amounted to little more than rumor and bar talk.
Very little corroborating evidence has emerged to support the dossier. But neither, Steele points out, has there been much concrete contradictory evidence either.
His critics have taken issue with that particular line of defense.
"The common refrain when people were speaking about the dossier is, 'Well, we don't know if that's not true,'" Meier said. "People who are intelligence operatives anchor their reports to rumors, to hearsay, to bar talk, to smoke. That's the world that Christopher Steele operated in. And I guess that's the world he continues to operate in. I prefer the world of facts. That's the world I'm comfortable in."
https://abc7chicago.com/christopher-steele-dossier-donald-trump-russia/11139511/