Russiagate Timeline
2014
February - As Kiev's Maidan coup culminates, Sir Richard Dearlove organizes a private dinner in Cambridge where DIA head Gen. Michael Flynn was the guest of honor. Four months before, Flynn had visited Moscow's military intelligence (GRU), as the Russians were helping with the investigation of the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorists. Christopher Andrew, the official MI5 historian, brought his post-grad student Svetlana Lokhova to the event, with whom Flynn spoke. (This event was the basis of Halper's 2016 salacious insinuation to the FBI that Flynn was connected to Russians via a 'honeypot,' Lokhova. (See Aug 11, 2016.) Flynn resigned his DIA post two months later, on the losing side of a policy fight with the Obama administration.
April - Robert Hannigan is announced as new Director of the GCHG (taking office in November). It is reported that the (2013) Snowden revelations ended Ian Lobben's tenure, which would indicate that Hannigan was considered the man to handle such problems.
2015
March 2 - The New York Times reports that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, exclusively used her own private email server rather than the secured government-issued one. (Four months earlier, hard-copy of over 30,000 emails were turned over to the FBI, but almost 32,000 were kept back as of a personal nature.) Hence, it was public knowledge that her server had been unsecured from when she first became Secretary of State in 2009. This should not be confused with the DNC emails downloaded in 2016, related to the primary campaign against Bernie Sanders. [See July 5, 2016.]
June 16 - Trump announces his candidacy for president.
Summer - Hannigan's GCHQ cyber security team first detects “evidence” of "suspicious contacts" between "people we believe are Russian intelligence agents" and Trump associates, according to Luke Harding of The Guardian. Since Flynn also first meets with Trump this summer at the invitation of his team, Flynn would have met the category of "people we believe are Russian intelligence agents." Harding also cites "sources in the US and the UK" from which GCHQ was picking up such links through the first half of 2016. (While UK sources would be obvious, it is curious which US sources would be providing info on the GCHQ operation. First on the list would be Gina Haspel, the CIA station chief in London.)
2016
March 21 - 29-year-old George Papadopoulos is appointed a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. He is supposed to set up meetings with foreign leaders, including Russia, for the Trump campaign.
March 24 - Joseph Mifsud meets with Papadopoulos in London. He claims that he has important connections and introduces him to a Russian woman whom he falsely claims was Putin's niece.
April 26 - Mifsud and Papadopoulos meet in London where Mifsud tells him that he has intel that the Russians have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. It is unclear whether Mifsud actually mentions "thousands of emails" at this point, or after Assange's June announcement. Regardless, Papadopoulos apparently makes no attempt to solicit the intel. (Later, Robert Mueller would charge him with lying about when he learned from Mifsud that Russia may have dirt on Clinton in the form of emails.)
May 10 - During the intervening two weeks, the political counsellor at Israel's London Embassy, Christian Cantor, proposes that Ambassador Alexander Downer meet with Papadopoulos. His 'partner,' Erika Thompson, was a political counsellor for Downer at Australia's London High Commission, and set up the meeting at a London wine bar. Downer curiously makes clear to Papadopoulos that he is a big Hillary Clinton supporter, but then asks Papadopoulos whether he thought Trump could defeat her. Downer's May 11 cable to Canberra put on record his claim that Papadopoulos told him that "the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton..." (Only later does Downer tell American authorities that Papadopoulos apparently had prior knowledge of Russia's 'dirt' being DNC emails.) Papadopoulos later denied having told Downer about emails.
May 16 - Downer's cable to Canberra omits any statement that Russia had made an "offer to assist the Trump campaign." The phrase, used by the FBI to predicate their investigation, is included in Erika Thompson's May 16 cable, apparently using her own words to characterize Papadopoulos' conversation.
June 12 - Julian Assange announces that Wikileaks has emails of Hillary Clinton that would be released soon.
June 14 - Crowdstrike announces an intrusion into the DNC headquarters–with evidence left behind in Cyrillic characters–a footprint known to be a specialty of the CIA's Marble Framework operation, which can mimic foreign IP addresses.
June 15 - The "Guccifer 2.0" fabrication surfaces online, proclaimed as supposed evidence of the hand of Russian military intelligence.
June 20 - Christopher Steele's first memo on Trump-Russia connections is sent via encrypted mail to Glenn Simpson's Fusion GPS, which was on the payroll of the Clinton campaign. It says that Russians have both compromising material on Trump involving his sex perversions and a "dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton" which has "been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years" from various trips she made to Russia. There is no mention of Moscow having thousands, or any, emails. Steele then goes to Rome to brief an FBI contact, likely Michael Gaeta (see July 5).
July - GCHQ head Hannigan flies to D.C. to brief John Brennan in person on evidence of Russian cyber ops regarding the U.S. election.
July 5 - Christopher Steele meets in London with Michael Gaeta, the head of the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit focused upon Russia, Georgia and Ukraine. The two had worked together on anti-Russia operations from no later than 2010. It was Victoria Nuland's office that authorized his trip to London. (Nuland was a prime recipient of Steele's 'intel' prior to the FBI.) Steele gives Gaeta his dossier material.
July 5 - FBI Director James Comey makes a televised statement announcing the FBI would recommend no charges in the inquiry into Clinton's use of a private email account to transmit official, public material. Also transmitted was classified material on an unsecured account. He dismisses the matter by saying that Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” with classified material.
Early July - Cambridge University holds a lecture series covering "Trump's maverick candidacy." Stefan Halper offers that "the deficits in Clinton's campaign" mean the election is "almost too close to call," but if the media "continue to focus on Trump, he will lose."
Mid-July - Sir Richard Dearlove speaks privately with Stefan Halper at a Cambridge University conference attended by Carter Page, then a Trump campaign adviser. Halper then approaches Page and begins to cultivate him (e.g, dinner offers). Halper's FBI handler later told the Inspector General that they had tasked Halper ("Source 2") to target Page, George Papadopoulos, and another unnamed high-ranking Trump campaign official. When it’s found out that Halper also has contacts with Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, the FBI handler calls it "serendipitous" that he "had contacts with three of their four subjects" that they were targeting. They "couldn't believe [their] luck." At the same conference is Clinton's close associate, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, and she also attends a small, private dinner with Halper. A few days later she announces: “The truth is that a Trump victory in November would be a gift to Vladimir Putin, and given what we’ve learned about Russia’s recent actions, Putin is eager to see Trump win."
Mid-July - According to her later testimony, Victoria Nuland gets some of the Christopher Steele material.
July 21 - The FBI records (supposedly for the first time) a Democratic Party plot to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia. On this day, an FBI agent in a New England field office reports that an informant had told them that the DNC and another unnamed individual hired an investigative firm to look into Trump’s dealings with Russia.
July 22 - WikiLeaks releases the first batch of emails derived from DNC computers, three days before the Democratic convention. They show, among other things, that the DNC was plotting to impede Bernie Sander’s campaign challenge to Clinton.
July 26 - Hillary Clinton (this is the day that she is nominated the Democratic candidate for president) approves a proposal from one of her campaign foreign policy advisers to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services" - this, according to intelligence reviewed by special councel John Durham's special investigation. The CIA receives this intel within days.
FBI Runs with the British Ball
July 26 - The U.S. Embassy in London is officially given the Downer testimony from the May 10 meeting with Papadopoulos. (At some point after May 10, Downer had also contacted the deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in London, Elizabeth Dibble. Dibble would leave government work a few months later, after 36 years.) However, later special counsel Robert Mueller ended up concluding that Papadopoulos never communicated that information to anyone on the Trump campaign and had no involvement in or knowledge of Russian election activities other than the hearsay of what Misfud had told him in March and April 2016.) What London provides becomes the sole basis on which the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane is opened.
July 31 - Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, writes the memo opening the Russian collusion investigation, Crossfire Hurricane. Strzok says that he was directed to do this by then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Aug 1 - The FBI leadership orders the bulk of the corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation to be closed. Later, agents said that the directive to do so came from Comey, who cited an “undisclosed counterintelligence concern” - one that he ultimately never revealed.
Aug 2 - Downer and Thompson tell Peter Strzok that they heard Papadopoulos suggest back in May that Russia had damaging information on Clinton. Later, special counsel John Durham noted that Strzok was given vague information with no specifics, but “shortly thereafter, the FBI opened full investigations of Papadopoulos, Carter Page, General Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort.” (What instructions Dearlove may have conveyed to Stefan Halper 2-3 weeks earlier at Cambridge about Page remained unknown, but Papadopoulos, Page and Flynn were all tracked by London, long before Washington.)
Aug 3 - CIA Director John Brennan briefs President Obama in the White House Situation Room on Russian involvement with the U.S. election. Also present are James Comey and VP Joe Biden. Brennan also tells Obama about the intel that Clinton is planning to create a scandal tying Trump to Russia. (See July 26.)
Aug 8 - Strzok and Lisa Page, then an FBI lawyer on the Russia investigation, privately assure each other that they can prevent Trump’s election. Page asks:“[Trump’s] not going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok, the lead investigator for Crossfire Hurricane, assures her: “No. No, he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
Aug 11 - Halper’s long-time FBI handler, Stephen Somma, visits Halper at his home where Halper volunteers to track Papadopoulos. Somma says that Halper also offered to include the other three targets, Page, Flynn and Manafort. Halper also offers his Flynn-Lokhova 'honeypot' story. (See Feb 2014 Cambridge event.) Halper tells Somma that the Cambridge group was "surprised" that, after a private dinner, Lokhova joined Flynn in the cab going back to London and that he was "suspicious of Lokohova" (even though Lokhova, a British citizen had lived there since 1999 and was the post-grad student of his close associate, MI5 historian Christopher Andrew). Apparently Halper enjoyed selling gossip. While Flynn spoke at the event, he did not attend the private dinner afterwards. Otherwise, the wire that Halper wore for meetings with Page and Papadopoulos would turn out to contain nothing of import about collusion with Russia, yet the FBI used the portion on Page for their four FISA applications.
Aug 8 - Strzok and Lisa Page, then an FBI lawyer on the Russia investigation, privately assure each other they can prevent Trump’s election. “[Trump’s] not going to become president, right? Right?!” Page writes to Strzok. “No. No, he’s not,” Strzok replies. “We’ll stop it." Strzok is the lead investigator on Crossfire Hurricane.
Aug 19 - Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, resigns amid media reports and leaks scrutinizing his ties to Russia.
Aug 20 - The FBI directs a confidential human source (possibly Stefan Halper) to contact Page to try to extract information from him. During the conversation, Page says that he had never met Paul Manafort - a problem for a central Steele dossier allegation that Page and Manafort were working together as the masterminds of the Russian collusion scheme.
Sept 2 - As intelligence agencies coordinated on the creation of an intelligence community assessment related to Russian election threats, an FBI intelligence analyst sends an email to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by James Clapper, saying that the FBI is “uncomfortable” with the statement, “Russia does intend to disrupt our elections." It asks for language about Russia’s motivations to be “softened” in a draft document, according to emails declassified by ODNI head Tulsi Gabbard in July, 2025. The FBI analyst says that the bureau did not want to “mislead the reader to believe that the IC currently has information indicating Russia has a known intent to influence the elections.” The message suggests that intelligence officials do not fully believe Russia is trying to meddle in the election with the intent to hurt or help any specific candidate.
Sept - Sometime during the month, Steele returns to Rome to brief an FBI team. Afterwards, he reportedly says that the FBI response to his briefing was one of 'shock and horror.'
Sept 7 - CIA officials send a referral to the FBI’s Comey and Strzok regarding the Clinton campaign’s proposal to create a scandal tying Trump to Russia. (See July 26.)
Sept 12 - Intel agencies circulate an intelligence community assessment (ICA) draft that did not find that Russia had any intent to help Trump in any way. However, over the dissent from the NSA and FBI, Brennan's operation states: “We judge Russia has conducted cyber and intelligence operations that suggest that it has potential interest in disrupting the U.S. presidential election. The Kremlin’s cyber penetration of a U.S. political party’s servers [asserted as fact] and the timing of the probable subsequent leak of stolen data suggest that Russia is motivated to exploit the period surrounding the U.S. presidential election." The FBI and the NSA record their dissent in this assessment of the DNC email leak: “FBI and NSA, however, have low confidence in the attribution of the data leaks to Russia. They agree that the disclosures appear consistent with what we might expect from Russian influence activities, but note that we lack sufficient technical details to correlate the information posted online to Russian state-sponsored actors.” (Later, former NSA expert Bill Binney would show from technical details that the data leaks were not possible from an overseas hack, but fully consistent with a download directly from the computers.)
Sept 14 - Undercover FBI agents arrange the first of several meetings with Papadopoulos, during which they try to draw him into admitting things about Russia. The following day, the FBI arranges for Papadopoulos to meet with one of its confidential human sources, who was also secretly recording him. Papadopoulos repeatedly denies knowing anything about the source of Wikileaks, and he emphatically denies that anyone on the Trump campaign was working with the Russians. Later, Special counsel John Durham wrote: “This was arguably the most significant information the FBI had gathered after approximately six weeks of investigative effort to evaluate the information it had received from Australia. Yet the FBI chose to discount the information and assessed it to mean the opposite of what was explicitly said.”
Sept 17 - Jonathan Winer emails Victoria Nuland requesting a 'face-to-face' on the "Russian matter." Steele comes to Washington and meets with Winer, assumedly after the meeting with Nuland (likely between Sept 19 and 22). Later, Winer reported: “Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier’… I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state [John Kerry] needed to be made aware of this material.”
Sept 19 - The first six Steele reports formally reach the Crossfire Hurricane team. Although Steele and the firm paid by the Clinton campaign had been reaching out to the FBI for over two months, those reports supposedly had not yet made their way to the agents on the case. Durham later suggested that the delay “raises the question of whether the FBI had misgivings from the start about the provenance and reliability of the Steele Reports.”
Sept 21 - FBI personnel place unverified information from the Steele dossier in the earliest draft of its first application for a surveillance warrant for Carter Page.
Sept 19 and 22 - Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS and Steele's associate, contacts Jonathan Winer (who then served as State’s special envoy for Libya) days ahead of the publication of a Yahoo! News article, the first story to cite information gathered by Steele.
Sept 22 - Steele meets in Washington, D.C. with a series of reporters, planting stories about Trump and Russia.
Sept 23 - Michael Isikoff puts out the first leak related to the Trump-Russia investigation, citing “multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue” to describe the FBI’s interest in Page and his ties to the Kremlin. Federal authorities would cite it in a FISA warrant on Page as a supporting document to the Steele dossier, even though it was based upon Steele's briefing to Isikoff and others.
Sept 25 - Two days after the article about the FBI’s interest in him, Page writes a letter to James Comey offering to voluntarily come in for an interview. The FBI declines to accept and continues its effort to wiretap him instead.
Oct 3 - FBI agents meet with Steele in Rome and offer him $1 million if he can provide corroboration for his sensational claims linking Trump and his aides to Russia (which, of course, he couldn’t.) Later in the month, Steele again comes to Washington, D.C. and briefs the State Department.
Oct 21 - The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approves the first of four FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page. The application for the wiretap includes unverified rumors from the Steele dossier. The investigation continues to be based on nothing more than Downer's May 10 version of the Papadopoulos conversation and the Steele dossier.
The Surprise Happened
Nov 8 - Trump pulls off an upset and defeats Clinton in the presidential race.
Nov 10 - Obama warns Trump about Michael Flynn.
Nov 18 - Trump names Flynn as National Security Advisor.
Nov 18 - A Halifax International Security Forum meeting finds Trump's surprise victory to be on everyone's mind. It is there that Sir Andrew Wood, an Orbis associate and a former UK ambassador to Russia, briefs Sen. John McCain, who then sends David Kramer to meet Steele in London. The next day Kramer is back in the US and Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson gives McCain a copy of the dossier (which now had the 'Russian hacking' section in it).
Dec 5 - The House Intelligence Committee receives its first post-election briefing on Russian election meddling from a top DNI official. Significantly, the briefing does not include the judgment that Putin aspired to help Trump win. Indeed, at the time, this is not the intelligence community’s view. Obama and Brennan would shortly fix that problem.
Dec 8 - The daily intelligence report for President Obama–which finds that no Russian or criminal actors had impacted vote counts in the election–is suppressed. This was a major intervention. An NSC meeting is called for Dec. 9. At some point, Sen. McCain, who is channeling Steele material, calls and meets with Comey.
Dec. 9 - The day opens with the New York Times and the Washington Post publishing leaks, suggesting that the intelligence community has already concluded that Putin wanted to help Trump win. “The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter,” the Washington Post reports. A “senior U.S. official” describes this assessment as a “consensus view,” the report says. (DNI Tulsa Gabbard's newly-released materials have revealed that this was not true.) The next month would involve tailoring an ICA to fit this policy decision.
Dec 9 - At the NSC meeting with Obama, Brennan, Clapper and others, a new order goes out from the outgoing President. DNI Clapper’s assistant sends an email to the intelligence community with the subject line, ‘POTUS Tasking on Russian Election Meddling,’ tasking ODNI principals to create a new assessment per the President’s request. According to the newly-declassified House Intelligence Committee 2020 report, Brennan orders the five CIA analysts he had selected to write up the first draft of the assessment to include information from “substandard reporting,” which had been collected before the election but had been judged at the time to be too unreliable to use in any way. This is done "to support claims that Putin aspired to help Trump win.” The draft includes a deceptively clipped fragment of a sentence, which in the context of the report from which it was clipped, appears to mean something different. This sentence fragment ultimately “constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest Putin ‘aspired’ to help Trump win,” congressional investigators found.
Further, Brennan also severely limits access to the underlying intelligence that he directed his analysts to use for the assessment to support the conclusion that Putin aspired to help Trump win. He claims that this is because the intelligence is so sensitive. Yet, the January 2017 ICA’s final conclusion is spelled out in a classified version of the final report that is widely circulated (ultimately to 250 government officials), “an extraordinarily high number for such a sensitive document.”
Dec 16 - On Brennan’s orders (the 2020 report found), the CIA drafters dig up a second piece of “unverified and implausible” information, which is of unknown origin, to use in the intelligence assessment. Like the first piece of substandard reporting, CIA analysts collected it before the election but had declined to use it anywhere because it is not deemed credible. Yet simultaneously, the CIA drafters “selectively excluded information from reliable intelligence sources that senior Russian officials had serious reservations about how a potential Trump administration could be bad for Moscow and complicate repairing relations with Washington.” Of course, including that information in the assessment from sources far more reliable than what Brennan had ordered his team to use, would have directly undermined the ICA’s final judgement that Putin wanted Trump to win.
Dec 17 - Simultaneously (and unexpectedly), resignations from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar gang occur. Dearlove, Halper and historian Peter Martland all resign. (Their cover story–that they don't wish to be compromised by Moscow–should be taken for what it's worth; however, various players from the London side would soon separate from the compromised positions from which they operated in the previous couple of years.)
Dec 19 - When representatives from multiple intelligence agencies meet to go over a first draft of the intelligence community assessment, several express “discomfort” with the claim that Putin aspired to help Trump win the election due to a lack of evidence.
John Ratcliffe’s memo comments that, among the information withheld from that draft and subsequent ones, was the fact that the intel agencies knew Russia had obtained emails showing Clinton was in poor physical health, was suffering from a mental health crisis, benefitting from political pressure exerted on her behalf over the FBI to close the Clinton email and Foundation investigations, and had, as secretary of state, traded favors in exchange for political support. The 2020 House Intelligence Committee investigators concluded that the fact that Putin chose not to leak any of this during the campaign showed that if Putin had indeed aspired to help Trump win, he would have released that information. However, none of this is included in the ICA draft. Instead, the next day, the draft goes from the multiple agencies and into a review process confined to Brennan's handpicked group.
Dec 22-23 - Trump's selected NSA head, Gen. Michael Flynn, discusses with Russia's ambassador to the U.S. Kislyak (per a request from "very senior" Trump transition team official) to get Moscow to kill a UN Security Council resolution 2334 on illegal Israeli settlements. Kislyak says that they won't do that. (Hence, the measure passed 14-0 and the U.S. was forced to go on record abstaining.)
Dec 25 - The plane of the Red Army Chorus Alexandrov crashes on the way to Syria. Flynn's message to Kislyak extends Christmas greetings and offers condolences on the Alexandrov tragedy.
Dec 28 - Outgoing President Obama affirms the 'election meddling' charges, imposes sanctions on Russia and, during Russia's 12-day celebration of Christmas, expels 35 of its diplomats. Moscow holds back from an immediate response and Ambassador Kislyak asks for a phone conversation with Flynn.
Dec 29 - The CIA’s deputy director for analysis writes an email to Brennan warning that including information from the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment risks “the credibility of the entire paper” due to the dossier’s unreliable claims. Contrary to his later denials, (e.g. during a closed-door interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018), Brennan insists on its inclusion. At some point in this process (and likely this particular day), a senior CIA officer objects to Brennan using Steele's dossier "because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards," yet Brennan, when "confronted with the dossier's many flaws," says, "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?"
Dec 29 - Obama escalates, asserting now that it was specifically Russia's GRU that had hacked the DNC. After a call with Kislyak, Flynn contacts a senior official on the transition team regarding a response, and then calls Kislyak urging Russia not to escalate the situation. As US intel was monitoring their exchanges, they become concerned, since they had intended for Moscow to escalate.
Dec 30 - Putin announces that he will not retaliate. Trump praises Putin for the decision, writing in a Twitter post, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin). I always knew he was very smart!” It’s standard procedure to take up such matters with an incoming administration, but to take such provocative and unnecessary steps three weeks prior to leaving office is highly unusual.
2017
Jan. 3 - Sen. Charles Schumer warns Trump to get in line: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways to Sunday, getting back at you."
Jan. 5 - Obama is briefed that, not just the GRU, but Putin himself had authorized the hacking of the DNC.
Jan 6 - The final classified and unclassified versions of the ICA are published. Obama’s top intel officials brief Trump on the ICA’s findings. The briefing includes the Steele dossier allegations, which the ICA had included in a classified appendix. After the officials finish, Comey stays behind to convey to Trump privately that the 'prostitutes peeing' story may get circulated. (Later, Comey would, almost clinically, claim that he didn't want this to be a J. Edgar Hoover moment–that is, to be interpreted as blackmail. Apparently, Trump fails to bend to either Schumer's public or Comey's private warnings.
Jan 10 - Four days later, Buzzfeed becomes the first outlet to publish the Steele dossiers in full.
Some Dramatis Personae
Christopher David Steele - Steele was a British intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service from 1987 until his retirement in 2009. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence.
Sir Richard Dearlove - Retired head of MI6. Christopher Steele was his underling.
Christopher Andrew - Professor at Cambridge University and the official MI5 historian. He founded the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, key to the Russiagate operation.
Robert Hannigan - Director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) from November 2014 – April 2017.
Stefan Halper - From 1979-84, he worked with his father-in-law, CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline and some of his CIA team on different projects. In 1983, he joined Cline on the board of the National Intelligence Security Center. Though employed as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, 1981-84, he helped organize the founding of Palmer National Bank, which channeled funds to a Swiss bank account controlled by Oliver North, to fund the Contras. He left in 1984 to become the chairman of Palmer. The 1994 case against him for possession of crack cocaine was terminated and the case file itself was destroyed. A Cambridge University professor, he became friends with Dearlove (and his underling Christopher Steele), and Christopher Andrew no later than 1996 and at some point became an informant for the CIA and passed intel to the British pair. He received around $1.2 million from the FBI over the years as their confidential informant. Halper is also close to the Washington Post's David Ignatius.
Glenn Simpson - Simpson’s Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele's Orbis were set up in 2009, the first year of the Obama Administration. The two had known some of the same FBI people and shared their 'expertise' on Russia. A professional partnership was set up between Fusion and Orbis. Both Simpson and Steel worked for Russian oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs, tracing large sums concealed behind offshore companies, largely stemming from the 1990s 'fire sales' of government assets.
Joseph Mifsud - Not properly appreciated is that Mifsud's position as Director of London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD) made him a Chatham House operative (the LAD was a member of Chatham House). The LAD was closed down in 2017 and Mifsud became a mystery man. The director of Chatham House would claim: "I've never heard of him." Otherwise, both Boris Johnson and then Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood were photographed with Mifsud. Mifsud would defer questions about his role by saying: "Secret agent! I never got a penny from the Russians: my conscience is clean."
Alexander Downer - Australia's High Commissioner in London (Feb 2014 to April 2018). Downer has been on the Advisory Board of Britain's strategic intelligence and advisory firm Hakluyt & Company and reportedly has played a leading role in Australia in stopping the replacement of the monarchy with a president. After his role with Papadopoulos, he became Chair of Trustees at the UK think tank Policy Exchange and the Executive Chairman of the International School of Government at King's College, London. When asked about Papadopoulos' contrary view of their meeting, he said: "This sort of idea that there is a kind of a ASIS-ASIO-MI6-MI5-FBI-CIA-Ukrainian Government conspiracy to bring down the Trump administration, that this is treason, that I should be in Guantanamo Bay... I mean it's a little bit sad that people take that kind of thought seriously."
Christian Cantor - As Political Counsellor at Israel's Embassy in London (Sept 2012 - Sept 2017), Cantor was listed as responsible for the strategic portfolio, Iran sanctions and nuclear files. Afterwards, he handled the Iran nuclear file in Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Oct 2017 - Sept 2019).