Tweet with a location 
 
 You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| The Anti-Defamation League and the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect both condemned Mr. Trump for what they characterized as trivializing one of the singular horrors of the 20th century to score a political point. 
 
 “Has he no sense of shame?” said Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center, the American chapter of an international group that fights prejudice to honor the legacy of Anne Frank, the teenage diarist who perished in the Holocaust in 1945. 
 
 “The president-elect has shown the grossest possible insensitivity to survivors of the Holocaust before he even takes office,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Either he is completely callous in attacking U.S. intelligence, or he is so ignorant of history that you would never want this man to be president.” 
 
 Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Mr. Trump’s analogy was “not only an inappropriate comparison on the merits, but it also coarsens our discourse.” 
 
 “We have a long record of speaking out when both Democrats and Republicans engage in such overheated rhetoric,” he said. “It would be helpful for the president-elect to explain his intentions or apologize for the remark.” ||||| The extraordinary but unverified documents published on Tuesday on Donald Trump’s ties with Moscow began life as a piece of opposition research, which has become as much a part of US politics as yard signs and coloured balloons. 
 
 
 
 There is a small industry of research and investigative firms in Washington, typically staffed by a mix of former journalists and security officials, adept at finding information about politicians that the politicians would rather stay hidden. The firms often do not know who exactly is hiring them; the request could come from a law firm acting on behalf of a client from one of the parties. 
 
 In this case, the request for opposition research on Donald Trump came from one of his Republican opponents in the primary campaign. The research firm then hired one of its sub-contractors who it used regularly on all things Russian: a retired western European former counter-intelligence official, with a long history of dealing with the shadow world of Moscow’s spooks and siloviki (securocrats). 
 
 Explainer: what is in the Trump-Russia dossier John McCain passed to the FBI? Read more 
 
 By the time the contractor had started his research, however, the Republican primary was over. The original client had dropped out, but the firm that had hired him had found a new, Democratic client. This was not necessarily the Hillary Clinton campaign or the Democratic National Committee. Opposition research is frequently financed by wealthy individuals who have donated all they can and are looking for other ways to help. 
 
 By July, the counter-intelligence contractor had collected a significant amount of material based on Russian sources who he had grown to trust over the years – not just in Moscow, but also among oligarchs living in the west. He delivered his reports, but the gravity of their contents weighed on him. If the allegations were real, their implications were overwhelming. 
 
 He delivered a set to former colleagues in the FBI, whose counter-intelligence division would be the appropriate body to investigate. It is believed he also passed a copy to his own country’s intelligence service, but it felt constrained in what action it could take and left it up to the Americans to do their own investigation and draw their own conclusions. 
 
 As summer turned to autumn, the investigator was asked for more information by the FBI but heard nothing back about any investigation. The bureau seemed obsessed instead with classified material that flowed through a private email server set up by Clinton’s aides. The FBI’s director, James Comey, threw the election into a spin 11 days before the vote by announcing his investigators were examining newly discovered material. 
 
 The former intelligence official grew concerned that there was a cover-up in progress. On a trip to New York in October, he was persuaded to tell his story to David Corn, the Washington editor of Mother Jones, who first reported the existence of the material on 31 October. 
 
 The FBI however continued to refuse to comment on the issue, despite reports that it had requested and perhaps acquired a warrant for further investigation from the Foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court. The silence was not altogether surprising. The FBI counter-intelligence division, headquartered in Washington, is extremely secretive, much more so than the New York field office, which had strong links to former prosecutor and mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was by then working for Trump. The threat of leaks from New York about Clinton emails had reportedly pushed Comey into making his October surprise announcement. 
 
 Donald Trump press conference: Russia allegations something 'Nazi Germany' would have done – live Read more 
 
 In mid-November, the documents took another route into Washington that ultimately led to them being mentioned in the joint intelligence report on Russian interference that was delivered to President Obama and President-elect Trump. On 18 November, the annual Halifax International Security Forum opened in the Canadian city, bringing together serving and former security and foreign policy officials from around the world. 
 
 Senator John McCain, a hawkish Republican, was there and was introduced to a former senior western diplomat who had seen the documents, knew their source and thought him highly reliable. McCain decided the implications were sufficiently alarming to dispatch a trusted emissary, a former US official, to meet the source and find out more. 
 
 The emissary hastily arranged a transatlantic flight and met the source at the airport as arranged. (The Guardian has agreed not to specify the city or country where the meeting took place.) The meeting had a certain cold war tradecraft to it, as he was told to look for a man with a copy of the Financial Times. Having found each other, the retired counter-intelligence officer drove the emissary to his house, where they discussed the documents and their background. 
 
 The emissary flew back within 24 hours and showed McCain the documents, saying it was hard to impossible to verify them without a proper investigation. McCain said he was reluctant to get involved, lest it be perceived as payback for insulting remarks Trump had made about him during his rambunctious campaign. 
 
 However, on 9 December, McCain arranged a one-on-one meeting with Comey, with no aides present, and handed them over. 
 
 BuzzFeed publishes unsubstantiated Trump report, raising ethics questions Read more 
 
 “Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI. That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue,” the senator said in a statement on Wednesday morning. 
 
 It is not clear what underpinned the FBI’s decision to include a summary of the documents in its highly classified briefing to the president and president-elect and their top staff, before the bureau had completed its investigation. It may have been as a defensive measure, to prove for posterity that it was not involved in a cover-up, or because its investigators believed them to be credible. 
 
 Whatever the motive, it was quickly leaked – first to CNN, which reported on the material on Wednesday. That triggered a controversial decision by BuzzFeed to publish an unredacted version of the documents on its website. It is unclear where the BuzzFeed version came from. The author of the reports had been insistent on blotting out references to his Russian sources in the copies he gave to the press, out of fear for their safety. The unredacted version could have come from the original client, who commissioned the research, or from intermediaries between the counter-intelligence contractor and the client. ||||| In January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further. This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.” Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss, as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry, and damaging those behaviors might be. The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There is a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combating those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach. But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating from the very precincts designed to propagandize and lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and basic human rationality. And casually branding domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it. Beyond all that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents can do for him than attacking him with such lowly, shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who is going to believe the people and institutions who have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any assertions no matter how factually baseless, who deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring accuracy? All of these toxic ingredients were on full display yesterday as the Deep State unleashed its tawdriest and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting credibility in and then causing the public disclosure of a completely unvetted and unverified document, compiled by a paid, anonymous operative while he was working for both GOP and Democratic opponents of Trump, accusing Trump of a wide range of crimes, corrupt acts, and salacious private conduct. The reaction to all of this illustrates that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers, so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts to undermine it. For months, the CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.” It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decadeslong international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it. Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework — the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest, civil disobedience — that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords. Yet craving Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic operatives and media figures are doing. Any doubt about that is now dispelled. Just last week, Chuck Schumer issued a warning to Trump, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being “really dumb” by challenging the unelected intelligence community because of all the ways they possess to destroy those who dare to stand up to them: 
 
 Chuck Schumer on Trump's tweet hitting intel community: "He's being really dumb to do this." https://t.co/MOcU8ruOPK — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 4, 2017 
 
 And last night, many Democrats openly embraced and celebrated what was, so plainly, an attempt by the Deep State to sabotage an elected official who had defied it: ironically, its own form of blackmail. Back in October, a political operative and former employee of the British intelligence agency MI6 was being paid by Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump (before that, he was paid by anti-Trump Republicans). He tried to convince countless media outlets to publish a long memo he had written filled with explosive accusations about Trump’s treason, business corruption, and sexual escapades, with the overarching theme that Trump was in servitude to Moscow because they were blackmailing and bribing him. Despite how many had it, no media outlets published it. That was because these were anonymous claims unaccompanied by any evidence at all, and even in this more permissive new media environment, nobody was willing to be journalistically associated with it. As the New York Times’ Executive Editor Dean Baquet put it last night, he would not publish these “totally unsubstantiated” allegations because “we, like others, investigated the allegations and haven’t corroborated them, and we felt we’re not in the business of publishing things we can’t stand by.” The closest this operative got to success was convincing Mother Jones’s David Corn to publish an October 31 article reporting that “a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country” claims that “he provided the [FBI] with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump.” But because this was just an anonymous claim unaccompanied by any evidence or any specifics (which Corn withheld), it made very little impact. All of that changed yesterday. Why? What changed was the intelligence community’s resolution to cause this all to become public and to be viewed as credible. In December, John McCain provided a copy of this report to the FBI and demanded they take it seriously. At some point last week, the chiefs of the intelligence agencies decided to declare that this ex-British intelligence operative was “credible” enough that his allegations warranted briefing both Trump and Obama about them, thus stamping some sort of vague, indirect, and deniable official approval on these accusations. Someone — by all appearances, numerous officials — then went to CNN to tell the network they had done this, causing CNN to go on air and, in the gravest of tones, announce the “Breaking News” that “the nation’s top intelligence officials” briefed Obama and Trump that Russia had compiled information that “compromised President-elect Trump.” CNN refused to specify what these allegations were on the ground that it could not “verify” them. But with this document in the hands of multiple media outlets, it was only a matter of time — a small amount of time — before someone would step up and publish the whole thing. BuzzFeed quickly obliged, airing all of the unvetted, anonymous claims about Trump. Its editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, published a memo explaining that decision, saying that — although there was “serious reason to doubt the allegations” — BuzzFeed in general “errs on the side of publication” and “Americans can make up their own minds about the allegations.” Publishing this document predictably produced massive traffic (and thus profit) for the site, with millions of people viewing the article and presumably reading the “dossier.” One can certainly object to BuzzFeed’s decision and, as the New York Times noted this morning, many journalists are doing so. It’s almost impossible to imagine a scenario where it’s justifiable for a news outlet to publish a totally anonymous, unverified, unvetted document filled with scurrilous and inflammatory allegations about which its own editor-in-chief says there “is serious reason to doubt the allegations,” on the ground that they want to leave it to the public to decide whether to believe it. But even if one believes there is no such case where that is justified, yesterday’s circumstances presented the most compelling scenario possible for doing this. Once CNN strongly hinted at these allegations, it left it to the public imagination to conjure up the dirt Russia allegedly had to blackmail and control Trump. By publishing these accusations, BuzzFeed ended that speculation. More importantly, it allowed everyone to see how dubious this document is, one the CIA and CNN had elevated into some sort of grave national security threat. Almost immediately after it was published, the farcical nature of the “dossier” manifested. Not only was its author anonymous, but he was paid by Democrats (and, before that, by Trump’s GOP adversaries) to dig up dirt on Trump. Worse, he himself cited no evidence of any kind but instead relied on a string of other anonymous people in Russia he claims told him these things. Worse still, the document was filled with amateur errors. While many of the claims are inherently unverified, some can be confirmed. One such claim — that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen secretly traveled to Prague in August to meet with Russian officials — was strongly denied by Cohen, who insisted he had never been to Prague in his life (Prague is the same place that foreign intelligence officials claimed, in 2001, was the site of a nonexistent meeting between Iraqi officials and 9/11 hijackers, which contributed to 70 percent of Americans believing, as late as the fall of 2003, that Saddam personally planned the 9/11 attack). This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that “the FBI has found no evidence that [Cohen] traveled to the Czech Republic.” None of this stopped Democratic operatives and prominent media figures from treating these totally unverified and unvetted allegations as grave revelations. From Vox’s Zack Beauchamp: 
 
 Look, don't take anything in this dossier as gospel. But it's definitely evidence in favor of some pretty extraordinary claims. — Zack Beauchamp (@zackbeauchamp) January 10, 2017 
 
 BuzzFeed’s Borzou Daragahi posted a long series of tweets discussing the profound consequences of these revelations, only occasionally remembering to insert the rather important journalistic caveat “if true” in his meditations: 
 
 Whoa ????. So guessing the press conference tomorrow is off. https://t.co/e4iNrNKgrh pic.twitter.com/VEa44PeICe — Borzou Daragahi (@borzou) January 11, 2017 
 
 Stunning and believable narrative in leaked docs describing alleged rift in Kremlin over meddling in US elections https://t.co/e4iNrNKgrh pic.twitter.com/qY2TuSM5Fc — Borzou Daragahi (@borzou) January 11, 2017 
 
 According to raw intel file, Kremlin info ops regarded Trump, @DrJillStein, LaRouche and @GenFlynn all potential assets in war vs Clinton pic.twitter.com/3fxTcqUIUL — Borzou Daragahi (@borzou) January 11, 2017 
 
 Bombshell if true: Trump lawyer @MichaelCohen212 & Kremlin reps allegedly held clandestine August meeting in Prague https://t.co/e4iNrO1RiP pic.twitter.com/7FBZjJyXMq — Borzou Daragahi (@borzou) January 11, 2017 
 
 Meanwhile, liberal commentator Rebecca Solnit declared this to be a “smoking gun” that proves Trump’s “treason,” while Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas sounded the same theme: 
 
 With CNN confirming that intelligence chiefs consider this report credible, it's about time to start using the word "treason" — Markos Moulitsas (@markos) January 11, 2017 ||||| In June, the tenor of the effort suddenly changed. The Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, apparently by Russian government agents, and a mysterious figure calling himself “Guccifer 2.0” began to publish the stolen documents online. 
 
 Mr. Simpson hired Mr. Steele, a former British intelligence officer with whom he had worked before. Mr. Steele, in his early 50s, had served undercover in Moscow in the early 1990s and later was the top expert on Russia at the London headquarters of Britain’s spy service, MI6. When he stepped down in 2009, he started his own commercial intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence. 
 
 The former journalist and the former spy, according to people who know them, had similarly dark views of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former K.G.B. officer, and the varied tactics he and his intelligence operatives used to smear, blackmail or bribe their targets. 
 
 As a former spy who had carried out espionage inside Russia, Mr. Steele was in no position to travel to Moscow to study Mr. Trump’s connections there. Instead, he hired native Russian speakers to call informants inside Russia and made surreptitious contact with his own connections in the country as well. 
 
 Mr. Steele wrote up his findings in a series of memos, each a few pages long, that he began to deliver to Fusion GPS in June and continued at least until December. By then, the election was over, and neither Mr. Steele nor Mr. Simpson was being paid by a client, but they did not stop what they believed to be very important work. (Mr. Simpson declined to comment for this article, and Mr. Steele did not immediately reply to a request for comment.) 
 
 The memos described two different Russian operations. The first was a yearslong effort to find a way to influence Mr. Trump, perhaps because he had contacts with Russian oligarchs whom Mr. Putin wanted to keep track of. According to Mr. Steele’s memos, it used an array of familiar tactics: the gathering of “kompromat,” compromising material such as alleged tapes of Mr. Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, and proposals for business deals attractive to Mr. Trump. 
 
 The goal would probably never have been to make Mr. Trump a knowing agent of Russia, but to make him a source who might provide information to friendly Russian contacts. But if Mr. Putin and his agents wanted to entangle Mr. Trump using business deals, they did not do it very successfully. Mr. Trump has said he has no major properties there, though one of his sons said at a real estate conference in 2008 that “a lot of money” was “pouring in from Russia.” ||||| Democrats have resisted openly questioning Donald Trump’s legitimacy as the next president — despite Vladimir Putin’s efforts to get him elected, now acknowledged by Trump himself. 
 
 But the party is finding it increasingly difficult to hold back. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 Democrats are struggling with how far to go in exploiting Trump’s Russia troubles for political gain — wary of prolonging election-year acrimony and undermining confidence in American democracy, but tempted to try to maximize their chances of making Trump a one-term president. 
 
 The dilemma was heightened by this week’s explosive reports about Russia possibly obtaining compromising information on Trump, which he flatly denied at a news conference Wednesday. Where the party ends up could say a lot about how Democrats intend to mount a comeback from their shocking defeat at Trump’s hands in November. 
 
 For now, at least, they’re trying to straddle a middle ground, saying it’s up to Trump to prove his legitimacy with his own actions. That means backing stronger sanctions against Russia and allowing a full investigation into its apparent election meddling instead of bashing U.S. intelligence agencies and lavishing praise on Russian leader Putin. 
 
 “It casts a shadow over the presidency,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said in an interview. While Russia’s cyber-intrusion into the election “doesn’t change the outcome of the Electoral College,” he added, it does demonstrate that “there is no mandate for Trump’s vision or policies for America. He lost the popular vote — that’s the citizens’ vote — by a huge margin.” 
 
 Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) was more direct in his challenge to Trump’s “bizarre and so otherwise inexplicable” refusal to agree with the intelligence community’s findings that Russia mounted a campaign to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the White House. 
 
 “What is the nature of your compulsion to deny and to avoid this conversation?” Connolly said he would like to ask Trump. He warned Republicans who have sidestepped Trump’s friendliness toward Russia that “you put yourself at great peril depending on subsequent facts” by embracing any “rationalization of this Russian interference and possible troubling relationship between the president-elect and Putin.” 
 
 So far, House Democrats are more willing than their Senate counterparts to assert that Trump’s presidential victory has lost credibility due to Russian meddling. Even before Trump’s Russia troubles deepened late Tuesday, two members of House Democratic leadership wryly nicknamed him “Moscow Donald” during a news conference. 
 
 “This was the most un-American election ever,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a member of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which oversees human rights in the region. 
 
 If Trump commits to “stronger sanctions” against Russia, Cohen added, “I think people would feel comfortable that he would put America first. It would maybe limit people’s concerns that there was a relationship with Russia that was unhealthy that we don’t know about. People think Putin had something on him.” 
 
 California Rep. Eric Swalwell, who’s helped lead a Democratic push for an independent commission to investigate Russian hacking, said lawmakers should not worry about appearing to try to invalidate the results of the election because there is no evidence that Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia. 
 
 “There’s a fear that, if you acknowledge it, you’re putting an asterisk on our president-elect, and that’s really a short-sighted way of looking at this,” Swalwell said in an interview. “It’s only an asterisk if there was any collaboration.” 
 
 Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have called for further investigation into links between Trump emissaries and Russia, however. FBI Director James Comey said during Senate testimony Tuesday that he could neither confirm nor deny a probe of alleged coordination between Trump allies and Russia. 
 
 “He can legitimize himself by being forthcoming about his global interests,” Swalwell said, reviving long-running Democratic insistence that Trump follow presidential precedent and release his tax returns. 
 
 Senior Democrats are renewing their push for an independent, bipartisan commission to probe Russia’s meddling following the revelation, first reported by CNN, that U.S. intelligence officials briefed Trump on Russia’s alleged attempts to collect compromising information on him. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Wednesday that Trump’s friendliness toward Russia is “even more worrisome” in light of the reports, acknowledging they remain uncorroborated. 
 
 “The allegation that an American president could be susceptible to blackmail by a hostile foreign government is historic and deeply troubling,” Durbin said in a statement. “It makes the resistance of Republican leaders in the Senate and House to a fulsome investigation all the more inexplicable.” 
 
 Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen says Russia's preference for Donald Trump in the November election is not in dispute. | AP Photo 
 
 Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), chairman of Senate Democrats’ campaign committee, said in a Tuesday interview before the CNN report that while “it’s unknowable to what extent Russian interference affected the outcome” of the election, Moscow’s preference for Trump isn’t in dispute. 
 
 “What we do know is they were working hard to elect Donald Trump and try to disqualify Hillary Clinton, and that means it’s really important that we not only shine a light on what happened,” Van Hollen said, “but that we protect our electoral system and we sanction the Russians.” 
 
 Several Democrats steered clear of questioning Trump’s validity. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, one of several Democrats who joined four Republican senators Tuesday on a new Russia sanctions bill, said the Putin regime’s involvement in the election was critical — not what that involvement says about Trump’s victory. 
 
 “I don’t even pass an opinion on whether it affected the legitimacy of his election,” Menendez said. 
 
 Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) offered a road map for his party’s messaging efforts, blaming Trump for putting his own legitimacy at risk by resisting intelligence reports and underscoring Democrats’ interest in a bipartisan process. 
 
 “What undermines the incoming president is his unwillingness to agree with the intelligence community,” Schatz said in an interview. “There are very few serious members of Congress who are using this to question the legitimacy of the president-elect, but there are very many people on both sides who want to get to the bottom of this — not for the purpose of re-litigating 2016, but for the purpose of protecting our republic.” ||||| President-elect Donald Trump says allegations made about him in an unverified dossier prepared by ex-British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, are completely fabricated. WSJ’s Jason Bellini breaks down what we know about the material and the person behind it. Photo: Getty. 
 
 A former British intelligence officer who is now a director of a private security-and-investigations firm has been identified as the author of the dossier of unverified allegations about President-elect Donald Trump’s activities and connections in Russia, people familiar with the matter say. 
 
 Christopher Steele, a director of London-based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., prepared the dossier, the people said. The document, which an official close to the matter said was prepared under contract to both Republican and Democratic...
– The author of the explosive dossier dogging Donald Trump less than 10 days before his inauguration has been named as a former British intelligence officer—but the investigative firm he co-directs won't confirm or deny his involvement. Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that the document was prepared by Christopher Steele, a former Russia expert in Britain's spy service who founded the Orbis Business Intelligence research firm in 2009. The New York Times, in a look at how the dossier came to light, reports that Steele was hired by Washington research firm Fusion GPS, which was hired by a wealthy GOP donor in the fall of 2015 to compile anti-Trump material. After Trump became the presumptive nominee, the GOP donor no longer needed the research firm's services, but wealthy Democratic donors stepped in, and Steele continued to send monthly memos detailing alleged Russian efforts to both compromise Trump and assist his campaign, per the Times' sources. In other coverage: The Guardian looks at John McCain's involvement, which apparently included clandestine efforts to obtain the dossier after hearing about it from a diplomat during a conference in Canada. "Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI," McCain said in a statement Wednesday. The AP reports that it has been unable to contact Steele. A neighbor of the former spy, who lives outside London, says Steele and his family are away and it's not clear when they will return. Intelligence chiefs are defending their decision to take the very unusual step of attaching a summary of the unverified dossier to last week's briefing on Russian hacking, the Washington Post reports. "Part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Wednesday. He said he spoke with Trump and expressed dismay at the "extremely corrosive" leaks in the press. Early Thursday, Trump tweeted that Clapper had called him "to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated." He added: "Made up, phony facts.Too bad!" Politico looks at how Democrats are dealing with Trump's Russia troubles. So far, senators have been more restrained than House members, some of whom have started referring to Trump as "Moscow Donald." The New York Times reports that Trump is facing a backlash from Jewish groups for wondering if we "are living in Nazi Germany" when he was criticizing intelligence agencies' handling of what he called "fake news." At the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald calls the dossier "farcical" and warns that this episode could backfire badly for Democratic operatives and others treating the dossier as gospel. He warns that if it is proved false, it will "forever discredit ... future journalistic exposés that are based on actual, corroborated wrongdoing."