Former UK intelligence officer Christopher Steele produced a second, previously unpublished dossier for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Donald Trump during his presidency, The Telegraph has cited unnamed sources as saying.
The ex-MI6 agent's first dossier was leaked to and published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, a report that comprised claims of alleged collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential elections.
The dossier included bombshell materials ostensibly related to Trump, including an alleged sex tape of the ex-POTUS with a prostitute at a Moscow hotel in 2013.
The Telegraph's sources argued that the second dossier "contains raw intelligence that makes further claims of Russian meddling in the US election and also references claims regarding the existence of further sex tapes".
According to the insiders, the document relies on "separate sources to those who supplied information for the first reports".
The newspaper reported that the existence of the second dossier means that Steele's work "was apparently still being taken seriously" after Trump assumed office in 2017.
The news outlet went on to argue that "intelligence gathered by Steele for his second dossier is understood to include further details of [Trump's campaign chairman Paul] Manafort's alleged Russian contacts". Washington has not commented on The Telegraph report yet.
FBI Knew Steele Dossier on Russia-Trump 'Collusion' Was 'Rumours at Best'
The second dossier-related allegations came after Chairman of the US Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham released declassified documents in July 2020 indicating that the FBI knew about the unreliability of the first Steele Dossier.
The first document contains the FBI's interview with Steele's "primary sub-source", who revealed that the former MI6 operative's dossier on the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and Russia was "unsubstantiated and unreliable".
According to the document, the material that the source gave to Steele was "second and third-hand information and rumours at best".
Another declassified document included type-written notes by former FBI special agent Peter Strzok pertaining to claims made in a New York Times article published on 14 February 2017 about alleged Russian intelligence ties to the Trump campaign.
Strzok described as "misleading and inaccurate" the claims that the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials before the 2016 US presidential election, noting that there was "no evidence" of this.
Steele Dossier
The 35-page Steele dossier, published a week before Trump's inauguration in January 2017, alleged that Russian intelligence had compromising information on the then-US president and that the Kremlin and Trump had "extensive" secret back channels.
The dossier, which was proven to be untrue after being leaked, became part of the Democrats three-year campaign accusing Trump of colluding with Russia.
In April 2019, then-US Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that his probe found insufficient evidence of Russia-Trump collusion, which had been repeatedly slammed by the former US president as "a witch hunt".