Five years ago, the world's media was abuzz with allegations about incoming president Donald Trump and some pretty salacious details of what he'd got up to while in Russia.
The so-called Trump Dossier had been prepared by Christopher Steele - a former Russia-based spy for Britain's MI6 who'd set up his own private investigation company.
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Much of the 35-page dossier has remained unverified.
Barry Meier has looked at the rise of corporate investigators - or ‘spies-for-hire. It's an opaque industry - but one that's been valued at around $2.5 billion.
His book is called Spooked: The Secret Rise of Private Spies.
A large part of the book is devoted to the saga of the Steele Dossier, he told Kathryn Ryan.
“The dossier compiled by this former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele about Donald Trump supposed connections to Russia.
“That made its way into the media because private investigators who were basically working for the Democratic Party fed that information to reporters, as part of a campaign against Donald Trump.”
A central player in this story is Glenn Simpson, Meier says. Simpson was a former journalist who founded an investigator firm Fusion GPS.
Initially it had with altruistic aims, but the firm was soon taking on dubious clients, he says.
“The truth of the matter is that the real money comes when you work for the bad guys, and the good guys don't have that much money. And that's maybe why they're the good guys.”
He then got involved in the 2016 campaign presidential campaign working for a Washington conservative organisation who wanted dirt on nominee Donald Trump.
“The Washington Free Beacon Foundation, was funded by Paul Singer, a hedge fund guy, basically, against Donald Trump when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination. Singer and the foundation were backing Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator, as their choice.”
But when Trump wins, Fusion GPS is without a client.
“So, they go to the other side, they go to the Democratic Party, and they say hey guys, we've dug up a lot of stuff and we really want to continue our investigation and we think there's a lot of great stuff to be learned about Donald Trump in Russia.”
At this point Christopher Steele enters the picture, he says. Simpson had got to know Steele through corporate connections. Steele now was also running a similar from based in the UK.
“Steele and another MI6 operative Christopher Burrow formed a company in London called Orbis Business Intelligence and went into private operations there.”
Steele had claimed to have intelligence on Trump and his activities in Russia.
Five years on the material in Steele’s dossier is largely discredited, Meier says.
“The more you began to examine this dossier, the more you examined Christopher Steele's work methods, the more you examine the track record of Fusion GPS, the more you began to suspect that something was very rotten in Denmark.
“And that has proven to be the case in spades.”
Steele’s work by even basic journalistic standards was sloppy, Meier says.
“As a journalist what you try to do is go to the source of the information to confirm it, and to satisfy yourself that that person is reliable.
“But Christopher Steele never did any of that.”
Steele’s main source was Igor Danchenko, Meir says.
“He never went or met with the people that Igor Danchenko was meeting with and getting information from to satisfy himself that that this was accurate that Danchenko was describing these people in a bona fide fashion.
“And this just spoke to kind of a sloppiness and a laziness that I really find startling.”
The mainstream media was aware of the dossier and tried to stand it up, he says.
“They tried to nail it down; The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, they dispatched reporters to Moscow, they dispatched reporters to Prague to check on the allegation that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's lawyer, had had a secret meeting there with Russian operatives, and none of it checked out.”
But then Buzzfeed decided to run the story, he says.
“It was off to the races and everybody, regardless of where they were working, was writing about it. And many people without any factual basis, particularly cable news networks, were embracing this.”
Assumptions were made by reporters because of Trump’s background, he says.
“So, this guy was basically a liar and a fraud. And many journalists were prepared to believe the worst about him. And while they were many good reasons to believe terrible things about Donald Trump, some of these reporters then took the next step by saying to themselves, well, if this guy is capable of doing all these bad things, well he's certainly capable of colluding with Vladimir Putin.”
