There is a thirty-five-page document entitled U.S. Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump's Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin.1 It alleged that Trump had been in cahoots with the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin for at least five years and that he “accepted a regular flow of intelligence on Hillary Clinton.” It also contains what it purports to be evidence that proved Trump had been compromised. Information, if true, could be used to blackmail him, including substantial financial connections to Russian oligarchs and by extension the Kremlin. A former MI6 Moscow field agent, Christopher Steele, had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, a commercial research and intelligence agency cofounded by former journalist Glenn Simpson, on behalf of the firm's anonymous client at the Democratic National Committee to investigate Trump's business dealings in Russia.² Steele sent a series of sixteen memos to Fusion beginning in June 2016, revealing most of the materials that would be compiled into the dossier.³ He also noted that Russian-government-based intelligence sources, at the request of Putin, had spent years collecting material about Hillary Clinton during her frequent visits to Russia, but that these were mainly bugged phone calls and conversations that contained no incriminating information. The FBI would eventually see the dossier but not until after it had launched its counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016.

At the Halifax International Security forum in Canada held on September 2, 2017, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) learned about the dossier from Sir Andrew Wood, the United Kingdom's former ambassador to Russia. Wood stressed that the document contained information that concerned a mortal threat to the US democratic system. According to my sources, McCain had requested someone to meet with Steele, find out what he knew, and pick up the document.4

My producers and I had done some research and figured out who McCain had sent to London to pick up the dossier. Our research showed that the envoy for this secret mission was David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state, whom McCain seemed to trust. Here was a man who traveled to London and walked around Heathrow Airport with a former operative for MI6 who had collected information that could contribute toward a scandal as big as Watergate with our new president-elect, information that could shift the playing field of our country and possibly the free world as we know it. I had read all about Steele. I knew he had been an MI6 operative during the Cold War. He'd operated in Paris, Russia, and the Foreign Commonwealth Office in London. As a Russia specialist, he is believed to have been integral to the investigation into Alexander Litvinenko's murder.⁵ Litvinenko was a Russian spy who died after drinking green tea laced with radioactive polonium-210. I wondered what that work entailed. I imagined high-speed car chases, covert meetings in train tunnels and caves inside parks, stamp-sized cameras, and bugs in hollowed-out coins so conversations could be monitored.

A spokesperson for Putin dismissed the dossier as kompromat, which means “compromising material.” President Trump has called it “fake.”⁶ According to my sources, by sending Kramer on that secret mission, McCain obviously believed the dossier was worth obtaining.⁷

If anyone appreciated freedom and democracy, it was the senator from Arizona. His story is well known by now. While he was a naval aviator in 1967, he was shot down during a bombing mission over Hanoi. After being captured by the North Vietnamese he was held as a prisoner of war until 1973. He was tortured but refused to betray his country after being offered unconditional release. McCain decided that he would adhere to the POW code of honor, and that meant remaining in a North Vietnamese prison. He didn't want to be repatriated ahead of the other American prisoners who had been there longer.⁸

McCain wasn't a Trump fan, having been a frequent target of then candidate Trump's barbs about preferring people who hadn't been captured in battle. Trump said, “He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured.”9 McCain has been in the House and Senate for nearly forty years, and he ran for president twice, so he seems to have thick skin by now. But he is sensitive about protecting the nation from Russia, and he has not minced words about his distaste for Vladimir Putin. He often calls him a dictator or “the most important threat, more so than ISIS.”¹⁰

After Kramer came back to the United States with the dossier, McCain hand-delivered it to the FBI.¹¹ That, in itself, was extremely unusual, and it shows the urgency with which McCain viewed the matter. Is it possible McCain knew more than just what was in the dossier?

In late 2016 and throughout 2017 I would monitor McCain's interviews because I knew about his connection to the dossier and his well-known reputation for being a maverick. He's the type of politician who can't be controlled or muzzled to uphold the party line. Remember the campaign rally in 2008 when a woman stood up and called then candidate Barack Obama an Arab?¹² It would have been so easy for McCain to ignore the comment—there are too many people (sadly) who would have done just that. But McCain corrected the woman, and for good measure said, “No, ma'am, he's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

On the issue of Russia and collusion McCain has been persistent in trying to get the public to pay attention and to appreciate the gravity of the Russia investigation. In the dozens of interviews I've seen when he's asked, he always answers the same way: “I told you months ago that this was a centipede and shoes would drop, and I guarantee you more shoes will drop.”¹³