NEW YORK — An extensive New Yorker profile cites a former national-security official claiming that a longtime associate of John McCain sent by the Arizona senator to obtain the infamous anti-Trump dossier hatched a plan whereby McCain would use the document to confront President Donald Trump and get him to resign.
David J. Kramer, a former State Department official and close McCain associate, received a copy of the largely-discredited dossier directly from Fusion GPS after McCain expressed interest in the document, the Washington Post previously reported. McCain then reportedly passed the dossier directly to FBI Director James Comey.
In the magazine profile, released this week and titled, “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier,” the New Yorker reported on Kramer’s alleged plan for McCain to use the dossier to compel Trump to step down following his 2016 presidential victory. An attorney for Kramer denied there was such a plan.
New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer reports:
The week before Thanksgiving, Wood briefed McCain at the Halifax International Security Forum. McCain was deeply concerned. He asked a former aide, David Kramer, to go to England to meet Steele. Kramer, a Russia expert who had served at the State Department, went over the dossier with Steele for hours.After Kramer promised to share the document only with McCain, Steele arranged for Kramer to receive a copy in Washington. But a former national-security official who spoke with Kramer at the time told me that one of Kramer’s ideas was to have McCain confront Trump with the evidence, in the hope that Trump would resign. “He would tell Trump, ‘The Russians have got you,’” the former official told me. (A lawyer for Kramer maintains that Kramer never considered getting Trump to resign and never promised to show the dossier only to McCain.) Ultimately, though, McCain and Kramer agreed that McCain should take the dossier to the head of the F.B.I. READ MORE
