- Christopher Steele peddled an unfounded rumor about Michael Flynn to a longtime aide to John McCain, according to a transcript released Thursday.
- The rumor appears to center around Flynn’s visit to Cambridge in February 2014, when he served in the Obama administration.
- An FBI memo released last week showed that a confidential informant provided the bureau with information regarding Flynn that mirrors the information that Steele provided the McCain aide.
- Svetlana Lokhova, the Russian-British academic at the center of the allegation, has vehemently denied any improper contact with Flynn.
Christopher Steele told a longtime aide to John McCain in 2016 that he believed Michael Flynn was having an extramarital affair with a Russian woman, showing for the first time that the former British spy peddled an unsubstantiated rumor that later appeared in the media and made its way to the FBI.
Steele shared the allegation with David Kramer, a longtime associate of McCain’s, according to a transcript of Kramer’s House Intelligence Committee testimony released Thursday.
Kramer met with Steele in London in November 2016 at McCain’s direction to discuss Steele’s work on the Trump dossier. Kramer later gave the salacious document to a reporter from BuzzFeed News.
Kramer told House investigators in his Dec. 19, 2017, interview that Steele shared one allegation with him regarding Flynn that was not included in the dossier. (RELATED: DOJ Drops Case Against Michael Flynn)
“There was one thing he mentioned to me that is not included here, and that is he believed that Mr. Flynn had an extramarital affair with a Russian woman in the U.K.,” Kramer testified.
Kramer revisited the rumor later in the testimony. Flynn’s alleged mistress was a “Russian woman” who “may have been a dual citizen,” he said.
The rumor — which mirrors one regarding Flynn and Russian-British academic Svetlana Lokhova — has appeared in various forms in multiple news articles and an FBI memo dated Jan. 4, 2017.
The allegation centers around a visit that Flynn made on Feb. 28, 2014, to the University of Cambridge. Flynn, who then served as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), attended a dinner hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former chief of MI6 and Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge historian and mentor to Lokhova.
Lokhova attended the dinner along with other graduate students.
There was no mention of the dinner in the media until nearly three years after it took place, shortly after Flynn was fired as national security adviser.
In March 2017, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian reported that U.S. and British intelligence were notified about contacts between Flynn and Lokhova at the Cambridge event. The stories implied that the pair had some sort of improper contact and that Flynn had failed to report it to DIA.
read more here: https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/08/christopher-steele-michael-flynn-lokhova/
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