When BuzzFeed published the so-called Trump dossier authored by Christopher Steele on the evening of Jan. 10, 2017, David Kramer, a longtime associate of the late Sen. John McCain, called BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger in a panic.
“The first words out of my mouth were, ‘You are gonna get people killed!’” Kramer recalled telling Bensinger over the phone.
“Why? How?” Bensinger replied.
“By posting this, you will put people’s lives in danger … Please take it down,” Kramer said.
The dramatic phone call between Kramer and Bensinger was revealed when a federal court unsealed the December 2017 deposition given by Kramer — a former State Department official who met with British ex-spy Christopher Steele and shared the memos that comprised the dossier with Bensinger, first reported by the Daily Caller on Thursday.
Steele, who would author the series of memos that would come to be known as the “Trump Dossier,” was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the summer of 2016 to provide them with information on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Kramer testified that he originally met Bensinger for 45 minutes to an hour on Dec. 29 at the McCain Institute Office in Washington, D.C., where Kramer was a fellow. He spoke to Bensinger at the behest of Steele, who had worked with Bensinger during a FIFA corruption investigation with which he’d assisted the FBI.
Kramer said he had already briefed a number of journalists on the compilation of unverified investigative memos put together by Steele.
When they met, Kramer said Bensinger already seemed to have some idea of what was in the Steele dossier memos: “He said that they were very interested in this, that they had heard about it, they had not heard about it from me initially, and were interested in looking at it and doing some investigative reporting on it.”
During the meeting, Kramer emphasized the unverified nature of the information in the memos and said: “I’m not in a position to verify or refute this, but that it seemed to me to be serious enough to be looked at in a professional way, and that professional journalists were arguably in a position to look into the matter.”
Kramer testified it was his understanding from Steele that “this was only supposed to have been released or posted and published if it had been verified.” Kramer “stressed to him the sensitivity of it … that it had to be handled very carefully. And he agreed.”
According to Kramer, Bensinger “said he wanted to read” the memos but that Bensinger also “asked if he could take photos of them on his — I assume it was an iPhone.” Kramer said he asked him not to.
Kramer said he expressed concern with photographs being taken: “I said to him that even though I’m a bit of a Luddite, I don’t understand technology, I always worry that things electronically like that could inadvertently be spread around, and I said that that would not be good.”
Bensinger replied that “he was a slow reader, he wanted to read it.”
Kramer then walked out of the room for half an hour, leaving Bensinger alone with his camera phone and the unverified material: “I said, you know, I got a phone call to make, and I had to go to the bathroom, so I’ll let you be because I don’t read well when people are looking at me breathing down my neck, and so I left him to read for 20, 30 minutes.”
It was during this time that Kramer said Bensinger photographed all 35 pages of the dossier. Kramer claimed Bensinger never told him about publishing the dossier and that he didn’t know photos had been taken of it until BuzzFeed published it. He said if he’d known BuzzFeed would publish the dossier then he never would’ve shown it to Bensinger.
BuzzFeed pushed back on this claim and Kramer later amended his testimony, saying he believed Bensinger had taken a physical copy of the dossier away with the meeting. In a declaration dated June 2018, Kramer said he had no issue with this and he allowed other journalists to do the same do they could investigation its claims. Kramer reiterated he asked Bensinger not to take photos of the dossier due to technology security concerns and discouraged the publication of the document without verification.
On Jan. 10, 2017, Kramer said during his deposition that he was meeting with yet another journalist, Julian Borger of the Guardian, when a CNN report on the dossier came onto the TV in front of them. Kramer said his reaction to the CNN story was, “Holy shit.”
Kramer found out that BuzzFeed had published the dossier a few hours later when Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, called him and simply said, “BuzzFeed has posted the document.”
Kramer also spoke with Steele that evening. He testified Steele was “shocked” and said “this wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
When Steele asked Kramer how this could’ve happened, Kramer said he didn’t know. When Steele asked Kramer if this had happened because of him, Kramer said: “I denied it.” In fact, on the day of the deposition, Kramer insisted he still had not admitted to Steele that he was the one who gave Bensinger a copy of the dossier.
Along with Kramer’s deposition, the court has also ordered unsealed the deposition of Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy and author of the dossier who was hired by Fusion GPS during the 2016 presidential campaign to conduct research. Steele’s dossier, which contained unverified claims about Trump’s potentially compromising ties to Russia, was used in the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign and was used to obtain FISA warrants.
Simpson also allegedly tried to pass Steele’s memos along to a number of journalists, including Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News. Fusion GPS was paid in 2016 by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm.
The depositions were ordered unsealed by Judge Ursula Mancusi Ungaro of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The defamation lawsuit was brought by Aleksej Gubarev against BuzzFeed and its editor-in-chief Ben Smith. Gubarev is mentioned in Steele’s dossier, which alleged that Gubarev was involved in election interference and hacking the Democratic Party in 2016.
Gubarev argued these allegations were untrue and that BuzzFeed had never bothered to check with him before publishing. BuzzFeed ultimately prevailed, and the lawsuit was dismissed in December 2018. Ungaro ordered the depositions that Steele and Kramer had given during the case to be unsealed no earlier than March 14.
In his deposition, Kramer said he became aware of Steele and his research from a man named Andrew Wood, a retired British diplomat, at the Halifax International Security Forum in November 2016. He later linked up with Steele and Simpson, who were interested in sharing the information about President-elect Trump with McCain.
Kramer said he became aware that they had already spoken to the New York Times about the dossier, but “nothing came of that conversation.”
Not long after Kramer showed the dossier to McCain, who then spoke to the FBI about it, Kramer said he began to hear from the media.
“How they knew my role, I don’t know,” he said in his deposition. “I did not reach out to them. But they were aware that I had given it to Senator McCain.”
Ultimately, Kramer said he was in contact with more than a dozen journalists, including Bensinger, Carl Bernstein, ABC News’ Matt Mosk and Brian Ross, the Guardian’s Julian Borger, McClatchy’s Peter Stone and Greg Gordan, Mother Jones’ David Corn, NPR’s Bob Little and Rachel Martin, the Wall Street Journal’s Allan Cullison, and the Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger, Rosalind Helderman, and Fred Hiatt.
Bernstein, who now works with CNN, was listed as a co-author of the initial report on Jan. 10 about the dossier. Kramer said he met Bernstein at Steele’s request and that Fusion GPS likely didn’t know about it.
Kramer said he also discussed the dossier with Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.; Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia Affairs; and Celeste Wallander, the assistant secretary for Russian affairs at the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama.
Kramer also said Steele showed him a piece of paper showing the names of the dossier’s sources and that he recognized some them due to his background familiarity in Russia.
The names of Steele’s sources have not been publicly confirmed to this day.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with details from David Kramer’s declaration amending his deposition testimony about providing physical copies of the dossier to journalists.
