What does the British government know about Trump and Russia?

What does the British government know about Trump and Russia?
Many trails in the Mueller inquiry lead straight to the UK
Paul Wood
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/what-does-the-british-government-know-about-trump-and-russia/

Western governments are now trying to appease another germophobe with a reputation for narcissistic excess. The US is not Romania, the stories about Donald J. Trump focus on his cheating at golf, not hunting, and if the great developer removes any bathroom taps, it will be to replace them with something gold-plated. Even so, America’s allies worry that President Trump will get out of bed one morning and do something crazy: abolish Nato, declare war on Canada, give Alaska back to the Russians.

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The most important ‘British connection’ is, of course, Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer whose ‘dossier’ is the road map for the US inquiry. After he wrote it, Steele asked the retired head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove what he should do and was advised that the US authorities had to be told. Dearlove’s partner in a forum for intelligence professionals at Cambridge University was Professor Stefan Halper, apparently a long-standing CIA ‘asset’. Halper was used by the FBI to get close to George Papadopoulos, an aide on the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos was drinking in a Kensington wine bar with the Australian High Commissioner and told him that Russia had supplied ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton. Hearing about the conversation, the then director of the FBI, James Comey, began a counter-intelligence investigation with the CIA.

That is the cover story, anyway: a US intelligence official told me there were ‘many gathering clouds’ in the summer of 2016. Among them might be GCHQ’s intercepts of Trump’s associates talking to Russians. Some — credible — reports say the head of GCHQ flew to the US to hand-deliver this incendiary material to the CIA director. Later, Steele’s dossier was passed, in its entirety, to Comey, thanks to a former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Andrew Wood.

Then there’s Cambridge Analytica. The (now shuttered) British company did the Trump campaign’s data. Its speciality was ‘microtargeting’: individual messages tailored to individual voters, delivered by email, Facebook and Twitter. The US intelligence agencies believe that Russian internet ‘troll factories’ were also pushing out pro-Trump propaganda on social media: sometimes fake news, sometimes real news, such as the hacked contents of Clinton’s emails. The question is whether this was done in coordination with the Trump campaign. An American lawyer I know told me that he was approached by a Cambridge Analytica employee after the election. They had had the Clinton emails more than a month before they were published by WikiLeaks: ‘What should I do?’ Take this to Mueller, the lawyer replied.