It was mid-September 2016, smack in the middle of the U.S. presidential election, when I got

tipped off to what sounded like an important development.

A former British spy who had been hired by a research firm looking for derogatory information

about Donald Trump's ties to Russia had come across something about an obscure Trump foreign

policy advisor named Carter Page.

I met with that ex-buy Christopher Steele in Washington, and he passed along some startling

claims that Page had just had secret meetings in Moscow with two figures close to Vladimir

Putin in which they discussed a possible deal to lift economic sanctions against Russia.

Steele wasn't willing to be identified by name, but over the course of the next few days

I looked into Steele in his background, and I confirmed from an impeccable source that

U.S. officials were indeed aware of these allegations, and were investigating them.

On September 23rd, I popped the story for Yahoo News.

U.S. and television officials propped ties between Trump advisor and Kremlin, bread the headline.

Funny thing about this story, the Clinton campaign's press shop tried to steer other journalists

to write about it, but almost nobody did, especially after Page reached out to the Washington

Post, and forcefully denied just about everything I'd written.

Hit the story didn't go away.

It was the first hint that the FBI was actually investigating a link between somebody in the

Trump campaign and the Russian government.

And now, nearly two years later, it's very much back in the news with the release of more

than 400 pages of documents, showing how the FBI, just a few weeks later, got a foreign

intelligence surveillance warrant to eavesdrop on all of Carter Page's communications.

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