Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This is a special early release of our podcast.

This week in The New Yorker, we published an article by staff writer Jane Mayer about Christopher Steele,

the former British intelligence officer who compiled the infamous Russian dossier on Donald Trump.

Steele put the document together on contract for an opposition research company,

but this wasn't the typical opposition research that candidates routinely do on each other.

The dossier alleges a ring of corrupt ties between Trump and powerful Russians, so significant

that Steele brought his information to the FBI.

Jane, let's start with one point in your article that has gotten a lot of attention,

and that is the idea that there's another Christopher Steele memo written after the election

in which it's alleged that the Kremlin somehow tried to intervene and block

Trump's initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney.

Take us through that memo and how this allegation is supposed to have played out.

Right. So there is, it was the missing memo from Steele, and it was written at the very end of November, 2016.

And it's just, it's unusual for his memos because it's really short, and it's only

based on one source, and his source is just someone who's describing what the talk is in the

Russian foreign ministry in November 2016.

And what he says is that people there were claiming credit for trying to intervene and

stop Trump from picking Mitt Romney as Secretary of State. Well, how could they possibly have done

that? In other words, there was a lot of opposition to Mitt Romney in the administration,

to the degree to which Kelly Ann Conway went on television and spoke for

the Republicans who were against somebody like Romney, I guess they thought was too much of a

globalist. So what did the Russians have to do with any of that? Well, so it doesn't prove a thing.

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