Schwarz comments

In any case, when Steele sent in his first memorandum, which was thirty-five pages long and dated June 20, 2016, it contained some explosive allegations, including claims that the Russian regime had been carefully cultivating Trump, and that the F.S.B., the Kremlin’s domestic-intelligence agency, had “compromised trump through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him.” The memorandum also quoted Steele’s “Source A . . . a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” as saying, “the Kremlin had been feeding trump and his team valuable information on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary clinton, for years.”

It was about this time, Simpson said, that Steele first contacted the F.B.I. In Simpson’s telling, taking this step was Steele’s idea. Shortly after filing his first memo, Simpson recounted, “Chris said he was very concerned about whether this represented a national-security threat and said he wanted to—he said he thought we were obligated to tell someone in government, in our government, about this information. He thought from his perspective there was an issue—a security issue about whether a Presidential candidate was being blackmailed.” Simpson said that he didn’t agree or disagree with Steele’s suggestion, but said he’d think about it. “Then he raised it again with me. I don’t remember the exact sequence of these events, but my recollection is that I questioned how we would do that because I don’t know anyone there that I could report something like this to and be believed, and I didn’t really think it was necessarily appropriate for me to do that. In any event, he said, ‘Don’t worry about that, I know the perfect person, I have a contact there, they’ll listen to me, they know who I am, I’ll take care of it.’ I said O.K.”