Hours after the publication in early 2017 of a dossier claiming President-elect Donald Trump conspired with Russia to steer the U.S. election, a public relations executive in Washington tapped out an email to a client whose company was cited in the document, cast as a villain.
“I’m hoping that this is exposed as fake news,” Charles Dolan Jr. wrote. “I will check with some folks in the intel world to see if they know who produced this.” The dossier, published by BuzzFeed News, used code names to conceal its sources. Some were close to Kremlin corridors of power, it said.
The dossier proceeded to rivet the U.S. political class, win credibility within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, cast a shadow over the first two years of the Trump presidency and cost millions of dollars for investigations and lawsuits, only to eventually be mostly discredited. One reason was where much of the dossier’s information came from—anything but Kremlin insiders.
Instead, a Wall Street Journal review found, many of the dossier’s key details originated with a few people gossiping after they had been brought together over a minor corporate publicity contract.
The dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, relied mainly on a Washington researcher to gather information. According to FBI notes of an interview with that researcher, Igor Danchenko, he said he wasn’t comfortable with the assignment and some of his sources were old friends—one a former schoolmate—whose information Mr. Steele exaggerated.
It wasn’t until last November that prosecutors identified a man they pinpoint as one of Mr. Danchenko’s most important sources. Based on an indictment of Mr. Danchenko for lying to the FBI about whom he’d talked to, one of his key sources was none other than Mr. Dolan, the PR executive who tried to reassure a client.
The indictment says Mr. Danchenko relied on “PR Executive-1” for what became a dossier note about upheaval on Mr. Trump’s campaign staff. The indictment also suggests that Mr. Danchenko drew on PR Executive-1—since confirmed to be Mr. Dolan—for part of the dossier’s most lurid allegation, that Russian agents once secretly videotaped prostitutes cavorting in Mr. Trump’s Moscow hotel room.