(NEW YORK) — A bipartisan group of lawmakers is accusing Amazon leadership — including former CEO Jeff Bezos — of misleading or lying to Congress in the wake of reports from media outlets that they say “directly contradicts the sworn testimony and representations” from Amazon about its business practices.
In a letter sent to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Monday, lawmakers on the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee are asking the e-commerce giant to correct the record and provide “exculpatory evidence” to corroborate prior testimony and statements made to the committee.
The lawmakers reference investigative journalism pieces from Reuters and The Markup that alleged Amazon used data from individual sellers to create similar items and boost its own products in India, and that Amazon places products from its own brand ahead of those from competitors even on the U.S. site.
“At best, this reporting confirms that Amazon’s representatives misled the Committee,” the letter, signed by Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., David N. Cicilline, D-R.I., Ken Buck, R-Colo., Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., states. “At worst, it demonstrates that they may have lied to Congress in possible violation of federal criminal law.”
“In light of the serious nature of this matter, we are providing you with a final opportunity to provide exculpatory evidence to corroborate the prior testimony and statements on behalf of Amazon to the Committee,” the lawmakers added. “We strongly encourage you to make use of this opportunity to correct the record and provide the Committee with sworn, truthful, and accurate responses to this request as we consider whether a referral of this matter to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation is appropriate.”
An Amazon spokesperson denied the allegations raised in the letter, and called the media articles in question “inaccurate.”
“Amazon and its executives did not mislead the committee, and we have denied and sought to correct the record on the inaccurate media articles in question,” a company spokesperson told ABC News in a statement Monday. “As we have previously stated, we have an internal policy, which goes beyond that of any other retailer’s policy that we’re aware of that prohibits the use of individual seller data to develop Amazon private label products.”
“We investigate any allegations that this policy may have been violated and take appropriate action,” the statement added. “In addition, we design our search experience to feature the items customers will want to purchase, regardless of whether they are offered by Amazon or one of our selling partners.”
The lawmakers, meanwhile, point to the “credible reporting” in Reuters and The Markup. The lawmakers said the claims made in the recent articles are at odds with the July 16, 2019 testimony from Nate Sutton, Amazon’s Associate General Counsel, who told them that Amazon does “not use any seller data for — to compete with them” and that Amazon does not “use any of that specific data in creating our own private brand products.” Moreover, Sutton also testified that Amazon’s search rankings are not designed to favor its own products.
The lawmakers also pointed to a July 29, 2020, testimony from then-CEO Jeff Bezos, who said that Amazon enforces a policy against using seller-specific data to develop competing products, but that Amazon considers seller data from more than a single seller to be “aggregate” for the purpose of this policy. Bezos claimed in response to post-hearing questions that this policy “prohibits the use of anonymized data, if related to a single seller, when making decisions to launch private brand products,” the lawmakers added.
The representatives are asking Amazon to provide a sworn response to clarify the record as to how Amazon uses non-public individual seller data to develop and market its own line of products, as well as a sworn response to clarify how Amazon advantages its own products over products from other sellers in its search rankings. Finally, the lawmakers are seeking all documents and communications relating to its internal inquiry into violations of its Seller Data Protection Policy, as well as documents and responses referred to in the Reuters and Markup reports.
An Amazon spokesperson told the Markup that there is a difference between search results and merchandising placements, but that it does not favor its own brands in the search tool.
“We do not favor our store brand products through search. There is a difference between search results and the placements [the Markup] is referring to – ‘Featured from our brands’ – which are merchandising placements. As [The Markup] notes, these placements are clearly labeled to distinguish them from search results,” a company spokesperson said. “These merchandising placements are optimized for a customer’s experience and are shown based on a variety of signals, starting with relevance to the customer’s shopping query.”
The company spokesperson added that they look at sales and store data to enhance customer experience, “However, we strictly prohibit our employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which store brand products to launch.”
An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters, meanwhile, that “these allegations are incorrect and unsubstantiated” and that it “does not give preferential treatment to any seller” on its marketplace. In addition, the company reiterated that it displays search results “based on relevance to customers, irrespective of whether such products are private brands offered by sellers or not.”
(WASHINGTON) — Recipients of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine should not be concerned about the shot’s lower efficacy now that boosters have been recommended, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told ABC This Week co-anchor Martha Raddatz.
“I think that they should feel good about it because what the advisers to the FDA felt is that given the data that they saw, very likely this should have been a two-dose vaccine to begin with,” he said Sunday.
The FDA vaccine advisory panel unanimously recommended booster shots for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine Friday. The panel recommended all J&J recipients 18 years and older to get an additional jab as early as two months after the first dose — key differences from their recommendations for the Moderna and Pfizer boosters which were only for Americans 65 and older or in higher risk groups.
The decision came days after early data released from a National Institutes of Health study found that boosting with a different shot than one’s original vaccine appears to be safe and effective. The data, which is not yet peer reviewed, also found that for J&J recipients, antibody levels were higher if they received a Moderna or Pfizer booster rather than a J&J booster.
Raddatz pressed Fauci on whether mixing and matching vaccine boosters for J&J recipients would be a better idea.
“But, Dr. Fauci, the panel was also looking at new data that suggest J&J recipients may be better off getting a booster shot from the more effective Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Is that a better solution?” Raddatz asked.
“That is true, the data you refer to, that if you boost people who have originally received J&J with either Moderna or Pfizer, the level of antibodies that you induce in them is much higher than if you boost them with the original J&J,” Fauci said.
He went on, “However, you’re talking about laboratory data, which very often are reflective of what you would see clinically. But the data of boosting the J&J first dose with a J&J second dose is based on clinical data. So what’s going to happen is that the FDA is going to look at all those data, look at the comparison and make a determination of what they will authorize.”
Fauci added that the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will give people the flexibility to mix and match vaccine boosters based on their individual health situations.
Now that the FDA has recommended J&J boosters for a wider group of Americans, the question turns to when Moderna and Pfizer boosters will be expanded to the general public.
Fauci said that will depend on the data being collected by the CDC and the findings coming in from Israel, which is about a month ahead of the U.S. in its vaccine rollout.
As for vaccines for children ages 5-11, Fauci said the FDA is on track to approve the Pfizer vaccine in early November.
With kids eager to go trick-or-treating and the holidays right around the corner, Raddatz also asked Fauci about his guidance for celebrating the upcoming holidays.
“I believe strongly that — particularly in the vaccinated people, if you’re vaccinated and your family members are vaccinated, those who are eligible, that is obviously very young children are not yet eligible, that you can enjoy the holidays,” he said. “You can enjoy Halloween, trick-or-treating and certainly Thanksgiving with your family and Christmas with your family.”
(NEW YORK) — A Haitian gang has been blamed for kidnapping a group at a Haitian airport that included 17 missionaries, five of them children, according to officials.
Nineteen people were abducted by a gang at a checkpoint in Haiti during an airport run on Saturday, a source at the U.S. embassy told ABC News. The kidnapping occurred at the intersection of “Carrefour Boen” and “La Tremblay 17,” a source at the Haitian presidential office told ABC News.
Included in the group are 17 missionaries — 16 Americans and one Canadian — and two Haitian citizens, according to the U.S. Embassy. Two French priests were also kidnapped in a separate attack at the same location earlier in the day, the source said.
The Haitian government suspects the gang known as 400 Mawozo to be responsible for the abductions, the source said.
It is unclear where the victims were taken. The Embassy is working with a special group of Americans in the country who are investigating.
The Ohio-based ministry Christian Aid Ministries confirmed in a statement that a group of 17 people were “abducted” while on a trip to an orphanage on Saturday.
“We request urgent prayer for the group of Christian Aid Ministries workers who were abducted while on a trip to visit an orphanage on Saturday, October 16,” the statement read Sunday. “We are seeking God’s direction for a resolution, and authorities are seeking ways to help.
Five men, seven women and five children are among the group, according to the ministry.
Haitian police inspector Frantz Champagne told The Associated Press that the 400 Mawozo gang kidnapped the group while they were in Ganthier, about 17 miles east of Port Au Prince.
The country is experiencing a rise in gang-related kidnappings, many demanding ransom, that quelled after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7 and a 7.2-magnitude earthquake on Aug. 14 that killed more than 2,200 people.
The U.S. State Department told ABC News in a statement that it is “in regular contact with senior Haitian authorities and will continue to work with them and interagency partners.”
“The welfare and safety of U.S. citizens abroad is one of the highest priorities of the Department of State,” the statement read.
The FBI is expected to assist in negotiations, ABC News has learned.
Additional information on the kidnapping was not immediately available.
(WASHINGTON) — Former U.S. Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell died Monday morning due to complications from COVID-19, his family said in a statement.
“He was fully vaccinated. We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment,” the family said. “We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American.”
Powell was 84 years old.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(CHANNAHON, Ill.) — Christine Kump, of Channahon, Illinois, was newly pregnant with her second child late last year when she felt a lump in her breast.
She said it was in the same spot as a lump she had developed when she breastfed her now 3-year-old daughter, so she brushed it off as leftover scar tissue.
“When you Google it, it says it could be breast cancer, but most likely scar tissue,” Kump, 34, told Good Morning America. “I thought there’s no way I have breast cancer.”
Kump underwent IVF to get pregnant with her second child, so she also attributed the soreness she felt in her breast to side effects from the treatment. When the soreness continued and a burning sensation developed though, Kump went to see her primary care doctor.
“The doctor sent me to do an ultrasound but she wasn’t super concerned,” said Kump. “A few weeks later I went for the ultrasound and then they had me do a biopsy, which I did on Christmas Eve.”
A few days after the biopsy, on Dec. 29, 2020, Kump said her doctor called and told her she had Stage 3 invasive ductal carcinoma breast cancer.
“I was worried that I wasn’t going to make it through the pregnancy,” said Kump, who was eight weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed. “I was thinking I was going to have to write letters to my [3-year-old] daughter Susie for all of her milestones because I wasn’t going to be there.”
Because Kump had a history of cancer in her family, she underwent genetic testing and tested positive for the BRCA1 gene mutation, meaning she was at an increased risk for breast and ovarian cancers.
About 1 in every 500 women in the United States has a mutation in either her BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Because of her genetic background and because her cancer was so advanced, Kump began chemotherapy once she entered her second trimester of pregnancy, a time that doctors say is safer because the baby’s organs are more developed.
Kump was in the middle of her chemotherapy treatments in May, when she went into early labor.
She gave birth to her daughter, Vivian, on May 30, 2021, about three months before her August due date.
“She decided to show up super early,” Kump said of her daughter, who weighed 2 pounds, 10 ounces at birth and faced complications that come from premature birth. “She was intubated for six days and then was on oxygen until she could breathe on her own.”
Vivian would go on to spend the next 59 days in the neonatal intensive care unit, which was 10 minutes away from the cancer center where Kump received treatment.
“My husband and I were the only ones who were allowed to see her in the NICU,” said Kump, adding that she would go from receiving chemotherapy in the morning to visiting her daughter in the afternoon. “The NICU was the safest place for me to be because it was so clean.”
Kump continued on with chemotherapy after giving birth, completing 16 rounds in all. She finished her last treatment in August, shortly after bringing Vivian home from the NICU.
In September, Kump underwent a bilateral mastectomy.
She will next have to undergo nearly six weeks of radiation treatment, and then will undergo a hysterectomy in January since the BRCA1 gene mutation puts her at a higher risk of ovarian cancer.
Kump said she is sharing her story publicly to both raise awareness of breast cancer during pregnancy, and to encourage women to listen to their bodies and seek help if something feels off.
Breast cancer is found in about 1 in every 3,000 pregnant people, according to the American Cancer Society.
“I was taken very seriously and was diagnosed on the first time, but a lot of women are told it’s just an infection, or it’s something from breastfeeding,” said Kump, who, at 34, was six years below the recommended age of 40 to start annual mammograms. “If you think something is a little off, call your doctor, and if you don’t like the response you get from one provider, get a second opinion. It’s so important that we advocate for ourselves.”
It’s a message echoed by Dr. Mary Ahn, Kump’s breast cancer surgeon at Northwestern Medicine.
“If you’re pregnant and see changes in the breast, the majority of time it is pregnancy-related, but if there is something that feels unusual, get it evaluated. It’s better to be cautious,” she said. “We have be our own advocates, be aware of our bodies and, if there are any questions, address them with a medical professional.”
(NEW YORK) — One dad is going the extra mile for his daughter — literally.
Chris Brannigan, 41, from England, is currently walking 1,200 miles barefoot from Maine to North Carolina in order to fund research on gene therapy for his daughter Hasti, 9, who has a rare genetic disorder called Cornelia de Lange syndrome.
Although the exact number of cases is unknown, the CdLS Foundation estimates that CdLS occurs in 1 in 10,000 live births.
“If you have a rare disease you don’t have the same treatment options or the same quality of healthcare so parents like us have to fight endlessly,” Brannigan told “Good Morning America.” “The sad truth is there’s just no money for rare disease research so it’s left to families like ours to undertake these fundraising campaigns just so we can get treatments for our kids.”
The disorder affects a person’s growth and development, and symptoms include seizures, gastrointestinal problems, autistic-like behavior, heart defects, hearing loss, myopia, and body malformations and other abnormalities.
As a child gets older, more serious symptoms such as anxiety and self-injurious behavior may appear. The CdLS Foundation found that self-injurious behavior occurs in 60% of children and adults with the disorder.
“It gets worse over time,” Brannigan said. “For my wife and I, that was really frightening.”
After Hasti was born, Brannigan said he and his wife, Hengameh, “knew straightaway something was wrong.”
“She looked unhealthy to us,” he said. “She was jittery. She was underweight. When we got her home from the hospital, she had a seizure within the first 24 hours.”
Many of Hasti’s developmental milestones were delayed. Brannigan said she didn’t walk until she was almost 2 years old and didn’t feed voluntarily for the first year of her life.
“There were so many indications but the diagnostic odyssey in the rare diseases world is so long and painful,” he said.
At age 4, Hasti had blood tests done to check for CdLS but the results came back negative, much to the family’s relief.
“I sort of did a little jump for joy because we knew how difficult a condition it was, having researched it after speaking to the doctor,” Brannigan said.
To figure out what could be wrong, Hasti was then enrolled in the 100,000 Genomes Project in the U.K., where they sequenced her genome and looked for common gene errors or mutations. The project took two years, Brannigan said, and the new results showed that she did actually have CdLS.
To manage the disorder, Hasti receives a number of daily treatments, such as hormone replacement therapy via injections and speech and language therapy.
“The cycle of therapies and medical appointments is just never-ending,” Brannigan said.
The fact that CdLS is a rare disease means not much is known about it and how to treat it, which is why Brannigan said he and his wife have had to become experts on the disorder.
“If your child has something terrible like cancer, doctors know what to do because they’re well-practiced in those things,” he said. “But if your child has a rare disease, they just don’t know and that causes a lot of anxiety for parents.”
He added, “Parents have to be experts because no one else is.”
The reality of having a rare disease
After Hasti received her initial diagnosis, Brannigan said he and his wife reached out to numerous doctors around the world to ask them to take a look at gene therapy as a way to help manage the disorder.
“Through online research we came to realize that other rare conditions like spinal muscular atrophy were achieving gene therapies that were transforming children’s lives,” he said, adding that several medical professionals said they would be willing to look into it but it would take “a lot of time” and “cost huge sums of money.”
“When we realized something could be done, we were presented with a question, which was: ‘Do we do this? Do we throw everything we have at our disposal at creating a therapy for Hasti and all the other kids with CdLS? Or do we consciously not do that?'” he said. “As parents I don’t think there’s any other choice you can make. You can’t choose to not help your child.”
The family created the charity, Hope for Hasti, in order to raise the money for research into CdLS gene therapy. After consulting doctors and researchers on how much would be needed to fund the research, they set a $3 million target.
“Raising money has been incredibly hard through the pandemic so my wife and I decided that we should run a fundraising event that would help focus people on not just fundraising but also how difficult it is to manage the life of a child with a rare disease,” Brannigan said.
According to Dr. Wendy Bickmore, director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the University of Edinburgh, gene therapy will likely not be a cure but a way to treat some of the disorder’s symptoms.
“Gene therapy encompasses several things,” Bickmore told “GMA.” “It can be adding back in an extra copy of the gene, which has been mutated, or it can be gene editing where you go in with these CRISPR molecular scissors and try and correct the actual spelling mistake of the genome. They both have the ultimate aim of trying to repair the genetic defect.”
All of the preclinical research will be handled by the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. According to Dr. Cathleen Lutz, the lab’s senior director, they’re working with mouse models with various genetic mutations, including one with Hasti’s specific mutation. As CdLS can be caused by any number of genetic mutations, a therapy that works for one may not work for another.
“I think we all recognize we’re in uncharted territory, no one is rushing here,” Lutz told “GMA.” “We’re trying to explore the potential for these therapeutics. Even if gene therapy turns out not to be a path forward for CdLS, we’re going to have so much information to plug into new potential therapeutics.”
In a recent statement, the CdLS Foundation announced a partnership with Jackson Laboratory to coordinate research efforts for all genes implicated in CdLS. The goals of the collaboration include advancing basic science around the disorder, creating a centralized repository of existing and new mouse models with CdLS features, and testing various treatment options.
A British army major, Brannigan calls himself the “Barefoot Soldier.”
“The idea of being barefoot is to make it really difficult because Hasti’s condition makes her life incredibly challenging,” he said. “Things that other children find easy, she finds very hard. It seemed only fair that I do something that was equally difficult and challenging.”
Brannigan has already completed one barefoot walk so far. From July 6 to August 18, 2020, he walked 700 miles from Land’s End in England to Edinburgh in Scotland.
“I wounded both of my feet,” he said. “It took weeks for them to heal.”
His current walk will see him do 1,200 miles through 12 states over 53 days. So far, Brannigan’s made it well over halfway and expects to complete the journey in late October.
“It’s been incredibly painful and I think I have nerve damage in my foot,” he said. “I’ve cut my feet. I’ve stood on glass. I’ve had more blisters than I can count. I’ve encountered some really challenging road conditions and it’s slightly dangerous.”
Though Brannigan plans to finish out the walk no matter what, the kindness he’s experienced along the way has kept his spirits up. People have walked with him for parts of the journey, given him food and drink, and even housed him for a night.
“Hasti is a child like every other child who has hopes and dreams and we want her to realize those,” he said. “She deserves to be happy and healthy.”
(NEW YORK) — Retired British spy Christopher Steele is stepping out of the shadows to discuss his so-called “Steele dossier” for the first time publicly, describing his efforts as apolitical and defending his decision to include the most explosive and criticized claims about Donald Trump contained in his controversial 2016 report.
“I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it,” Steele said in a wide-ranging exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos about how he gathered his intelligence, and the life-altering events that ensued after his work and identity were made public.
The dossier’s contents, laid out in 17 memos, upended Washington and quickly ricocheted across the globe after BuzzFeed News published the bombshell reports in early 2017 — 10 days before Donald Trump was sworn into office. The salacious mix of sex, spies, and scandal made for an irresistible political drama. But the real-world implications of its claims, even though unproven, exacerbated an already fraught moment in American history.
Trump and his allies immediately lashed out at the allegations laid out in the dossier, calling it “fake news” and “phony stuff.” The president’s detractors embraced it, using it to buttress growing suspicions about what they saw as Trump’s odd infatuation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Over time, journalists and experts from both sides of the political aisle grew increasingly skeptical about the dossier’s claims, noting that despite deep investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and others, many of Steele’s allegations have never been verified, and some have been debunked.
“Everyone with whom the dossier was shared sent reporters out, tried to confirm the basic allegations within it. And it never got any traction because no one could nail anything in it down,” said Barry Meier, author of “Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies,” and a vocal critic of Steele’s.
“Bearing in mind, this was raw intelligence,” said Chris Burrows, Steele’s partner in the private investigative firm Orbis Business Intelligence. “Raw intelligence in the sense that what we sent over was the initial findings.”
Yet in many ways, the dossier proved prescient. The Mueller probe found that Russia had been making efforts to meddle in the 2016 campaign, and that Trump campaign members and surrogates had promoted and retweeted Russian-produced political content alleging voter fraud and criminal activity on the part of Hillary Clinton. Investigators determined there had been “numerous links — i.e. contacts — between Trump campaign officials and individuals having ties to the Russian government.” And, proof emerged that the Trump Organization had been discussing a real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign.
All were findings that had been signaled, at least broadly, in Steele’s work.
Cloistered in his London home and his firm’s office, Steele has never responded to his critics in public. Through all the cacophony of political rhetoric and cable news punditry, one notable voice has been missing: Steele’s.
Now, nearly five years after his report became public, Steele has broken his silence to defend his name, his credibility, and the dossier that captured the world’s attention.
“It was credible reporting,” Steele told Stephanopoulos. “We knew some of it was right, and we suspected some of it may never be provable.”
“Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier” is available Monday, October 18, on Hulu.
A sordid conspiracy
Christopher Steele penned his reports between June and December of 2016 for a law firm that represented Democrats and the campaign of party nominee Hillary Clinton. His reporting was initially meant to be internal work for the firm conducting opposition campaign research.
Over seven months, the memos laid out a series of damning claims alleging that the Russians were attempting to influence the campaign in Trump’s favor, that members of the Trump campaign had various connections and communications with Kremlin officials, that the campaign had coordinated with Kremlin officials and accepted a flow of anti-Clinton information, and, most alarmingly, that the Kremlin perhaps had materials with which it could blackmail or exercise leverage over Trump.
Steele said that as he worked on the report, he grew increasingly alarmed by the picture it was painting.
“It meant that, for the first time, there was a potentially serious situation of ‘kompromat’ against a presidential candidate. And therefore, it became much more of serious issue than we had expected,” Steele recalled. “I was surprised and shocked.”
Even before the dossier surfaced publicly on Jan. 10, 2017, the FBI and several news outlets had already seen Steele’s intelligence reports and had attempted to corroborate their contents, but could not. Within days of its publication, some allegations fell apart quickly. Reports that Trump’s personal attorney and self-described fixer Michael Cohen had relatives who maintained ties to Putin were swiftly debunked.
Trump’s allies mounted a full-fledged campaign to pick the dossier apart — and malign its author. Trump himself repeatedly lashed out at Steele and the report. At one point, then-President Trump tweeted of Steele: “This man should be extradited, tried, and thrown into jail. A sick lier [sic] who was paid by Crooked Hillary & the DNC!”
Asked if he was ever worried about Trump’s calls for his extradition, Steele at first laughed: “He also called me a liar, spelled L-I-E-R, George. So, you know, these things have to be taken, I think, with a pinch of salt.”
But Steele said that the ensuing investigations, legal fights, and withering attacks — including Trump’s claims that his reporting was a “hoax” — did take a toll.
“The idea that somebody with my track record — and I’ve never had my integrity, professionalism, or expertise on Russia questioned at any point in my career — would be inventing some strange, fabricated document or information, is absolute anathema, and I wouldn’t be a successful businessman if that were the practice,” Steele said.
The dossier did deal a series of blows to Steele’s credibility in both media and government investigations, most notably a December 2019 Justice Department inspector general report that cast doubts on his sources.
The inspector general wrote that “certain allegations” in Steele’s reporting “were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team; and that the limited information that was corroborated related to time, location, and title information, much of which was publicly available.”
“Do you accept that conclusion?” Stephanopoulos asked Steele.
“I think they are putting too much store, frankly, into what FBI knew about early on in the campaign,” Steele said. “I think the FBI is generally an effective organization. I’m not sure the extent to which FBI has got good coverage of Moscow and Moscow politics and Moscow operations.”
Through it all, Steele said, he has remained confident in the broad strokes of his dossier, which he insists remain “still very credible.”
“I think there are parts of the dossier which have been stood up, there are parts of the dossier that haven’t been stood up,” Steele said. “And there are one or two things in it which have been proven wrong.”
Drafting the dossier
Steele’s firm agreed to take on the project at the behest of Fusion GPS, a Washington-based corporate research firm, in the spring of 2016. Fusion GPS’s initial client had been a Republican financier, but when Trump emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, a law firm representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign agreed to inherit Fusion GPS’s research.
Steele said he knew within the first month of his reporting that “supporters of Hillary Clinton” were funding Fusion GPS’s work, and by extension his own.
“I didn’t know what opposition research was,” Steele said. “But from our perspective, what we were doing was very similar to other project work we’d done, which is getting human intelligence out of Russia on an issue of interest to a client.”
Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee the assignment for Steele was relatively simple — Donald Trump had made repeated trips to Russia during his career as a real estate mogul, but not sealed any deals.
“He was the lead Russianist at MI6 prior to leaving the government and an extremely well-regarded investigator, researcher, and, as I say, we’re friends and share interest in Russian kleptocracy and organized crime issues,” Simpson testified regarding Steele. “I would say that’s broadly why I asked him to see what he could find out about Donald Trump’s business activities in Russia.”
Steele told ABC News that the mission expanded almost immediately into two main threads: “One was what the Russians were doing in terms of potential interference in the campaign; and two, what the links were between Trump and the Trump campaign and Russia,” Steele said.
“We realized it was potentially quite a big project and potentially quite a controversial project,” he added. “But frankly, George, when we went into it, we weren’t expecting to find a great deal.”
Steele soon became convinced he had wandered into something more involved, and more concerning.
The four pillars
In defending his work, Steele describes his intelligence reports as resting on “four pillars” of information that he believes have held up over time as accurate.
“One was, there was a large-scale Russian interference campaign in the American election in 2016,” he said.
“The second was that this had been authorized and ordered at the highest levels, including Putin,” he said.
“The third had been that the objective of this was to damage Hillary Clinton and to try and get this rather unorthodox candidate, Donald Trump, elected,” Steele said. “And the fourth was, there was evidence of collusion between Trump and people around Trump and the Russians.”
Part of the challenge — and the intrigue — of Steele’s reporting is that much of it is virtually impossible for lay people to verify. When the Department of Justice’s inspector general examined the dossier’s claims, he concluded that what Steele described as “raw intelligence” amounted to little more than rumor and bar talk.
Very little corroborating evidence has emerged to support the dossier. But neither, Steele points out, has there been much concrete contradictory evidence either.
His critics have taken issue with that particular line of defense.
“The common refrain when people were speaking about the dossier is, ‘Well, we don’t know if that’s not true,'” Meier said. “People who are intelligence operatives anchor their reports to rumors, to hearsay, to bar talk, to smoke. That’s the world that Christopher Steele operated in. And I guess that’s the world he continues to operate in. I prefer the world of facts. That’s the world I’m comfortable in.”
It isn’t just Steele’s critics who have accused him of trafficking in rumors. His own collector — the person who actually traveled to Russia on his behalf to gather information, including the “pee tape” allegation — later told the FBI that he “felt that the tenor of Steele’s reports was far more ‘conclusive’ than was justified,” and that “information came from ‘word of mouth and hearsay’ … ‘conversation that [he/she] had with friends over beers,'” according to a Justice Department inspector general report.
Steele suggested his collector may have “taken fright” at having his cover blown and “[tried] to downplay and underestimate” his own reporting when he spoke to the FBI. Steele added that the information he gathered passed through an important filter: his experience as an expert on Russian intelligence activities going back decades. He said his confidence in the dossier’s claims about Russia’s interest in Trump is based on his knowledge of Putin — a figure whom he has studied for decades.
“This is the M.O. of the KGB and its successor organizations,” Steele said, referring to Russia’s intelligence services.
Skeptics of Steele’s reporting, however, suggest he may have fallen victim to another trademark of Russian spy craft: disinformation. Speaking to congressional investigators in October 2019, Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official in the Trump administration and a longtime friend of Steele’s, called Steele’s dossier a “rabbit hole.”
“It’s very likely that the Russians planted disinformation in and among other information that may have been truthful, because that’s exactly, again, the way that they operate,” Hill said.
Steele acknowledged that “there is a chance” the Russians intentionally tainted his reporting, but said he felt it was “very unlikely.”
“Ultimately, any disinformation operation has an objective,” Steele said. “Seems to me pretty far-fetched that the Russians’ objective during the campaign of 2016 was to aide Hillary Clinton and to damage Donald Trump. And I just don’t think you can get past that.”
The ‘pee tape’
One allegation from Steele’s dossier stood out immediately: a claim that the Russians had obtained a compromising video of Trump at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013. According to the dossier, the tape purportedly showed Trump “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him” on a bed where the Obamas supposedly once stayed.
The supposed “pee tape” never emerged. But the claim may be the public’s most enduring symbol of Steele’s work — particularly after it became a favorite of late-night comics.
Steele told ABC News he believes the alleged tape “probably does” exist — but that he “wouldn’t put 100% certainty on it.”
When Stephanopoulos asked him to explain why the tape, if it does exist, has not been made public, Steele replied that “it hasn’t needed to be released.”
“Because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.,” Steele said.
“[Putin] wouldn’t be releasing it in a hurry for all sorts of reasons,” he continued. “He would put it under very strict lock and key and make sure it never got out, unless he chose for it to get out.”
For his part, Trump has repeatedly and firmly denied this specific allegation. At a press conference the day after BuzzFeed published Steele’s dossier, Trump told reporters that he was “a germaphobe.” As recently as last week, Trump reportedly told donors at a private speech that he is “not into golden showers.”
Pressed by Stephanopoulos on how he can assess the likelihood of a seemingly outlandish allegation without concrete evidence, Steele cited his lengthy career as a British intelligence officer focused on Russia.
“When you’ve worked on Russia for 30 years like I have and you’ve spent as much time, sadly, in the brains of the Russian leadership as I have, you begin to understand these things,” Steele said. “And you actually sense whether something’s credible or not.”
Still defiant
Steele’s dossier took its first major hit with the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s highly anticipated report, which largely omitted mention of Steele’s name or his claims. The most significant mention of Steele was not positive.
The report cast doubt on one of the dossier’s most striking claims: that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, had traveled to Prague in the summer of 2016 for “secret meeting/s with Kremlin officials.”
Cohen has vehemently denied ever traveling to Prague or meeting with Russian interlocutors. The Justice Department inspector general reinforced Mueller’s findings, saying the FBI had determined that this specific allegation was untrue.
To this day, Steele says he remains unmoved.
“Do you accept that finding, that it didn’t happen?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“No,” Steele replied. “I don’t.”
“But the FBI looked into this and said it wasn’t true,” Stephanopoulos said.
“I don’t know to what extent they were able to look into it. I don’t know what evidence they gathered,” Steele said. “I haven’t seen any, if you like, report on that aspect. So, from my point of view, I think it’s still an open question.”
Reached for comment, Cohen sarcastically told ABC News, “I’m pleased to see that my old friend Christopher Steele, a/k/a Austin Powers, has crawled out of the pub long enough to make up a few more stories.”
“I eagerly await his next secret dossier which proves the existence of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and that Elvis is still alive,” Cohen said.
Stephanopoulos pressed Steele: “Do you think it hurts your credibility at all that you won’t accept the findings of the FBI in this particular case?”
“I’m prepared to accept that not everything in the dossier is 100% accurate,” Steele replied. “I have yet to be convinced that that is one of them.”
Dismissing claims that subsequent government reports undermined his findings, Steele argued that, in his view, Mueller’s team actually served to reinforce the broad strokes of his dossier — those “four pillars” he described.
“Those four pillars that we mentioned … when you actually look at the detail, if you’re forensic about looking at the detail of the report, then it paints a totally different picture, in my view,” Steele said. “And I think there’s a lot of supportive commentary and evidence and so on, there, for the work we had done.”
But further investigative efforts undertaken at various levels of government have appeared to confirm the notion that Steele’s reporting was at best flawed and at worst incorrect.
A bipartisan report published by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2020 found that Steele’s assertions about Trump campaign aide Carter Page — which accused him of conducting “secret meetings in Moscow” with Kremlin leaders — were incorrect. Page himself would later testify before Congress that he spoke briefly with a mid-level Russian official during a visit for a Moscow speech, but that the conversation was short and inconsequential.
“Other than … facts which were readily available in news reports at the time of their inclusion in the dossier — the Committee did not find any information that corroborates the allegations related to Page in the dossier,” the report concluded.
Stephanopoulos asked Steele about the FBI decision to rely in part on his work in seeking and obtaining court approval to eavesdrop on Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“Any regrets about that?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“It had nothing to do with us,” Steele replied. “I didn’t even know what FISA was, frankly, in 2016. We were not told of any use of our material in such a process. And therefore, if there were problems with that process, they weren’t our problems, they were the problems of the people conducting it.”
A potential threat
Steele conceded in the ABC News interview that he could not provide evidence for many of his claims, including those about Page. But pressed by Stephanopoulos on some of the findings that have come up against the harshest criticism, Steele remained defiant.
“Not the ‘pee tape,’ not Michael Cohen in Prague, not Carter Page?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“None of those things, to my mind, have been disproven,” Steele replied. “They may not have been proven. And we maybe will hear more about those things as we go forward.”
Steele said he is watching American politics from a distance these days. He said he has concerns about a potential Trump return to the presidency in 2024.
“So, Donald Trump, in your view, is a continuing threat, as long as he’s an active political player, to the national security?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“A potential one,” Steele replied. “Yes.”
And as long as Trump remains active in politics, Steele contends that more evidence to support the dossier’s claims may still surface.
“I don’t think this book is finished,” Steele said. “By a long shot.”
(LOS ANGELES) — Robert Durst has been diagnosed with COVID-19, his attorney confirmed Saturday, two days after the real estate heir was sentenced to life in prison on a first-degree murder conviction.
Durst, 78, was sentenced Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 2000 killing of Susan Berman, his close confidant. The wheelchair-bound Durst appeared in the courtroom for his sentencing, looking frail and wearing a face mask.
His attorney, Dick DeGuerin, did not share any additional details on Durst’s condition.
The high-profile trial has been plagued by a series of delays due to the pandemic. After two days of testimony, the trial was delayed for 14 months after the coronavirus shuttered courts, with testimony resuming in May.
In August, testimony was briefly paused again after a courtroom observer tested positive for COVID-19. There was another holdup in June, when Durst was hospitalized for an unspecified health issue.
Durst did not appear in the courtroom when the verdict was announced in September because he was in quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19 by one of his sheriff drivers. Jurors found him guilty after deliberating for about seven hours over three days.
The New York real estate scion was accused of killing his best friend, Berman, who was shot in the back of the head in her Los Angeles home in 2000. Prosecutors alleged Durst killed Berman to prevent her from telling police she helped him cover up the unsolved murder of his wife, Kathleen Durst, in 1982. Durst has never been charged in his wife’s disappearance.
Durst pleaded not guilty in 2018 to the murder charge for Berman’s death. His attorneys have unsuccessfully sought a mistrial, arguing the lengthy delay impeded his chances of a fair trial.
Durst was also charged in the 2001 killing of a neighbor in Galveston, Texas. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted.
ABC News’ Cassidy Gard contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Even before her stage two breast cancer diagnosis in 2020, Yvonne Llanes knew her strength — and her community.
Llanes, who was first introduced to “World News Tonight” in 2017, had lost both of her legs nearly 16 years ago in a freak accident. For a decade, Llanes was confined to a wheelchair.
But, in 2017, she had made a promise to herself — and her late father — to walk again.
“I was just depressed. I was sad. I was mad at the world and I wanted my life back. I wanted my legs back,” Llanes told “World News Tonight” in 2017.
Llanes found a community at the Hanger Clinic’s Bilateral-Above-Knee Amputee Bootcamp.
With the support of fellow amputees and after months of determination, Llanes pushed herself to get out of her chair and walk across a stage in front of her friends and family.
“I met a group of amputees such as myself that were doing extraordinary things. They were up and they were walking and they were out of their wheelchairs and I was just incredibly amazed and I told myself I want to be like them,” said Llanes.
“I decided enough was enough I was going to get up and get on with life,” she added.
Nearly four years later, Llanes returned to the Hanger Clinic’s Bootcamp for Amputees to celebrate another victory. This time, to announce that she was cancer-free.
She was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer and underwent surgeries in 2020 and 2021. Across the country, her Bootcamp family was there for her by sending photos and wearing “Yvonne Strong” T-shirts.
“All my amputee friends here have stood behind me through this diagnosis and have been very supportive of me 100%, and I just appreciate it tremendously,” said Llanes on Thursday.
Llanes told “World News Tonight” Friday that the community’s motto, “Decide to rise,” can be applicable to anyone.
“Life is going to throw obstacles at you — do not let those obstacles get in your way,” she said. “Have faith, have courage, have hope, overcome those obstacles and never forget to decide to rise.”
(WASHINGTON) — “I’m in danger,” the daughter cried to her father from thousands of miles away in Afghanistan.
“We cannot go outside with friends. Before, we were going outside to restaurants, shopping, but now we are like prisoners in our own home,” she said, her voice full of fear, saying Taliban fighters might find her.
“Mina” (ABC News has changed her name for her protection and that of others), a university-educated and unmarried Afghan woman, separated from her family in the U.S., was pleading for help on a call with advocates trying to get her out.
With her father having aided the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, and her immediate family living in New Jersey, Mina is in hiding, saying she fears her ties to the U.S. make her a target.
On a recording of a call ABC News listened to, her voice was breaking.
“I’m not mentally good nowadays because this situation is a burden on me,” she said, adding that she did not know which relative she might find shelter with next.
“She is under pressure,” her father said, helping translate for a daughter he said is normally proficient in English. “Now in this status situation, she forgot her language. She forgot her information. She forgot her mind.”
Mina’s mother says she isn’t used to relying on medication to fall asleep, but after calls like this one, she says she needs it to escape the dark reality facing her only daughter — blaming herself for Mina being left behind.
Mina’s parents and two brothers were able to come to the U.S. in 2016 on her father’s Special Immigrant Visa, or SIV, granted to those who helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Her oldest brother, who also worked with the U.S., immigrated in 2018 under the same program. But Mina, now 34, aged out to qualify as a dependent.
While her father has petitioned since 2018 to bring her to the U.S. via a Petition for Alien Relative, a route that permanent, lawful residents can use to bring immediate relatives to the U.S., the chaotic evacuation of American troops from the country at the end of August ignited a desperate search for options.
“It’s life or death,” Elizabeth Dembrowsky, the attorney who’s handling Mina’s case from New York, told ABC News. “Her father’s worked and aided the United States — because of their interests — and because of that aid, he’s put his daughter at risk.”
Mina’s father said he sometimes regrets not lying about her age on the SIV application, believing, he said, that if he hadn’t abided by the rules of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, his daughter might already be with them.
He says people in Afghanistan know her immediate family lives in the U.S. and mockingly call her “‘the Americans’ daughter.'”
‘Please help my daughter’
Dembrowsky founded Good Counsel Services, a nonprofit that offers legal advice to other nonprofit organizations, in 2016. Volunteering at an immigration office while studying at Brooklyn Law School, she met a man who had helped the U.S. mission in Afghanistan who then started recommending her legal services to his friends. One of them was Mina’s father who first contacted her in 2018.
“‘Please help my daughter'” were the only words in an email Mina’s father sent her last month.
Dembrowsky is actively working on filing humanitarian parole applications in 13 similar cases, a legal route she took with Mina’s case as U.S. troops left the country, taking with them the hopes of many Afghans desperate to escape.
Granted by USCIS on a “case-by-case basis,” humanitarian parole allows certain individuals to enter and reside in the U.S. without a visa. Each application comes with a $575 fee and extensive paperwork, including an “Affidavit of Support” that serves as proof a sponsor has agreed to provide financial support to the person who is known as the parolee. It’s a process Dembrowsky said has bipartisan backing.
“You can wring your hands and scream and blame the former or current president or the entire decision to go into Afghanistan, but it’s not helpful because the crisis is ongoing. We have people today that need to be taken out of there, and we as Americans can help by volunteering to serve as sponsors,” Dembrowsky said.
Once a sponsor is secured, it can take weeks to months to process applications. There’s currently a backlog of roughly 11,000, according to the National Immigration Forum. That does not include the majority of SIV holders — tens of thousands of people — who were also left behind in the abrupt evacuation. Dembrowsky is calling on the federal government to do more to expedite applications from allies and their families she says the U.S. “abandoned.”
To expedite a parole application, a person can directly write or call immigration services, but advocates say an often more effective route is having a member of Congress contact them about a specific application on their behalf. Dembrowsky said she contacted the offices of Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., on Sept. 2, and of Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. on Sept. 23.
“My office is working closely with the Department of State, USCIS, and family members in New Jersey to bring this young woman safely to the United States. We are making progress on her case and are confident that she will be able to join her family in New Jersey,” Pallone told ABC News in a statement on Thursday afternoon.
MORE: How are the Taliban treating Afghan women and girls?
Dembrowsky learned late Wednesday that Mina’s Petition for Alien Relative application, filed in 2018 to prove she was related to her family, was “processed,” but they haven’t been contacted about next steps. Mina’s humanitarian parole application still hangs in limbo, as they do for thousands of Afghan nationals.
The UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, has reported more than half a million Afghans have been internally displaced since January due to Taliban advances, 80% of whom are women and children.
‘Matter of political will’
Even if Mina’s parole application is conditionally approved, there’s still a major caveat.
With the U.S. Embassy in Kabul closed, she must make the dangerous and uncertain trek to an embassy or consulate in another country for additional processing. That journey has been made nearly impossible since the former Afghan government collapsed and the U.S. withdrew — with few flights out of the country and uncertainty over how to get a seat, or risky travel over land through Taliban checkpoints.
“It’s extremely difficult and that’s why, while this humanitarian parole application process can offer some hope, it’s not an easy solution,” Danilo Zak, a senior policy and advocacy associate at the National Immigration Forum, told ABC News. “In general, it’s going to be very difficult for people to escape on their own now.”
Mina’s devoted father said in the call reviewed by ABC News that he would personally find a way to get her across the border.
He just needs the paperwork.
“If the government makes excuse that there is no embassy of America in Kabul … if they issue the visa for her, paper-wise, and send by email, I can go to third country and evacuate her from Afghanistan and process her documentation and visa and fingerprint and interview with her — and then I will bring her with me,” he said.
Dembrowsky said her team is also working with veterans groups to help facilitate safe passage if and when Mina is deemed eligible and called for processing at an embassy or consulate.
Despite what may seem like insurmountable obstacles, Zak said granting humanitarian parole is the most effective option right now for those left behind because the process was designed for quick, emergency evacuations. The U.S. has repeatedly granted parole to allies, under presidents of both parties, under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, including 130,000 parolees after the Vietnam War.
“We can’t discriminate against these parolees for the nature of the emergency evacuation — which is really what we’re doing here,” Zak said, arguing the need for an Afghan Adjustment Act to establish a pathway for refugees and parolees to permanent residency.
Further congressional action, such as expediting immigration processes and mandating the U.S. work with allies to create safe evacuation routes, he said, is all “a matter of political will.”
“That’s what we saw before the evacuation, where suddenly we actually were able to ramp up SIV processes. The same thing is true now,” he said. “It’s just a matter of making this a top priority to evacuate those who remain at risk in Afghanistan.”
‘What would I do?’
For now, Mina waits — in hiding.
And volunteers at Good Counsel Services continue lobbying lawmakers — and everyday Americans — on cases like hers.
When Congress passed its continuing resolution last month to prevent a government shutdown, it included a provision of benefits for Afghan parolees they otherwise wouldn’t be able to access without a visa, such as housing, childcare and federal financial support, critical for volunteer agencies and for recruiting all-important sponsors.
“The result is that resettlement agencies can play a much, much larger role for many of those who are coming in under parole, and that means that there’s less of responsibility for the sponsor, and certainly no responsibility to house them,” Zak said.
Dembrowsky, for her part, said she’s asked daily to take on more applications for people still desperate to get out, but lamented she won’t commit to them without securing financial sponsors first.
“I just don’t want to throw this life preserver and not be able to hold on to the other end of it,” she said.
One person who answered her call is Ford Seeman, a social impact entrepreneur in New York, who credited being adopted at birth for giving him a unique understanding of how one’s future can be affected by circumstance. He’s donated $10,000 to Good Counsel Services for the cause, as well as agreed to gather the necessary documents and sign on to sponsor a potential parolee.
“I’m honored and, frankly, feel somewhat obligated to share with those facing overwhelming obstacles,” he told ABC News in an email. “We are all one people and need to look out for each other.”
While thousands of Afghans like Mina face an uncertain fate, Dembrowsky said the U.S. is facing a moment of moral reckoning.
“I wasn’t alive during the Holocaust. I wasn’t alive during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s. But we, as humans, ask ourselves these questions, ‘What would I do in that circumstance?'” Dembrowsky said. “Today in Afghanistan, there is something we can do, and if we refuse to do something — and if anything were to happen to her — it will be on our collective hands.”
