Former MI6 operative Christopher Steele's wife and business partner pushed him to keep the most salacious details about Donald Trump's time in Moscow out of the memos he was writing for clients.
Steele was interviewed by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos for a new special, Out of the Shadows, the Man Behind the Steele Dossier, which came out on Hulu Monday.
'My view has always been we have to stay true to the intelligence. I've seen situations in the past where things have been smoothed off on the edges, where things that might seem a bit outlandish have been left out, so on and so forth, and to me that's wrong,' Steele told Stephanopoulos explaining why he believed it was important for the 'golden showers' allegations to appear in his report.
Christopher Steele said in a new documentary that his wife didn't think he should include the infamous 'golden showers' story in his memos to clients as he looked into Russian relations with Donald Trump
Steele put into what would eventually be dubbed the 'Steele dossier' claims he heard from sources that said Trump stayed in the same room former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama stayed in at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow and paid prostitutes to urinate on the bed as a way to defile it during a 2013 visit.
The Steele dossier said the incident was filmed by Russia's FSB, the successor to the KGB, so it could be used as 'kompromat.'
'We had a debate obviously about the golden showers thing. I said don't put that in, it sort of detracts from the key message here, that the Russians have actually been monitoring and cultivating Trump for years,' Steele's business partner Chris Burrows shared with ABC News.
Steele then added, 'It wasn't just Chris, I think my wife also thought it shouldn't be in there.'
'Golden rule for golden showers,' Burrows continued. 'You just don't talk about sex in reports. This is a serious business. We are there to objectively report things. I said "Take out the pee pee tape, please take out the pee pee tape,"' Burrows added.
Steele didn't.
Steele said when his sources initially told him about the 'golden showers' incident he was 'surprised and shocked.'
'But, having said that, some of the things we were being told were clearly aspects of well-known Russian m.o. - modus operandi,' Steele continued.
Stephanopoulos then asked if sex tapes were 'standard operating procedure' as kompromat for the Kremlin.
'Correct,' Steele answered.
'We had no reason to disbelieve it, we had no reason strongly to believe it. We had to then try and evaluate it and invalidate it or whatever,' he said. 'In an instance like that there were a limited range of things you could do, which we did.'
He said they checked dates and people's movements and found that Trump was in Moscow at the time.
'It meant that for the first time there was a potentially serious situation of kompromat against a presidential candidate,' Steele added. 'We immediately decided that we had to report it into the FBI.'
'We suddenly found ourselves with a hot potato,' Burrows recounted.
Steele told Stephanopoulos that he continues to mostly believe that the 'golden showers' tape exists.
'I think that it probably does, but I wouldn't put 100 per cent certainty on it,' he said.
'So how do you explain if that tape does indeed exist, it hasn't been released?' the ABC reporter pushed.
'Well it hasn't needed to be released?'
'Why not?'
'Because I think the Russians felt they got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.,' he said.
Steele also told the broadcaster why he believed he didn't get duped by the Russians.
Some had suggested that the 'golden showers' story was pushed as part of Russian disinformation.
'Ultimately any disinformation operation has an objective,' Steele said. 'It would have been disinformation about Hillary Clinton. Why would they run a disinformation campaign that was deragatory about the person they preferred to be elected?' the former Moscow-based spy asked.
Trump has continuously denied the events – and ironically denied the claim at a Republican donor event just this Thursday.
'I'm not into golden showers,' he said unprompted to the crowd, according to The Washington Post.
He also said that his wife and former first lady Melania Trump doesn't even believe it.
'You know the great thing, our great first lady - "That one," she said, "I don't believe that one,"' he said.
Steele's original dossier was the subject of multiple investigations
Over the course of the special, Steele also said he believed that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
'I think the evidence suggests that, yes,' Steele said.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report found that there wasn't enough evidence to find that the Trump campaign 'coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.'
However, Steele argues that Mueller's work reinforces his own.
