Simple. He was motivated by extreme personal animus for Trump and paid by the DNC and Clinton, et al for his services.
I think some of you are confusing Steele's alarm over what his sources revealed about Trump with "extreme personal animus".I'm also willing to bet that as the head of MI-6s "Russia desk" for a decade and his network of Anti-Putin agents,including dissidents,Russian emigres,and civil libertarians Steele likely leaned more to the right,when it comes to politics.He did not know he was working for the DNC,he just knew that another former intelligence agent he had worked with in the past (Simpson) called him in June 2016 and asked him to investigate Trump's business dealings with Putin.In a Nov 2017 interview with Vanity Fair,Steele gave a clue as to what kind of info may be part of his dossier...
"As federal investigators pore over the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, the work of ex-British spook Christopher Steele continues to loom large. At least part of Robert Mueller’s probe has been informed by Steele’s infamous dossier, which alleges substantive ties between
Donald Trump and the Russian government. Though Trumpworld has cast doubt on the document’s legitimacy, with former Trump aide Carter Page
dubbing it the “dodgy dossier,” Steele has stood by his research and,
reportedly, has offered up another tip: zero in on the president’s foreign real-estate deals.
In December of last year, Steele informed Luke Harding, a journalist for the Guardian, that “the contracts for the hotel deals and land deals” between Trump and individuals with the Kremlin ties warrant investigation. “Check their values against the money Trump secured via loans,” the former spy said,
according to a conversation detailed in Harding’s new book,
Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. “The difference is what’s important.”
According to his book, Steele did not elaborate on this point to Harding, but his implication was clear: it’s possible that Trump was indebted to Russian interests when he descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to declare his candidacy. After the real-estate mogul suffered a series of bankruptcies related to the 2008 financial crisis, traditional banks became reluctant to loan him money—a reality he has
acknowledged in past interviews. As a result, the Trump Organization reportedly became increasingly reliant on foreign investors, notably Russian ones. As Donald Trump Jr. famously said in 2008, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/christopher-steele-robert-mueller-trump-russia-dossier
You do realize that Simpson paid Steele upfront,and that both men shared a mutual investigative background,and a deep concern for what they were hearing about the relationship between Putin and Trump? It was the info his sources turned up that prompted Steele to take his findings to the FBI-he wasn't working for them.He wasn't soliciting the FBI for a job or for funds-Simpson is the one who called him out of the blue and asked him to see what he could dig up on Trump and Russia.
"And so, on a warm day last June, Christopher Steele, ex-Cambridge Union president, ex-M.I.6 Moscow field agent, ex-head of M.I.6’s Russia desk, ex-adviser to British Special Forces on capture-or-kill ops in Afghanistan, and a 52-year-old father with four children, a new wife, three cats, and a sprawling brick-and-wood suburban palace in Surrey, received in his second-floor office at Orbis a transatlantic call from an old client.
It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” Steele would recall in an anonymous interview with
Mother Jones, his identity at the time still a carefully guarded secret. But over the next seven incredible months, as the retired spy hunted about in an old adversary’s territory, he found himself following a trail marked by, as he then put it, “hair-raising” concerns. The allegations of financial, cyber, and sexual shenanigans would lead to a chilling destination: the Kremlin had not only, he’d boldly assert in his report, “been cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump for years but also had compromised the tycoon “sufficiently to be able to blackmail him.”
And in the aftermath of the publication of these
explosive findings—as nothing less than the legitimacy of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was impugned; as congressional hearings and F.B.I. investigations were announced; as a bombastic president-elect continued to let loose with indignant tirades about “fake news”; as internal-security agents of the F.S.B., the main Russian espionage agency, were said to have burst into a meeting of intelligence officers, placed a bag over the head of the deputy director of its cyber-activities, and marched him off; as the body of a politically well-connected former F.S.B. general was reportedly found in his black Lexus—Christopher Steele had gone to ground."
Yet even at the tail end of his peripatetic career at the service, Russia, the battleground of his youth, was still in his blood and on his operational mind: from 2004 to 2009 he headed M.I.6’s Russia Station, the London deskman directing Her Majesty’s covert penetration of Putin’s resurgent motherland.
And so, as Steele threw himself into his new mission, he could count on an army of sources whose loyalty and information he had bought and paid for over the years. There was no safe way he could return to Russia to do the actual digging; the vengeful F.S.B. would be watching him closely. But no doubt he had a working relationship with knowledgeable contacts in London and elsewhere in the West, from angry émigrés to wheeling-and-dealing oligarchs always eager to curry favor with a man with ties to the Secret Service, to political dissidents with well-honed axes to grind. And, perhaps most promising of all, he had access to the networks of well-placed Joes—to use the jargon of his former profession—he’d directed from his desk at London Station, assets who had their eyes and ears on the ground in Russia.
How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.
Source E was “an ethnic Russian” and “close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
This individual proved to be a treasure trove of information. “Speaking in confidence to a compatriot,” the talkative Source E “admitted there was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between them [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership.” Then this: “The Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to the WikiLeaks platform.” And finally: “In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue and to raise US/NATO defense commitments in the Baltic and Eastern Europe to deflect attention away from Ukraine.”
Then there was Source D, “a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,” and Source F, “a female staffer” at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel, who was co-opted into the network by an Orbis “ethnic Russian operative” working hand in hand with the loquacious Trump insider, Source E.
These two sources told quite a lurid story, the now infamous “golden showers”
allegation, which, according to the dossier, was corroborated by others in his alphabet list of assets. It was an evening’s entertainment, Steele, the old Russian hand, must have suspected, that had to have been produced by the ever helpful F.S.B. And since it was typical of Moscow Center’s handwriting to have the suite wired up for sound and video (the hotel’s Web site, with unintentional irony, boasts of its “cutting edge technological amenities”), Steele apparently began to suspect that locked in a Kremlin safe was a hell of a video, as well as photographs.
Steele’s growing file must have left his mind cluttered with new doubts, new suspicions. And now, as he continued his chase, a sense of alarm hovered about the former spy. If Steele’s sources were right, Putin had up his sleeve
kompromat—Moscow Center’s gleeful word for compromising material—that would make the
Access Hollywood exchange between Trump and Billy Bush seem, as Trump insisted, as banal as “locker-room talk.” Steele could only imagine how and when the Russians might try to use it."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/201...ssian-dossier-was-compiled-christopher-steele
Imo,the memo tries to create an animus between Steele and Trump on a personal level that didn't exist.Simpson hired Steele to look into Trump/Russia,and what he learned when he did frightened Steele.Not even sure if he knew about Page's history,or if his sources reported on the July 2016 trip by Page to Moscow because of the Steele connection.If you look at Steele's background,MI-6,SAS,battlefield commander in Afghanistan he comes off as more of a Torry than some left wing Brit...
