Former President Donald Trump’s relationship with his daughter Ivanka has seemingly broken down “severely” when the somewhat awkward news emerged that she had an undisclosed friendship with Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent said on Tuesday.
It has been noted that Steele made the remarks in a witness statement as part of legal proceedings in London, where Trump is suing Steele’s intelligence company over the now notorious dossier on Trump that Steele wrote in 2016, The Associated Press reported.
Trump had rejected Steele’s testimony, including the comments about his daughter. The former commander-in-chief has accused Orbis Business Intelligence, Steele’s company, of violating UK data-protection laws with the dossier, which included many salacious allegations of compromising encounters between Trump and Russian figures.
The dossier was examined by the FBI as part of its Trump-Russia probe. Those efforts were themselves put under scrutiny in a 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.
Steele’s testimony in that investigation brought forward numerous unexpected details — including his long-standing friendship with the younger Trump. The elder Trump has referred to Steele as a “Trump hater,” Vanity Fair reported in 2019. But Steele said he told the Justice Department at the time that it was quite the opposite.
“I informed them that I had in fact had a friendship and professional relationship with Ivanka Trump … for several years,” Steele said in his statement on Tuesday, according to The Times of London.
The Guardian reported in 2019 that Steele and the younger Trump had a friendship dating back decades and that Steele had even gifted her a “family tartan from Scotland.”
