Kremlin denies its agents gathered compromising information on Trump

MOSCOW - The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed as "a total fake" allegations that Russian intelligence agencies collected compromising information about President-elect Donald Trump - a denial that was echoed by much of Russia's establishment.

But when President Vladimir Putin's spokesman went further - saying the Kremlin "does not engage in compromising material" - it was widely greeted by the rolling of Russian eyes.

Gathering kompromat, the Russian word for potentially embarrassing information that can offer leverage, has a long history reaching back to Soviet days.

It was raised to a high standard by the KGB, the predecessor of Russia's Federal Security Service and the agency where Putin and many of his closest allies started their careers. One sex tape toppled a prosecutor general on an anticorruption crusade.

And Russia, said one Federal Security Service colonel, has not lost its taste for kompromat despite the flat-out denial by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

"Without a doubt we gather kompromat. . . . In the Kremlin, there's piles of it, as there are in all the security agencies," said Gennady Gudkov, also a former legislator who was forced out of parliament for his opposition to Putin. "As a rule, the special services collect information on everyone, like a vacuum, picking up anything and everything."

This in itself does not confirm the allegations, summarized in a classified report U.S. officials said was delivered to President Obama and Trump last week, that Russian intelligence services have compromising material and information on Trump's personal life and finances.

Trump himself rejected the allegations, first in tweets and then during a news conference in New York. "It's all fake news," he told reporters. "It's phony stuff. It did not happen."

Also Wednesday, more details emerged about the source of the allegations in the uncorroborated dossier, which had been circulating widely in Washington in October.

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday identified the dossier's author as Christopher Steele, a director of London-based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., whom the Journal said declined repeated requests for interviews through an intermediary. Another Orbis director told the Journal he would not "confirm or deny" that Orbis had produced the report.

The Washington Post, citing individuals familiar with the matter, said Steele's firm was hired to assist a political research firm in Washington that was initially working for Trump's primary opponents but later offered its services to Democrats.

The matter broke into public view Tuesday night when CNN reported that Trump had been briefed in a classified setting about a summary of the investigator's findings.

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed published the 35-page dossier that night. The website defended publishing the report, saying Americans "can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect." Other news outlets withheld publishing most details about the unverified claims because they couldn't confirm them.

In October, then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote to the FBI asking it to publicly disclose what it knew about any Trump campaign ties to Russia.

"It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government - a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information," Reid wrote on Oct. 30.

He said he learned of the information from FBI Director Jim Comey and from other top U.S. national security officials. It wasn't immediately clear how much Reid knew specifically of the compromising information vs. Russian hacking activity in general.

This article contains information from the Associated Press.