Christopher Steele, author of the eponymous dossier, has not had a fun couple of years by most people’s standards.
After being outed as the man behind a salacious report (pdf) about president Trump’s alleged Russia ties, the British former spy had to disappear into hiding. He was lambasted in a highly politicized memo by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republican chair, and been referred for a criminal probe by two top Republican senators. Both the US and Russian presidents now consider him an enemy.
One thing seems to be going well for him, however: business. The week after Buzzfeed published Steele’s dossier in Jan. 2017, his private intelligence firm Orbis received two thousand job applications, the New Yorker (paywall) reports. He’s also picked up “several new clients” thanks to all the publicity, according to the profile by Jane Mayer.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Jane Mayer’s name.