Who is Olga Galkina and what happened to Trump's 'golden shower' dossier? Here's why Russian woman denied links
Back in 2016, former M16 operative and Russian specialist Christopher Steele compiled a dossier known as 'Steele Dossier' or 'golden shower dossier'. The report is a collection of 17 intelligence reports that Steele had compiled, after being hired by Fusion GPS, a private political research firm in Washington, D.C. Fusion GPS was hired by Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign to inspect Trump's ties to Russia. One particular report captured everybody's attention. The report which dates back to June 20, 2016, talks about Trump's "(perverted) conduct" at Moscow's Ritz Carlton.
The report states that in 2013 when Trump was attending the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, he was put up at Ritz Carlton. According to the dossier which was made public in 2017, while staying at the presidential suite of the hotel, Trump reportedly hired prostitutes to urinate (golden shower) on the bed where former President Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama had slept.
The dossier cites a few sources as evidence of its claims. One such source is a woman identified as "Source" in the dossier. Source 3 was the "most important contributor" to the dossier, as reported by the DailyMail. The source has finally been revealed as Olga Galkina. Galkina, 40, a former employee of a Kremlin-owned state media has come forward to squash the claims of being the key source to Steele's report. On Friday, she used her former employer RIA Novosti to state that she not the key source to Steele Dossier.
She said, "My mood is rather low because I did not expect this story at all and, of course, it complicated (my life) quite a lot." Although she claimed that the allegations that she Steele's source was "not true", she didn't get into much details about it. Galkina however admitted that she knows Igor Danchenko, 42, from her school days. ACcord to a Wall Street Journal article, Danchenko was the one who had recruited her into the mission of gathering intelligence for Steele. She said of Danchenko, "We studied at the same school, but the thing is that after that he went to work and study in America. And we haven't seen each other for a long time. This is the thing… The story is that we were friends. And he was helping me." She worked for state-funded RIA Novosti as a journalist between 2003-05.
While Galkina denies allegations of her being the source, Trump has been vehemently denying the authenticity of the report and even called it "Fake News Dossier" in one of his tweets from 2017. Aside from accusing him of throwing "golden shower parties", the reports also suggest that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for years, and played a role in helping Trump secure victory during the 2016 presidential elections.