Former MI6 officer Christopher Steele had a 'personal' relationship with Ivanka Trump

A review of the FBI's 2016 investigation into Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign and its links with Russia conducted by the US Department of Justice inspector general, Michael Horowitz, was released on Monday. The report has revealed that former MI6 officer Christopher Steele had a "personal" relationship with Ivanka Trump.

The report claims that Christopher Steele even gifted the first daughter a "family tartan from Scotland" as a present. The report has not addressed the 38-year-old by her name, but her identity was revealed by ABC News. The outlet further reported that Ivanka Trump and Steele even discussed the services that Steele's firm – Orbis Business Intelligence – could offer to the Trump Organisation regarding its planned expansion into foreign markets.

After Steele wrote a highly controversial dossier on Trump alleging links between his campaign and Russia, the United States President claimed on Twitter that the 55-year-old was actually "favourably disposed" to the Trump family. However, according to Horowitz's report, the former intelligence officer was friendly with Ivanka contrary to what Trump claimed.

Steele told federal investigators that he had visited Ivanka at Trump Tower and had been "friendly" with her for "some years," and it was "ridiculous" to suggest that he was biased against Trump. The former British government spy described his and Ivanka's relationship as "personal" and claimed he had even given her a "family tartan from Scotland" as a present.

When Michael Horowitz's review report was sent to Orbis before it was publicly released on Monday, Steele issued an unusual statement via his Washington-based law firm, Bredhoff & Kaiser, and refuted some of the key claims in the report. The statement said Steele's reporting was not done "in bad faith" but sometimes showed a "lack of judgement" and could involve pursuing people with "political risk but no intelligence value".

The statement claimed that the Trump-Russia dossier released by Steele in 2016 was derived from "credible and reliable" human sources and reporting was also "extensively corroborated."

Steele was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in 2016 to research then Presidential candidate Trump's Russia ties. In June 2019, he was interviewed by United States Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, who had traveled to London for the review.