Tech Firm in Steele Dossier May Have Been Used by Russian Spies

Aleksej Gubarev is a Russian technology entrepreneur who runs companies in Europe and the United States that provide cut-rate internet service. But he is best known for his appearance in 2016 in a dossier that purported to detail Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the Trump campaign’s complicity.

Mr. Gubarev’s companies, the dossier claimed, used “botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.”

On Thursday, new evidence emerged that indicated that internet service providers owned by Mr. Gubarev appear to have been used to do just that: A report by a former F.B.I. cyberexpert unsealed in a federal court in Miami found evidence that suggests Russian agents used networks operated by Mr. Gubarev to start their hacking operation during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The dossier is made up of a series of reports compiled in the summer and fall of 2016 by Christopher Steele, a former British spy who runs a firm that conducts investigations for businesses and other clients. The work was done at the behest of President Trump’s political rivals, a fact that Mr. Trump and his allies have seized on in an effort to undermine the Russia inquiry by falsely claiming that it began because of the dossier.

Parts of the dossier have proved prescient. Its main assertion — that the Russian government was working to get Mr. Trump elected — was hardly an established fact when it was first laid out by Mr. Steele in June 2016. But it has since been backed up by the United States’ own intelligence agencies — and Mr. Mueller’s investigation. The dossier’s talk of Russian efforts to cultivate some people in Mr. Trump’s orbit was similarly unknown when first detailed in one of Mr. Steele’s reports, but it has proved broadly accurate as well.

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