The US presidential election was barely a week away when the two men first met. David Corn, Washington editor of the liberal news website Mother Jones, had agreed to meet with his contact, a former spy, under the condition that he would neither name him, reveal his identity or the spy service where he had worked for nearly two decades.

That anonymity was not to last however, and little did Corn know then that only a few months later, the name of former British MI6 man, Christopher Steele, would be making headlines around the world as would the dossier on US president-elect Donald Trump that he helped collate.

“The story has to come out,” Steele is said to have insisted at the meeting. Come out it certainly did, the story having now effectively rocked the US political establishment and pitched Trump into all out war with his own US intelligence agencies and the press.

What Steele confirmed to Corn that day, was that he had been retained in early June 2016 by a private research firm in the United States to look into Trump’s activity in Europe and Russia.

“It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” Steele recalls, emphasising that the focus was mainly on Trump’s business links in Russia.

What Steele was to subsequently uncover however was what he would go on to describe as “hair-raising” information.

This included details that Trump had allegedly been caught in a “kompromat” operation by the Russian intelligence service the FSB.

Among the compromising material claimed to have been secretly filmed in 2013, was Trump cavorting with prostitutes he had hired to perform sex acts, including urinating on the bed of the suite in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow, where President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, had stayed during an official trip to Russia.

Since the allegations were made public, the US president-elect has vociferously denied the claims and Russian officials have denied claims that they filmed it, but the ensuing scandal has only deepened a tense relationship between Trump and a US intelligence leadership that has already concluded his election was abetted by a foreign rival - Russia.

While Steele’s ‘dirty dossier’ claims remain unverifiable they come in the wake of a declassified assessment by the US National Security Agency (NSA), CIA and FBI that Russian president Vladimir Putin interfered in the US presidential election to aid Trump.

The resulting combative stance between Trump and US spies has now reached crisis proportions just days before the president-elect moves into the White House, and sets up a potentially historic confrontation between the commander-in-chief and US intelligence agencies from the start of the new administration.

Almost inevitably, it is the more lurid details of the Steele dossier that have made the biggest headlines and come under the most scrutiny in terms of veracity.

Fifty-two year old Steele, worked for MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, and served in Moscow in the early 1990s. After leaving the agency, he and a partner started Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd in 2009. According to the firm’s website, it provides strategic advice, gathers intelligence and conducts cross-border investigations.

It was back in June last year that Steele joined the team of firm Fusion GPS who themselves had been hired by Republican opponents of Trump in September 2015. By July however when Trump won the Republican nomination, the Democrats then became the new employers of Steele and Fusion GPS.

Eventually Steele, without his employer’s permission went to the FBI with his memos after he determined that what he had gathered was “sufficiently serious”.

“This was something of huge significance, way above party politics,” Steele is said to have told journalist David Corn. “I think Trump’s own party should be aware of this stuff as well.”

The FBI asked Steele how he had obtained the information, and requested that he forward future findings. The response to the information from the FBI, Steele recalls according to Corn, was “shock and horror,” and the bureau pushed him for information on his sources and their reliability and on how he had obtained his reports.

In the end Steele along with a colleague in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, came to believe that a cabal within the FBI was attempting to block a thorough inquiry into Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Around this time too it is believed that MI6 was also receiving information about Trump. Others too were hearing the reports about Trump and the Kremlin, among them Senator John McCain. He was to meet Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, a man of vast experience in Russian affairs, who made clear to McCain that while he had not read the dossier, Steele’s professionalism and integrity were regarded as solid.

“I know him as a very competent, professional operator who left the secret service and is now operating his own private company,” Wood, also confirmed last week echoing his previous observations to Senator McCain.

“I do not think he would make things up. I don’t think he would, necessarily, always draw correct judgment, but that's not the same thing,” Wood added.

Three British intelligence officers interviewed by The Associated Press also described Steele as well regarded in the intelligence community, with excellent Russian skills and high-level sources.

Though not a senior figure in MI6, one of the officials, who worked primarily on Eastern Europe, said that because of Steele's experience on the Russia desk and the high-level contacts he had during his time in Moscow, he was brought in to help with the case of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian secret service officer and Kremlin critic who was poisoned in 2006 in London by polonium-210, a radioactive substance.

James Nixey, the head of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia programme, says that parts of the document created by Steele “read exactly as reports from the secret services that we have been allowed to see before...Some of the practices which we know and which are confirmed to have happened during Soviet and post-Soviet times are reported in this dossier,” Nixey said, adding that Russia’s denials were also part of a Cold War pattern in which the Kremlin “would outright deny something which is quite plainly true.”

In the event, following his meeting with Sir Andrew Wood, it would be Senator McCain who would personally put the dossier before FBI director James Comey. In turn Barack Obama and Trump were briefed about the allegations contained in the dossier as part of a report into Russian hacking of the presidential election.

After publication last week Trump in his first press conference since becoming president-elect angrily denounced the allegations as

“fake news,” “phony stuff,” “crap” and the work of “sick people,” but the scandal surrounding the allegations has only gained momentum since then, as has Trump’s fallout with the US intelligence community.

So just where does this leave Trump now, and have the allegations done him more political harm than he would have others believe?

Certainly none of the news organisations that had access to the Steele dossier before last week have been able to verify its most salacious details and nor have the intelligence agencies been able to ascertain whether it is at all reliable.

The simple inescapable fact however is that in political terms just as the information cannot be classed as reliable neither can it be classed unreliable, whatever Trump says. Likewise these are allegation not likely to disappear any time soon.

Short of the sudden appearance of incriminating tapes, the lurid details within the dossier of the alleged “kompromat” on Trump in Moscow will remain difficult to prove. The same, however, cannot be said of the much more accessible line of investigation into allegations that members of his team were in close contact with Russian officials in the course of last year’s presidential election over Russian hacking of Democratic emails subsequently published by Wikileaks.

Independent reports indicate that US intelligence agencies were already investigating alleged links, such as those between businessman Carter Page and senior Russian officials.

Sean Spicer, Trump’s spokesman last week insisted that the president-elect “does not know” Page, even though Trump himself last March described Page as being a member of his foreign policy team.

Other Trump-Russian connections too have emerged over the last few days, with reports that the president-elect’s national security adviser has been in regular contact with Russia’s ambassador to the US.

The White House has confirmed its awareness of phone calls between retired lieutenant-general Michael Flynn and ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak reportedly included several calls on December 29, the day on which Barack Obama announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials, as well as other measures in retaliation for Russian interference in the election. It is believed said Flynn and Kislyak have also been in contact at other times.

It’s concerns like these that - that Putin and the Kremlin are puppeteering Trump and his team - which could be most politically damaging to the president-elect and are much more difficult for him or his appointees to refute.

On Friday the Senate intelligence committee also ratcheted up the pressure on the Trump administration with the announcement that it plans to interview some of its senior figures as part of its inquiry into alleged Russian hacking during the US election.

“As part of the Senate select committee on intelligence’s oversight responsibilities, we believe that it is critical to have a full understanding of the scope of Russian intelligence activities impacting the United States,” said a joint statement issued by the committee chairman Richard Burr, a Republican, and top Democrat, Mark Warner.

The committee will use “subpoenas if necessary” to secure testimony from Trump’s team as well as Obama administration officials, Burr and Warner insisted.

The joint announcement from Burr and Warner commits the Senate intelligence panel not only to probing possible Trump-Russia ties, but also to releasing “both classified and unclassified reports” that will include its conclusions and holding some open hearings.

All this points to the fact that the Russian connection in one shape or form is not leaving Trump’s political doorstep soon, and the longer is lasts and more it is delved into, the chances are that something damning will come to light for the 45th president.

Should that prove to be the case just how bad could it get for Trump?

Some Trump doubters are already pushing for a full out investigation into Russian hacking by a special select committee not unlike that convened during the Watergate crisis.

While some within the Republican leadership are wary of going down this route, Trump has already made so many enemies even in their ranks that they might be inclined to throw loyalty aside.

Which brings us to the possibility of impeachment should things get very even worse for the new president. Though a long way off from that situation yet, talk of impeachment of Trump is nothing new even before the current dossier and hacking allegations.

Only two presidents in history have suffered such disgrace, Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton, and neither was convicted. Richard Nixon dodged it by resigning. Johnson’s impeachment, took place several years into his term, and Clinton’s didn’t happen until his second term.

Legally, impeachment, which is like an indictment, requires serious wrongdoing in order to be invoked.

According to the US constitution, “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” would warrant such a move.

If Trump’s team were found to have conspired with the Kremlin to distort the 2016 presidential election, then certainly that would fall into the impeachable category.

Fighting any impeachment moves, Trump has some distinct advantages though, not least in that he has Republicans in charge of both the House and Senate, and that partisanship would help create a bulwark against accountability. Again though his tendency to make enemies from those that should be allies could work against him.

“On the other hand, many elected Republicans, perhaps most, consider Trump to be a threat to their brand and priorities. They worry that Trump is unhinged,” observed Vanity Fair magazine politics and policy writer T. A. Frank recently.

“To see Trump disappear and leave things to Mike Spence (VP-elect) a lockstep party man with all of Trump’s traditional rightist views and none of Trump’s eccentricities or heresies, would be a dream-come-true for Paul Ryan (House Rep Speaker) and Mitch McConnell (Majority leader Senate),” Frank added.

For now Donald Trump is a long way from the bad place of impeachment.

It would take one serious wrench and rift between Trump and the Republican Party to go there.

Neither though is he necessarily on the solid political ground that he makes out delivered daily with his usual swagger and arrogance.

“Watersportgate” as it has been dubbed in some of the more irreverent political quarters may not be Trump’s Watergate, Iran-Contra or Lewinsky affair.

The Russian hacking issue and his team’s alleged cosying up to Moscow for political gain is of course an altogether different matter. It might yet just take the shine off America’s golden boy.