President Donald Trump's long-time confidant Keith Schiller privately testified that he rejected a Russian offer to send five women to then private-citizen Trump's hotel room during their 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant, according to multiple sources from both political parties with direct knowledge of the testimony.
Schiller, Trump's former bodyguard and personal aide, testified that he took the offer as a joke, two of the sources said. On their way up to Trump's hotel room that night, Schiller told the billionaire businessman about the offer and Trump laughed it off, Schiller told the House intelligence committee earlier this week.
After several minutes outside of Trump's door, which was Schiller's practice as Trump's security chief, he said he left.
Members of the committee raised the matter because of salacious allegations laid out in a dossier compiled by former British agent Christopher Steele, an opposition research document funded by Democrats detailing alleged ties between Trump and his associates with Russians.
During this week's closed-door hearing,*House lawmakers walked through a Daily Caller article, which raised some of the allegations about Trump's Moscow trip from the dossier and discussed an alternative story involving Schiller's role in rejecting the Russian offer of sending prostitutes to Trump's room.
The dossier's claims about Trump's activities in Moscow are some of the most incendiary claims in the memos compiled by Steele, which claimed that Russia obtained "kompromat," or dirt, on Trump to use as blackmail. Trump has long denounced the dossier and flatly denied its assertions.
