Kramer acknowledged during the deposition that he gave a copy of the memos to reporters at BuzzFeed News, McClatchy news service, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio. Kramer said Steele and Simpson were aware of some of his contacts with media outlets; he said Steele specifically asked him to meet with a BuzzFeed reporter and veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, which he did.
“I, you know, became aware that other journalists either had seen it or had it,” Kramer said in the deposition. “I stressed to every person I met the sensitivity of the document, the need to verify or refute it, and not to publish it. Unless or until that would be done. And if it was refuted, it was obviously no reason to publish it.”
Kramer met with a BuzzFeed reporter on Dec. 29, 2016, at the McCain Institute in Washington, D.C. The office was closed for the holidays, he said. They met for no more than an hour.
The reporter asked if he could take photos of the memos.
" ... He said he wanted to read them, he asked me if he could take photos of them on his — I assume it was an iPhone,” Kramer recalled. “I asked him not to. He said he was a slow reader, he wanted to read it. And so I said, you know, I got a phone call to make, and I had to go to the bathroom so I’ll let you be because I don’t read well when people are looking at me breathing down my neck, and so I left him to read for 20, 30 minutes.”
Kramer said he did not know photos had been taken, and that if he had known that the reporter was going to take photos — and that BuzzFeed would publish the memos — he would not have given the reporter access to the dossier.
Kramer learned from Simpson that BuzzFeed had posted the memos, and called the reporter.
"And my first words out of my mouth were, ‘You are gonna get people killed,'” he said in the deposition.
And, he recalled his reaction when he saw — while coincidentally meeting with a reporter from the Guardian — CNN’s reporting of the dossier.