Golden Shower Gate Dossier Timeline: Everything We Know About Donald Trump’s Alleged Russian Blackmail Scandal

President-elect Donald Trump’s week was supposed to be filled with cabinet confirmation hearings and his first press conference since winning the election in November. Instead, the Republican and his transition team dealt with the release of a 35-page, unproven intelligence dossier that led to the scandal dubbed “Golden Shower Gate.”

Trump and his team have staunchly denied the allegations contained in the dossier - which was prepared by a former British spy turned private security consultant at the behest of one of the billionaire’s political opponents. The documents assert, along with alleged questionable contact with Russia, that Trump booked the hotel suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow that President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama stayed in and hired prostitutes to urinate on the suite’s bed.

The dossier claims Russia had the entire hotel bugged and had gathered information on Trump in order to blackmail him. The documents had reportedly circulated among politicians and media members for months but weren’t published before because the events and accusations described couldn’t be verified.

The story and allegations have many moving parts and can be confusing. Here’s a timeline of the events surrounding “Golden Shower Gate.”

Tuesday, 5:26 p.m. EDT: CNN was the first media outlet to break the story, reporting both Trump and Obama had been presented with the dossier and that Russian “operatives” had compromising personal and financial information that could be used to blackmail trump. CNN referenced a two-page synopsis of the report and not the entire dossier.

Tuesday, 6:20 p.m. EDT: Less than an hour later, BuzzFeed News dumped the entire 35-page dossier after the news site admitted its findings had not been verified and that it also contained errors like calling the Russian investment group Alfa Group instead “Alpha.”

BuzzFeed wrote it was “publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.”

Tuesday, 7:19 p.m. EDT: The president-elect quickly took to Twitter to denounce the reports, saying they were in line with a “political witch hunt,” and emphatically denied any business links to Russia.

Wednesday: Just prior to his first press conference in six months and first since beating Hillary Clinton, Trump again headed to Twitter to chastise the U.S. intelligence community for allowing the dossier to leak and asked: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

Later Wednesday morning, Trump held the conference and when it turned over to reporters for questions, the very first query asked for comment on the dossier and if he believed the long-held belief within the intelligence community that Russia indeed hacked the election.

“First of all, these meetings as you know are confidential, classified, so I'm not allowed to talk about what went on in a meeting, but we have many witnesses in that meeting, many of them with us. And I will say, again, I think it's a disgrace that information would be let out. I saw the information. I read the information outside of that meeting. It's all fake news. It's phony stuff. It didn't happen. And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents that got together, sick people, and they put that crap together," he said.

Trump added: “But I read what was released, and I think it's a disgrace. I think it's an absolute disgrace. As far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people. And I can say that, you know, when we lost 22 million names and everything else that was hacked recently, they didn't make a big deal out of that. That was something that was extraordinary that was probably China.”

During the conference, Trump also refused to take a question from a CNN reporter, accusing the cable network of being “fake news.”

Wednesday afternoon: The veracity of the allegations perhaps took on more weight and the scandal continued following the release of two reports. First RawStory, citing BBC News Washington Correspondent Paul Wood, published a report that stated Russia might not be the only country with knowledge of the scandal and asserted the Russians have both audio and video of the alleged events.

Secondly, the Wall Street Journal then unearthed the name of the ex-British spy as Christopher Steele, who is the director of Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. In London. He was reportedly a member of MI6, the United Kingdom’s top intelligence agency, and according to the BBC News' Wood Steele may have left his home on Tuesday or Wednesday and is “in hiding.”

Thursday: International Business Times learned from adult magazine Penthouse, which had offered a $1 million prize for exclusive rights to videos that would prove the scandal is real, that it has received three claims but had yet to receive any physical tapes or video files.