You may have noticed that the media is in a full-blown tizzy over the Steele Dossier coverage, calling it a “reckoning” with their own coverage of the Trump administration. It’s a pathetic display of self-flagellation in pursuit of “credibility” from right wing operators who are laughing in their faces. The fact is that nobody took the Steele Dossier as gospel. It was well understood that it was an oppo-research document that was unproven intel and gossip that may or may not be true. And this propaganda that all the Russia investigations relied on it is a lie. They explicitly did not.
Anyway, keep this in mind as you watch the mainstream media exonerating Trump on Russia when it remains true that there were Russian agents crawling all over that 2016 campaign and there were members of the campaign who were complicit, including the felonious campaign chairman Paul Manafort. It would have been malpractice to blow off such bizarre behavior.
Jonathan Chait wrote this on the subject this week:
Donald Trump’s attorney has written a letter threatening to sue the Pulitzer Committee unless it revokes the awards given to the Washington Post and the New York Times for their coverage of Trump’s secretive ties to Russia. Trump, of course, will probably never actually file this suit. If he did, he would certainly lose, because the Times and the Post in fact uncovered enormous amounts of damning evidence against Trump and did not, contra Trump, rely on the Steele dossier, the report compiled by the British spy Christopher Steele. Trump’s lawsuit threat is a publicity vehicle to advance the message he has never stopped making: that the entire Russia scandal is a “hoax,” ginned up by Democrats and the Deep State, of which he and his allies are innocent, and the crimes are all on the other side.
The novel development is that the entire conservative movement apparatus is now singing from the same hymnal. National Review, which in the past has wandered from the pro-Trump line on some matters, now alleges the FBI “relied on the shoddy document to surveil an American citizen in an investigation that produced the Mueller probe and a two-year-long obsession with Trump and Russian built on a preposterous foundation.” You can find the same line in organs like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the Washington Examiner, not to mention the ordinary houses of Trump worship like the Federalist.
The pretext for this chorus of new complaints that Trump has been treated very unfairly is new revelations about the Steele dossier. The tip sheet was always seen as unproven, even by those of us who gave it some credence. Steele himself estimated the tips were only around 70 to 90 percent accurate, and almost nobody would put the percentage anywhere near that high; many of the allegations he compiled came through interested parties or second- and third hand gossip.
[…]
[C]onservatives are not satisfied with merely correcting the record on Steele. They want to make Steele the underpinning of both the FBI investigation and the journalistic narrative about Trump and Russia.
But the Trumpist argument that Steele’s allegations formed the “foundation” of the FBI investigation is obviously false. The FBI began looking into Trump’s ties to Russia because Trump foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos boasted that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton to an Australian diplomat, who duly informed the U.S. government. That is obviously a very good reason to begin a counterintelligence investigation. The FBI did try to run down Steele’s leads, but it also had other sources for its investigation (and, indeed, uncovered a great deal of incriminating information).
The notion that the media started questioning Trump’s ties to Russia because of the Steele dossier is even more preposterous. While some insiders saw Steele’s reports, his dossier was not made public until January 2017. But nearly a year before that, the suspicious alliance between Trump and Putin was already playing out before our eyes.
In March 2016, Trump hired a campaign manager who had previously run a pro-Kremlin presidential campaign in Ukraine and appeared to be indebted to Russian oligarchs. In May, reporters noticed that the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus was openly cheering on Trump, who in turn was lavishing Vladimir Putin with fawning praise. In July, Franklin Foer wrote a long Slate story putting Trump’s relationship with Russia in the context of both Trump’s murky financial ties to the country and Russia’s well-established habit of courting and paying off right-wing politicians in other nations; a few weeks after that, Trump asked Russia to hack Clinton’s emails on live television. This extremely unusual fact pattern raised the antenna of the national media before any of us heard of Christopher Steele.
While the right-wing press has asserted over and over that Trump was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing, the opposite is true. The Mueller investigation was orthogonal to the questions raised by the media: It was a criminal investigation, not a counterintelligence probe. Even so, it incidentally established, and Mueller testified to Congress, that the most damning suggestion raised by the critics was in fact true. Russia had leverage over him, in the form of dangling a lucrative, no-risk contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time he was falsely telling the public he had no business dealings with Russia. (This deal closely mirrored other payoffs Russia has made to its right-wing political allies overseas, which are frequently disguised as investments.) This deal gave Putin both a carrot for Trump and a stick — he could easily expose Trump’s lie — should Trump have ever angered him.
The most conclusive investigation into the counterintelligence danger posed by Trump’s ties to Russia — that is to say, the noncriminal ways Trump was implicated in, and compromised by, Russia — was conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee. That bipartisan report is extensive and damning. It identifies two channels of cooperation between the Trump campaign and its Russian allies. First, campaign manager Paul Manafort, who communicated regularly with Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik, including giving him regular supplies of campaign polling data. And second, working through adviser Roger Stone, the campaign “took actions to obtain advance notice about WikiLeaks releases of Clinton emails; took steps to obtain inside information about the content of releases once WikiLeaks began to publish stolen information.”
Neither Manafort nor Stone cooperated with investigators or federal prosecutors, calculating correctly that Trump would reward them with pardons for keeping silent. Thus, the committee was left with suggestive but not conclusive evidence of the full extent of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. It said “some evidence suggests Kilimnik may be connected to the GRU hack-and-leak operation related to the 2016 election.” Likewise, Stone held conversations with Trump that other members of the campaign believed were about his back channel to WikiLeaks, but, since neither Stone nor Trump ever testified, this cannot be proven.
And while the report says it “did not establish” that Russia had sexually compromising information on Trump, it compiled a vast amount of circumstantial evidence, ranging from numerous contemporaneous reports that he had romantic encounters in Russia to noting that “the Ritz Carlton in Moscow is a high counterintelligence risk environment. The Committee assesses that the hotel likely has at least one permanent Russian intelligence officer on staff, government surveillance of guests’ rooms, and the regular presence of a large number of prostitutes, likely with at least the tacit approval of Russian authorities.”
The sexual aspect has naturally claimed an outsize role in the public imagination. Those of us who used Steele’s version of the sexual-blackmail claim were wrong, because Steele was simply passing on gossip. But the reason that gossip existed in the first place is not that Trump’s enemies invented it to stop his campaign, but because the possibility was a serious concern to counterintelligence professionals.
Even limiting the evidence to the parts that can be proven yields an extraordinarily damning indictment. For that reason, conservatives have almost entirely ignored the Senate Intelligence Committee report. None of the conservative columns I linked to above even mention the Senate Intelligence report; indeed, the conservative media has almost uniformly refused to acknowledge it at all. The source is simply too credible (the investigation was begun under Republican control, and its findings had bipartisan support on the committee) and its conclusions too incriminating for conservatives to spin away.
Better to ignore the report and pretend the whole Trump-Russia scandal was ginned up by Steele and the Democrats. This National Review headline is representative of the right-wing line: “Yes, Hillary Clinton Orchestrated the Russia-Collusion Farce.” This claim is more absurd and provably false than the wildest conjecture Steele dug up.
I hope that Trump does sue the Pulitzer board. A trial might be just the thing to get this whole thing demonstrated for the public at long last. He won’t like it. The best case shows he was played for a fool by the Russian government. Bring it.
Update: David Corn has written about this too. He wrote a book, with Michael Isikoff, about the Russia connection that dug very deep into the story and he was the first journalist to write about the Steele Dossier.
Vladimir Putin must be delighted. With the recent indictment of Igor Danchenko, the primary source for former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s 2016 dossier that alleged ties between Donald Trump and Moscow, the Trump-Russia denialists have had a field day. They have blasted the media for its reporting on Steele’s memos and claimed that this further undermining of his reports demonstrates the Russia scandal was a hoax.
That last point is disinformation.
Certainly, the credibility of Steele’s memos has been, once more, severely impugned. (I’ve been assailed for having been the first journalist to reveal their existence—more on that shortly). But the controversy over these documents is distinct from from the dark and troubling core of the Trump-Russia affair. In fact, it’s a distraction and a deflection. The Steele dossier—and how it was covered by media outlets—is but a sideshow to the main event: how the Kremlin clandestinely attacked the 2016 election to help Trump become president and how Trump and his crew aided and abetted that assault on American democracy.
Let’s start at the beginning. During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s relationship with Putin and Russia was a key question. He often spoke positively—even effusively—about the repressive Russian leader. And in June 2016, the news broke that Russian hackers had penetrated the computers of the Democratic National Committee. Weeks later—at the start of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia—WikiLeaks dumped documents that had been swiped by the Russian cyber-thieves.
Clearly, this was a move by Moscow to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Other dumps designed to undermine Democrats followed in subsequent weeks. Despite the consensus among cybersecurity specialists that the Kremlin was behind these attacks on America’s election, Trump and his top aides stridently denied any Moscow involvement—even as Trump himself publicly encouraged Russian hackers to target Clinton. (Russian hackers hours later tried to break into the servers used by Clinton’s personal office.) Roger Stone, a Trump confidante who claimed to have a backchannel to WikiLeaks, insisted that the paper-thin cover story put out by the Russians—a Romanian hacker was the culprit—was accurate.
The whole Trump-Russia thing was rotten. They were simultaneously denying the obvious and, as we later learned, hiding what they knew. Here’s some of what was kept from the public at the time:
–Trump had been secretly pursuing a tower deal in Moscow that could have earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Trump Organization (via Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer) had privately asked Putin’s office for help in securing the deal.
–Donald Trump Jr. had been informed in early June that the Kremlin wanted to covertly help the Trump campaign. As part of that effort, a Russian operative supposedly bearing dirt on Clinton was soon sent to Trump Tower, where Trump Jr., campaign chief Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with her. The Trumpers later claimed her information was not significant. But this secret meeting signaled to the Trump campaign that Moscow was aiming to help Trump on the down-low, and it signaled to the Kremlin that the Trump camp did not object to Moscow’s clandestine intervention in the election.
–During the campaign, Manafort was in secret contact with Russian and pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarchs and with a former business partner named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was identified in a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report (approved by the Republicans and Democrats on the committee) as a Russian intelligence officer. Manafort passed internal campaign polling data to the oligarchs and Kilimnik. That report noted that Kilimnik possibly was connected to Putin’s hack-and-leak operation that was being waged to bolster Trump. It also stated that the committee had “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was tied “to the hack-and-leak operations.” The report concluded: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” In April 2021, the Treasury Department went further and stated, “During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”
These serious Trump-Russia interactions were not publicly known. Yet to anyone paying attention, there was a Trump-Russia story to be had—and it seemed important.