Following up on David Frum’s observations this week about what is true about Donald Trump’s Russia dalliances, Marcy Wheeler this week surmised how disinformation in the Steele dossier advanced the goals of helping Russia undermine the U.S. election. She suggests how “any disinformation in the dossier became a key part of the Russian operation” to help Trump:
The details of any disinformation in the dossier — the possibility that Russian intelligence deliberately planted false stories about secret communications Michael Cohen had with the Kremlin — are important because they may have served the overall Russian operation. In some cases, such as the claim that Carter Page was Paul Manafort’s purported go-between with Russia rather than Konstantin Kilimnik, might have provided cover. The claims that Russia had years old FSB intercepts of Hillary they planned to release as kompromat, rather than recently stolen emails from John Podesta, would similarly provide cover. In others, disinformation might have worked in the same way Oleg Deripaska’s double game did, increasing the vulnerability of Trump’s people even while making it more likely they’d do what Russia wanted.
I have argued in the past that the Trump Tower deal wasn’t important because it showed that Trump was pursuing a real estate deal while running for President. Rather, it was important to the success of the Russian operation because it gave Russia proof, before any hint of the Russian operation became public, that Donald Trump would be willing to work, in secret, with sanctioned banks and a GRU officer to make an impossibly lucrative real estate deal happen.
There’s more:
The impossibly lucrative real estate deal was useful to the Russian operation because it ensured that, even before GRU hacked the DNC, Putin had collected receipts showing that Trump’s personal lawyer had secretly been in discussions about a deal brokered by a GRU officer and sanctioned banks for Trump’s benefit. Trump would want to (and in fact did) keep this fact from voters because it would have proven he was lying about having business interests in Russia. The attribution of the DNC hack to the GRU made Trump’s secret more inflammatory, because it meant Trump stood to benefit personally from the same people who hacked his opponent. Trump and Cohen couldn’t have known all that when Cohen called Peskov in January. But Russia did. Indeed, that may well have been the entire point.
The Cohen-in-Prague story includes outlines of Trump’s real secret: contact by Trump’s personal lawyer with the Kremlin and those who conducted the DNC hack. But the Cohen-in-Prague story displaced the key details of that secret, providing a place and personal details that would be even more damning, but also easier to debunk.
In fact, when Michael Cohen broke the law (by lying to Congress) to cover up this secret, when the Trump Organization withheld from Congress the most damning documents about it, when Trump told his most provable lie to Mueller about it, they (along with Felix Sater and others) used the Cohen-in-Prague story as an easy way to issue true denials while limiting admissions (and lying) about the extent of the Trump Tower deal.
There is reason to believe, Wheeler writes, that as disinformtaion the Cohen-in-Prague story accomplished what it was supposed to: hide the Trump Tower discussions by “creating an easily debunked stand-in for Trump’s real cooperation,” and distract from Manafort’s Russia involvement.
Wheeler concludes:
If the dossier was significantly disinformation, then all Americans were victims of it. It turned a legitimate concern about real Russian interference into American elections into one of the biggest sources of political polarization in recent history. Like the social media trolling from Internet Research Agency, it stoked divisions, with the added benefit that it led significant numbers of Trump voters to trust the Russians who were feeding that disinformation more than they trust the current President. One viral Twitter thread earlier this year even claimed that the dossier (and therefore any Russian disinformation in it) led directly to and justified the attack on the Capitol on January 6. As such, disinformation injected into the dossier should increasingly be treated as a potential central part of the 2016 Russian influence operation — perhaps its most successful and lasting part.
Republicans insist that the Steele dossier is the entirety of the Russia investigation and the original source of it (not true). Manafort told Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus they could undermine the Russia investigation by focusing relentlessly on the dossier and its flaws, Wheeler told the Columbia Journalism Review’s podcast last week, and by discrediting the dossier discredit anything coming at Trump out of the investigation of his ties to Vladimir Putin and Russia.
How the dossier, disinformation and all, worked to advance Russia’s interests has itself not received serious investigation in the media. Special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko, a key figure behind information/disinformation in the Steele dossier, has yet to provoke serious reflection by the media of its under-critical reporting on its contents or what Steele should have known that is not in it (Papadopoulos in London, etc.). Why did the stories that get told get told, Wheeler asks.
(h/t SR)