![]() ![]() That’s a tricky proposition at the best of times, given Russian counterintelligence prowess, and Steele never represented his dossier as anything more than the raw, unverified human intelligence report that it is. He did the best he could when faced with the difficult task of collecting sensitive information in Moscow second-hand, mostly using cut-outs. He remains respected among intelligence professionals on both sides of the Atlantic. ![]() None of this is to besmirch the reputation of Steele or his work. Otherwise, you may get quickly lost in what seasoned counterspies term the wilderness of mirrors. It’s very much in the habits of Russian intelligence to disseminate a great deal of accurate information, sometimes muddied, in the service of a greater lie… The Steele dossier should be treated with caution… Those seeking the truth of Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow should view the dossier as a jumping-off point for more investigation and no more. The idea that the Steele dossier represents an exercise in Chekist provokatsiya gets more plausible the more you look at it. Yes, they certainly did, and veteran counterintelligence hands were skeptical of the dossier from the moment it appeared, as I explained to you back in October 2017: Mueller’s report contained over a dozen passing references to the document’s claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out… misgivings about its reliability arose not long after the document became public.” As The New York Times noted this week, “Some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove. Indeed, it’s a distraction, and perhaps always has been. Steele’s dossier wasn’t completed until the end of the following year.Īt last, the mainstream media is waking up to the reality that the Steele dossier-which it has obsessed over nearly as much as Planet Trump has for more than two years-just isn’t that big of a story. The prime mover of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into then-candidate Trump wasn’t the Steele dossier, rather highly classified signals intelligence from American and allied spy agencies back in late 2015, which portrayed Trump’s relationship with Moscow in a troubling light, as I reported nearly a year ago. That assessment is starkly at odds with volumes of Trumpian mythology, tweeted regularly by the president himself, that Steele’s “ phony and corrupt dossier” was the cause of Robert Mueller’s “ witch hunt” (a term tweeted by the president 182 times) in the first place. In its admittedly highly redacted version, the report never implies that the dossier had any impact on the Department of Justice’s investigation into the president. It seems significant that the Special Counsel’s report on Trump and the Russians in 2016 barely mentions Steele and his dossier. To take a classic example, see the late summer 2016 meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney and Russian officials, alleged by the dossier, which may-or may not-have happened: we simply don’t know. While its portrayals of Kremlin atmospherics mostly rang true, many of the dossier’s specific allegations of shady activities involving Trump and the Kremlin were not just unproven but well-nigh unprovable. Subscribe to Observer’s Politics Newsletterįrom the outset, however, there were solid reasons to question the accuracy of much of its contents.
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