![]() ![]() “The stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate US foreign relations.”Īccording to the report, by the end of February 2017, US intelligence had learned that an unnamed individual connected to both Trump and Russia was claiming that newspaper reports about Trump’s 2013 Moscow trip - the occasion for the mythical “pee tape” - were wrong. “We identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele’s election reporting,” one footnote reads, pointing to Steele’s false reporting that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had travelled to Prague to meet with Kremlin contacts during the campaign. And now, it turns out, it may have all been part of a real and actually effective Russian disinformation campaign. The Steele dossier, in other words, subsumed all of national politics for the better part of Trump’s first term, when mobilizing against his attacks on the working class, minorities, and the natural world were most vital. The ongoing saga diverted precious attention and resources away from Trump’s many and very real crimes, sent the media and Congress chasing a phantom that was irrelevant to most people’s lives outside the Beltway, and ultimately embarrassed those same institutions whose standing with the public was already on shaky ground. Adam Schiff read portions of it out in Congress, the FBI cited it to get permission to spy on a Trump campaign contact, and members of the media periodically experienced bouts of paranoid hysteria, its apex perhaps being Jonathan Chait’s eight-thousand-word-long piece speculating whether Trump had been a Russian spy since the days of Gorbachev. Its release laid the groundwork for wholesale conspiracy theorizing by the political and media establishment: Rep. This was particularly so once Buzzfeed elected to publish the dossier in full, even as it acknowledged its claims “were unverified and unverifiable” or even completely false - the very reasons at least nine news organizations rejected publishing the report over the course of 2016. The Steele dossier super-charged a years-long media and liberal obsession with Trump and Russia, and with phrases like “pee tape” and kompromat. ![]() The result was the so-called Steele dossier, a greatest hits compilation of unverified, salacious gossip that alleged a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin, including one particularly scurrilous story that titillated the anti-Trump establishment for years: that Putin had a tape of Trump in a Moscow hotel room where Obama had once stayed, where he paid a group of prostitutes to pee on the bed as some form of nonsensical revenge against the former president. ![]() Christopher Steele was a former British spy retained by Fusion GPS, a DC-based research firm that was first hired by conservatives to dig up dirt on Donald Trump, before switching (once Trump was en route to become the GOP nominee) to getting paid by the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign to uncover possible connections between the billionaire candidate and Russia’s powers-that-be. It feels like it’s been decades since Russiagate was the political issue of the day, so let’s first recap some basics. Case in point: newly unredacted footnotes from the Department of Justice Inspector General report on the FBI’s collusion-related spying on Trump contacts now strongly suggest that the Steele dossier was itself the product of Russian disinformation. Russiagate has always been a farce, but even its most ardent skeptics couldn’t have predicted just how absurd the scandal would become. ![]()
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