What we did not know on election day was that
- the Christopher Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC, that
- the dossier itself may have been part and parcel of a Kremlin disinformation campaign, and
- that a FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance) court apparently used one of its most bizarre claims to approve the surveillance of a Trump campaign advisor.
- We also have learned that the Steele dossier was commissioned by an opposition-research firm—Fusion GPS—that had Russia among its main clients.
In light of these disclosures, investigators must now determine if the leaders of the Democratic Party, not Trump, colluded with the Kremlin to produce what the Russians call “black PR” against Trump.
We can understand if many Trump-haters [aka Tiberius] swallowed the dossier’s tales of improbable business deals and fictitious meetings as related by anonymous informants, but it now appears that the FBI used the dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil a member of Trump’s campaign team from a FISA court judge. Federal courts should be subject to rules of evidence on hearsay, identification, and authentication, which would seem to nullify the dossier as credible evidence. Federal courts, like FISA, are also not supposed to be swayed by politics and should have the commonsense to recognize nonsense when they see it.
I concluded immediately after the Steele dossier’s publication by BuzzFeed in January of 2017 that it was a fake. No source cited in the dossier had been willing to come forward; most of the information is hearsay or even hearsay of hearsay. There is no way that Steele’s alleged top-level Kremlin informants would spill the Kremlin’s deepest secrets to lowly Steele hirelings. Steele’s informants were therefore either fictitious, or low-level poseurs passing on gossip, OR they were doing the bidding of the Kremlin as part of a classic Russian disinformation campaign.
Persistent media efforts to validate the Steele dossier have failed. After an extensive investigation, the Washington Post disguised its disappointment with verbal gymnastics: “Although it’s impossible to say that the dossier is entirely inaccurate (there are some glimmers of accurate predictions), it is also impossible to say that it has been broadly validated.”
As a matter of fact, the dossier is unverifiable, given the anonymous sources and whether the informants are real people or fabrications. The Steele dossier could not stand up to the most liberal interpretation of rules of evidence. Even more damaging: one of the key verifiable claims of the dossier (that Trump’s personal lawyer orchestrated payoffs from Prague on specific dates) has been shown to be false. When virtually everything else is not verifiable or simply made up, the failure of the one claim that can be validated should call into question the entire dossier.
As a last reed of hope, “dossier Believers” argue that the dossier was after all prepared by a master spy—a former MI6 bigwig—whose “trusted compatriots” gathered intelligence from the innermost sanctums of the Kremlin. They do not note that Steele’s last tour of duty in Russia was a quarter century earlier. The Christopher Steele of dossier fame was long past his sleuthing days, but was instead a consultant hustling to give his clients the dirt they wanted.
