![]() But the FBI did not perform the most basic checks by asking: “Who are these sources? If they are truly Kremlin insiders, why are they talking? What is the message being imparted and for whose benefit?”Ī common refrain during this early period of RussiaGate was that the dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, stood as the guarantor of its authenticity. Their exercise failed to confirm any substantive points of the dossier. Indeed, the FBI did “check out” the dossier by constructing a spreadsheet of the dossier’s few checkable facts, such as times, dates, and places. Let’s get this straight: The dossier claims that two high-level Kremlin officials let a Steele “sub source” in on one of Russia’s deepest secrets - that then presidential candidate Trump was a Russian asset and had been one for five years! These two Kremlin sources had revealed the intelligence plot of the century, and no one was saying: “Wait a minute, this can’t be real! We need to check this out with a fine tooth comb.” ![]() Source B asserted that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN.” “Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least 5 years. Here is the excerpt from the first page of the report: I need only one excerpt from the Steele Dossier to illustrate why I reached the conclusion that it was a scam back in early 2017 - and why the intelligence community should have reached the same conclusion in short order. ![]() That is a long sentence but it summarizes what happened. Yet, our intelligence community, primarily the FBI, allowed an intelligence dossier compiled by a private opposition firm using anonymous private contractors interviewing anonymous Russian sources making once-in-a-century charges against a presidential candidate and then president to shape the nation’s most sensitive intelligence operations against a fictional plot cooked up by opposition politicians. Let the media and politicians roll in the gutter, but not us, they would say under normal conditions. Professionals who gather intelligence are supposed to be truth seekers. Those who dreamed up “Trump as a Russian agent” probably did not expect it to profoundly affect American political life as it did. Yes, politicians engage in dirty tricks that threaten to cross the line of legality, but it is hard to find another dirty trick of this magnitude. Media failures are to be expected, but rarely of this magnitude. Yes, media and politicians march to different drummers. ![]() We should not let the frenzy of the Steele Dossier by the media and anti-Trump politicians deflect attention from the intel community’s behavior. We are still waiting for some kind of disavowal of the dossier from our masters of intelligence. To my alarm, the FBI was taking the fake dossier seriously. All that would be required was for them to observe general rules of intelligence collection. Four years later, we have definitive proof from an inspector general and a special counsel that the Steele Dossier was indeed a hoax, one that paralyzed American politics for an entire presidential term.Īt the time, I expected the intelligence community to reach the same conclusion as I. ![]() In this and subsequent articles, I explained how and why I reached this conclusion, even with the limited information available at the time. 11, 2017 (one day after its publication by BuzzFeed), I wrote that the Steele Dossier was bogus, a fake, and a scam. ![]()
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