The FBI did try to run down Steele’s leads, but it also had other sources for its investigation (and, indeed, uncovered a great deal of incriminating information). That is obviously a very good reason to begin a counterintelligence investigation. The FBI began looking into Trump’s ties to Russia because Trump foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos boasted that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton to an Australian diplomat, who duly informed the U.S. They want to make Steele the underpinning of both the FBI investigation and the journalistic narrative about Trump and Russia.īut the Trumpist argument that Steele’s allegations formed the “foundation” of the FBI investigation is obviously false. But conservatives are not satisfied with merely correcting the record on Steele. Knocking down Steele’s unfounded speculation is a real public service by the Trump administration–appointed special prosecutor John Durham (who in general seems to have gone pretty far off the deep end). But on the whole, the thrust of my argument has proven true: Trump’s relationship with Russia turned out to be deeper and more incriminating. I suggested the story “ followed the contours of what Steele’s sources told him,” and now we’ve learned Steele was mostly wrong and had little insight into the scandal. As expected, not all the possibilities I described have proven true.
That story was rigorously fact-checked - and no, I couldn’t have cited Steele as a source for a factual claim even if I wanted to. In 2018, I wrote a story laying out an array of possibilities for where the Trump-Russia story might go, ranging from probably to unlikely. If that hypothesis turns out to be wrong, and the sources behind the claim turn out to be less credible than I believed, I won’t retract my conjecture that it might be true, but I would feel at least somewhat chastened. I’ve written numerous columns suggesting the lab-leak hypothesis, while unproven, might be true.
#RUSSIAN DOSSIER CASE FREE#
Opinion journalists are free to engage in speculation that is labeled as speculation, but we should also be held accountable for the quality of our speculation. The most famous is the alleged pee tape, the potential existence of which I speculated about quite a bit, citing factors like Russia’s demonstrated use of honey-trap tactics against visiting dignitaries and the shakiness of Trump’s denials. What some analysts and opinion journalists (like me) did was speculate that Steele’s claims may well be true, using verified facts to assess the possibility of Steele’s unverified claims. Not even opinion journalists claimed his allegations should be considered factually true. The mainstream media did not treat Steele’s allegations as facts. Steele himself estimated the tips were only around 70 to 90 percent accurate, and almost nobody would put the percentage anywhere near that high many of the allegations he compiled came through interested parties or second- and thirdhand gossip. The tip sheet was always seen as unproven, even by those of us who gave it some credence. The pretext for this chorus of new complaints that Trump has been treated very unfairly is new revelations about the Steele dossier.
National Review, which in the past has wandered from the pro-Trump line on some matters, now alleges the FBI “relied on the shoddy document to surveil an American citizen in an investigation that produced the Mueller probe and a two-year-long obsession with Trump and Russian built on a preposterous foundation.” You can find the same line in organs like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and the Washington Examiner, not to mention the ordinary houses of Trump worship like the Federalist. The novel development is that the entire conservative movement apparatus is now singing from the same hymnal. Trump’s lawsuit threat is a publicity vehicle to advance the message he has never stopped making: that the entire Russia scandal is a “hoax,” ginned up by Democrats and the Deep State, of which he and his allies are innocent, and the crimes are all on the other side. If he did, he would certainly lose, because the Times and the Post in fact uncovered enormous amounts of damning evidence against Trump and did not, contra Trump, rely on the Steele dossier, the report compiled by the British spy Christopher Steele.
Trump, of course, will probably never actually file this suit. Donald Trump’s attorney has written a letter threatening to sue the Pulitzer Committee unless it revokes the awards given to the Washington Post and the New York Times for their coverage of Trump’s secretive ties to Russia.
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