recent Barr letter on Danchenko contained unredaction of Horowitz Footnote 334, which commented on claim that "Steele himself was not the originating source of any of the factual information in his reporting". What does this actually mean? Is it true?
2/ as someone who's studied this very closely, it seems virtually certain to me that many details in the Steele dossier, including nearly all of the details of interest, did NOT originate with the PSS, but were embellishments or fabrications introduced in Steele's writeup.
3/ Was Horowitz archly trolling readers by his use of the term "factual information" (as opposed to more generic term of (say) details in the Steele dossier. I.e. anything that was true did not originate with Steele. But I really don't think that Horowitz was being that cute.
4/ for anyone (like myself) trying to distinguish disinformation originating with Steele from disinformation provided by Danchenko, we are confronted by a form of The Other Dude Did It problem.
5/ Steele says that he (Steele) merely wrote up information provided by Danchenko, while Danchenko says that he doesn't recognize or didn't make many of the assertions in Steele dossier.
6/ Horowitz, like FBI analysts before him, seems to have preferred Steele's version to Danchenko's. After all, it's more comfortable to blame "Russian disinformation". Even Lindsay Graham is happy to forgive FBI misdeeds if it was "Russian disinformation".
7/ Horowitz' redacted footnote, which raised the spectre that Danchenko had been investigated as a potential Russian spy, in this context, tended to support Steele's position in The Other Dude Did It.
8/ However, this position wasn't much help to the authors of the ICA who, based on Horowitz' position on The Other Dude Did It, had, on instructions from departing Obama administration, relied on "Russian disinformation" to destabilize incoming Trump administration.
9/ One of the key legs in the destabilizing ICA was its claim that Putin "preferred" Trump and was acting to aid Trump's election. We now hear rumors that intel community concealed information that stated exactly the opposite. This will totally undermine Priestap's excuse for
10 disregarding the disquieting background stories about Danchenko. What a mess.
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