The chapter in PROOF OF COLLUSION on the so-called "pee tapes" is about a dozen pages long—and almost none of it relies on Steele's dossier. Rather, it offers major-media evidentiary corroboration of the dossier from the US and UK. You can read it for $15: amazon.com/Proof-Collusio…
1/ That I know of, every single media source or book on the dossier—and for that matter, Steele himself—has said quite clearly that we don't know if these tapes exist. We just know that the CIA insists they do—and that all the evidence strongly suggests they do. A key difference.
2/ I mention this because there was an obscene amount of disinformation in media and online today, including claims people insisted they *knew* the tapes existed (no one ever claimed to "know") and that the only evidence of the tapes' existence came from Steele (*wildly* untrue).
3/ For instance, today @AriMelber—who I guess felt comfortable coming out for the premise that there wasn't any corroboration the tapes existed because it wasn't a topic he'd ever researched—gave the false impression that the topic always centered exclusively on Steele's dossier.
@AriMelber 4/ If you stop and think about it for a moment, of *course* that wasn't what happened. Steele presented a dossier with 100 words or so on this topic—and conceded it only had a 70% chance of being correct. Of *course* journalists all over the world tried to follow up on the story.
@AriMelber 5/ Journalists who stopped with the dossier—which is pretty bad journalism, given that the dossier was just raw intelligence!—of *course* came out and said there was no corroboration, because they didn't look for it. Other journalists, like Paul Wood at the BBC, spoke to the CIA.
@AriMelber 6/ Today, in the Judiciary Committee, up and down the line we heard Republicans *insisting* that the FBI should have *listened* to the CIA when it gave the FBI information on Carter Page. If only they'd *listened*! Well, guess what: the CIA told the BBC that the tapes *do* exist.
@AriMelber 7/ GOP interest in *listening to the CIA* began and ended—apparently—with Page. The same Page investigated by the FBI for being a Russian spy *before* Trump announced a presidential run because he gave info to Russian spies, admitted to it, and called himself a "Kremlin adviser."
@AriMelber 8/ If national politics weren't basically a joke—very few people on *either* side have immutable principles that don't change based on whose ox would get gored—the GOP would be as interested in what the CIA told the BBC about the tapes as in what the CIA told the FBI about Page.
@AriMelber 9/ Instead we get otherwise admirable left-leaning journalists burnishing their credentials by saying, "Hey viewer—don't worry! I never thought there were tapes! Nor investigated it!" I work differently; PROOF OF COLLUSION took a chapter to look at scores of sources on the topic.
@AriMelber 10/ Even at the end of the chapter (*spoiler*) I don't take a position on whether the tapes exist, as that would be journalistically bankrupt. Again—and still today—all we can say is that the CIA insists the tapes exist *and* every *single* piece of evidence we have says they do.
@AriMelber NOTE/ The *most* that happened today—if you're *quite* charitable to Graham and company—is that we got evidence that *one* of Steele's *many* sub-sources on the kompromat issue said he didn't know for *sure* a certain corroborating event happened, merely that he'd *heard* it did.
@AriMelber NOTE2/ Any person—whether in or out of journalism, online or off—who says they "know" the tapes do or don't exist is lying to you. Anyone who says there is "no evidence" they exist is lying to you. Anyone who says there is "no corroboration" of the dossier on this topic is lying.
@AriMelber NOTE3/ And by the way: the person who told the *most* lies about the tapes—by far? Donald Trump. He *couldn't stop lying* about *every single aspect* of the story and his trip to Moscow in November 2013. We still have *no* explanation for why he felt he had to lie about all this.
