This sentence appears late in the piece; it should've been in the lead paragraph: "The Steele dossier played no role in the F.B.I.'s opening of the Russia investigation in July 2016, and Mr. Mueller did not rely on it for his report."
Then you continue the discussion from there.
Then you continue the discussion from there.
PS/ I still maintain the Steele dossier is the single most lied-about document this side of the Trump-Zelensky transcript. First, Steele told anyone he spoke to about it that it was merely "raw intelligence." Second, Steele was clear that he thought maybe 70% of it was accurate.
PS2/ Third, Steele didn't know who was doing the work for when he did it (re: false GOP claims "Clinton paid Steele," when in fact Steele was a subcontractor working for a contractor the DNC's law firm paid). Fourth, Steele's *earlier* work on Trump was paid for *by GOP sources*.
PS3/ Fifth, Steele gave his work to the FBI, and only went to the media when the FBI *lied to protect Trump* by saying it had no evidence Trump had ties to Russia. Sixth, much of what is in the dossier (especially re: Manafort and Page) was prescient, accurate, and corroborated.
PS4/ Seventh, the GOP "bar talk" talking point—the idea Steele's sources "conceded everything in the dossier was just bar talk"—is a heinous lie Lindsey Graham concocted when (get this) he saw that Steele had met one source in a bar.
That's it—it was simply a *meeting location*.
That's it—it was simply a *meeting location*.
PS5/ Eighth, of the few confirmed inaccurate things—remember, Steele himself said at least *30%* was inaccurate—many dovetail with other intel. For instance, *7* allied intel agencies told USIC that Trump aides were meeting Russians in Europe. So it wasn't Cohen; it *was* others.
PS6/ These are just eight of the many lies told about the Steele dossier. The worst part? Media felt so burned by Mueller on the dossier—even though early media coverage of it was incredibly tepid—that it's actively participated in spreading deceitful rhetoric about the document.
PS7/ The dossier describes a policy-for-election aid collusion scheme we know from the Mueller Report and major-media reporting *did* occur. The sole reference to a Trump-camp payment for hacking appears to *not* be accurate—but was *never picked up by those on the left*, either.
PS8/ Media facilitation of lies about the dossier has, as the NYT piece atop this thread intimates, aided Trump's propaganda on his ties to Russia—or, as he falsely positions it, his lack of ties—by permitting the dossier to be seen as central to the Russia probe, when it wasn't.
PS9/ I do sometimes worry that media has done *such damage* to the core facts of the dossier and the Russia probe that historians won't be able to rescue the truth. Seriously—the misinformation spread by media *even about its own 2016 and 2017 reporting* is historically shocking.
PS10/ That's why I (and David Corn, Like Harding and some others) wrote books based on major-media reporting of the Russia probe *as it happened*—to protect against Trump's massive, lumbering, media-aided disinformation machine. Proof of Collusion (2018) has the truth of matters.
PS11/ Another far-too-late-but-key line in the NYT article: "[The dossier's] flaws have taken on outsized political significance, as Mr. Trump's allies have sought to conflate it with the larger effort to understand Russia's covert efforts to tilt the 2016 election in his favor."
PS12/ It's no coincidence that the most accurate parts of the dossier—among many—were about Carter Page, and that the dossier *was* used as one piece of evidence to justify surveilling Page.
That suggests the FBI's judgment on what to pay attention to in the dossier was *sound*.
That suggests the FBI's judgment on what to pay attention to in the dossier was *sound*.
