Thread by @SethAbramson

(THREAD) To those who thought that Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi would eventually stop lying about the Steele Dossier: no, they won't stop. They won't *ever* stop. They have too much money and too much cultural capital invested in the lies now.

So here (yet again) is the truth.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1393690351974686720

1/ Whatever nitpicking about Steele's professional reputation you may find that plays off the straw man one or two sources in England accidentally created by comparing Steele to Bond, the facts are simple: he was so trusted by MI6 that he was the man who trained *other* spies.

2/ The FBI had long trusted him, and had *good reason* to trust him. Steele was and is not just a top Russia expert worldwide—he *ran* the Moscow desk for MI6—but he had fruitfully aided the FBI in the past. When he did work for Fusion GPS, he did *not* know who his client was.

3/ Steele has never worked for the Clinton campaign. Steele has never worked for Perkins Coie, the Clinton campaign's 2016 law firm. Steele had a company called Orbis that did work as a contractor for Fusion GPS, who did not reveal the identity of its clients to Steele. Ever.

4/ Steele has done work benefitting both political parties in the US. In fact, Steele's original research into Trump (via Orbis, for Fusion GPS) was paid for by *right-wing sources*. Steele had been doing his work for *months* before—unknown to him—Perkins Coie became the client.

5/ Chris Steele did *not* go to the press when he discovered information that would have led *any* friend of the United States—and partner to the FBI—to worry that the American government was in danger of being infiltrated by hostile foreign actors.

No, Steele went *to the FBI*.

6/ What the FBI did next was lie. It lied to America and lied to media. It *proactively* told U.S. voters that it had no information about Trump and Russia—and let the NYT print that story, which it knew was fraudulent. And in the meantime, it was colluding with Giuliani in NYC.

7/ America was promised—over and over and over again, in 2017 and then in 2018 and then in 2019 and then in 2020—that the DOJ IG, or some entity in the FBI, or Congress, or *someone*, would investigate why the FBI lied to media *and* why it leaked false intel to Trump's campaign.

8/ Needless to say, the investigations never came. The DOJ and FBI entities who promised to investigate the FBI's lying and collusion were—ironically—lying when they said that. Only *one person in the goddamned world* took action in the face of the FBI's bad faith.

Chris Steele.

9/ When Steele saw that not only had the FBI *buried* the national-security-implicating intel he'd passed on but was *actively lying about it* to the media and American voters, he became concerned—given the leaks to Giuliani, it turned out correctly—that the FBI was compromised.

10/ So Steele, gravely concerned about *us*—the American people, his nation's allies—carefully reached out to the media to try to set the record straight. And when the FBI found out, it did just what you'd expect, given what it had done to aid Trump: it fired and libeled Steele.

11/ When people like Greenwald and Taibbi libel Steele as a fraud, one of their favorite data points is that the FBI stopped working with him. Yes, it did! Because Steele called them out on hiding accurate info from U.S. voters as it was leaking *false* info to Trump's campaign.

12/ What about the "dossier"? Greenwald and Taibbi's lies on this topic are boundless as well. They *start* such lies—especially Taibbi—by calling it a "report," which is *precisely* what they know it *wasn't*. Steele and the FBI were always *crystal clear* on it being raw intel.

13/ When Steele gave the FBI the dossier, he confirmed with them that it was *wholly unprocessed raw intelligence*, and he went even further: he estimated that about a third of it—consistent with much raw intel—was *false*. He was *very* clear on the possibility of sources lying.

14/ Steele had *nothing invested* in what the FBI did with the dossier. He just assumed they'd a) try to confirm it (separating wheat from chaff), b) take necessary actions in response to the "wheat."

Instead, the FBI lied about all the intel they had and aided Trump's campaign.

15/ People forget: Fusion GPS *didn't want* Steele to go to the press—nor did they aid him in doing so. Nor did anyone pay Steele to go to the press. Nor was him doing so part of his contract for a client whose identity he didn't know. He went because the FBI lied to him. And us.

16/ Because of course the FBI had a *lot* more than the dossier in late Summer '16—another thing Greenwald and Taibbi lie about. The FBI knew that Page, who'd given non-public info to Russian spies before and called himself a Kremlin adviser, had met secretly with Kremlin agents.

17/ They knew one of Donald Trump's top national security advisers—a member of Trump's intimately sized National Security Advisory Committee—had confessed to secret contact with Kremlin agents and that the Kremlin had offered Trump's campaign illegal aid and *not* been rebuffed.

18/ They knew Trump's campaign manager had spent at least ten years working under a *contract* to advance Putin's interests in the United States—and they didn't know if that contract had ended or not. They knew Trump had *publicly* asked for illegal election aid from the Kremlin.

19/ And they knew far more (I'm just hitting the highlights). So when Steele determined in fall 2016 that the FBI was acting in bad faith, he was *correct*. The October 30, 2016 NYT report—quoting the FBI—that there was no Trump-Russia evidence was its worst reporting since WMDs.

20/ OK, you say—but what about the quality of the intel in the dossier? Steele was candid about it being raw intel; candid about roughly a third of it likely being false; expected the FBI would do the vetting of it; was amply qualified to collect the intel... but was it any good?

21/ First, note that even its detractors *agree* that much of it was accurate—they just dismiss a large chunk of the accurate intel by saying that it was "public" information that in theory one could have found out via OSINT. Okay, fine, but the question was, "Was it *accurate*?"

22/ Second, note that the man who lied about investigating Giuliani (Horowitz) is the man Steele's critics often cite for the premise that dossier was bad. But wait! Even Horowitz says *some* of the *non-public* information in the dossier was *correct*.

That's right: *correct*.

23/ Third, even Horowitz—the only man Greenwald or Taibbi will listen to—says that besides the accurate public intel, and the accurate nonpublic intel, the dossier *also* contained information that's "unverifiable" by its very nature. Intel we can't call that "false" *or* "true."

24/ Fourth, Horowitz says that besides the ACCURATE public info in the dossier, and the ACCURATE nonpublic info, and the UNVERIFIABLE info that's NEITHER ACCURATE NOR OTHERWISE, much info in the dossier simply hasn't been verified "yet." That intel *also* can't be called "false."

25/ So now we come to a *fifth* category of analysis, and it's the *first one* where we encounter anything inaccurate in the dossier: we might call this the category of "non-public intelligence that can be confirmed or denied through an extensive attempted-verification process."

26/ When Steele told the FBI that he thought a third of the raw intel he'd compiled was probably false—just an estimate; he was certainly open to it being slightly higher—he was referring to this category *plus* the "permanently unverifiable" category. So how did Chris Steele do?

27/ Answer: Steele did right about where he *expected* he'd do, and told the FBI he'd do—and that you'd *expect* him to do by being an accomplished spy turning over a dossier of raw intel (not *in any sense whatsoever* a processed "report") to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

28/ Ask Greenwald/Taibbi what Steele got wrong in the category of "subject to verification" intel—a fraction of the whole—and they'll come up with just one clear error (needing to come up with dozens to beat Steele's "30%" estimate): Cohen's trip to Prague. That's it.

That's it.

29/ The problem is, Steele said that about a third of the dossier was false, so the Cohen trip to Prague *is consistent with Steele's estimate*. Steele is only a bad actor, or his dossier "fraudulent," if *well over a third* of its verifiable intel turned out to be wrong. Did it?

30/ Absolutely not. At present—within the category of intel from the dossier that we can assess—far *less* than 30% has been found to be incorrect. Was Manafort the point-man for Trump-Russia collusion? Yep. Did Page meet with Kremlin agents in Moscow and lie about it? Yep.

31/ Did the Kremlin have a complex payment scheme for its U.S. agents of exactly the sort the Steele dossier described? Yep. Was the *overwhelming* weight of the evidence we have suggestive of Trump have been filmed in a compromising way in the Ritz Moscow? Yes. Absolutely *yes*.

32/ I'm not going to turn this into a thread on kompromat—as there's a fully sourced chapter on that in PROOF OF COLLUSION—but suffice to say that when the NYT op-ed Greenwald just linked to snarkily says, "Did Steele know more than the CIA?" the answer is no. It knew the *same*.

33/ The BBC reported in January 2017 that its *top Moscow correspondent* had been told *by the CIA* that tapes of the sort described in the dossier exist (indeed, the CIA told the BBC "multiple" such tapes, from "several" dates and times and locations).

And the NYT *knows* this.

34/ The Mueller Report records that one of Trump's attorney's top contacts in Russia/the former Soviet republics told Team Trump that such tapes existed—and Cohen, who knows Trump better than anyone, found that report credible. But that's not all. That's not even *close* to all.

35/ UK media outlets spoke to hotel witnesses and even a Trump Org employee who corroborate key aspects of the narrative. Trump's bodyguard was caught lying to Congress about the circumstances of that night and whether he was guarding Trump's door or not. But wait! There's more.

36/ UK media spoke to Moscow prostitutes who said that their entire community in Moscow was alive with news—*at the time*—that something like this had occurred. And remember that Trump's bodyguard *admits* that a Trump ally offered prostitutes to party with Trump for that night.

37/ Two hotel employees told UK media they witnessed a group of women arguing in the Ritz Moscow lobby about whether they could go up to Trump's room without signing in. And Trump himself—don't forget!—publicly declared that he believed his room to be under video surveillance.

38/ But wait! There's more. Every statement Trump has made about his Moscow trip turned out to be false. Its duration, details, who he was with—all lies. Why, if there was nothing to hide? Trump even publicly said that he knew he was being watched, so he was on his best behavior.

39/ Unfortunately, *prior to the dossier's release* a former Miss Hungary, Kata Sarka, told Hungarian TV Trump *propositioned her for sex in his hotel room* on the night he said he was on his best behavior. So we *know* what he was up for that night, in his video-surveilled room.

40/ I focus on the tape because—after the Prague trip—this is the only *other* fact Greenwald and/or Taibbi insist was false, even though any criminal investigator or criminal lawyer, two jobs I've had, would say that on *balance* the story of the tape appears likely to be true.

41/ Greenwald and Taibbi are famous for being circumspect about major media, but in fact it was *major media* that immediately called the "pee tape" story "salacious" and likely to be untrue and—for some reason—Greenwald and Taibbi ran with it instead of doing research, as I did.

42/ But Greenwald and Taibbi's lying wasn't done with libeling Steele and lying about the dossier. No—they had to lie about the FISA warrants, which they said *only* used dossier info when they knew that was false, and they had to lie about the context in which the dossier arose.

43/ We're told the dossier was all along a massive Obama/Clinton/Democratic Party/Steele plot...

...with the only problem being that GOP sources paid for the research first...

...and it never came out before the election, which *easily* could've been managed if it was a "plot."

44/ So why are Greenwald/Taibbi dead-set on lying about the dossier? Simple: because major media lets them get away with it, and because they were so dead wrong about every other aspect of the Trump-Russia case that lying about the dossier is all they can do now without pushback.

45/ We complain about the Big Lie and revisionist history regarding an election-related Trumpist plot—the insurrection—but major media has no problem (because it's annoyed at Mueller for not indicting a POTUS he was told he couldn't) letting Greenwald and Taibbi lie about Russia.

46/ I've never claimed to know why Greenwald and Taibbi lie about Russia. People love to come on this feed and say both men have secretive Russian ties and sympathies, and I reject that because it's wholly unproven conspiracy theory. Others note they've gotten rich by these lies.

47/ That latter claim is clearly true—Republicans love to be lied to, and their favorite liars are (paradoxically) supposed left-wingers lying to them, so they throw a lot of money in that direction—but Greenwald and Taibbi have at various points exhibited principle, so I'm torn.

48/ All I know for sure, as I've spent years more than Greenwald and Taibbi—combined—researching this issue, and have published more bestsellers on this issue than Greenwald and Taibbi combined, is that on *Russia* these two men are either disingenuous idiots or stone-cold liars.

49/ And I know that the smarmy NYT piece atop this thread, promoted by Greenwald, *isn't* "reportage"—as you can tell by its pejorative characterizations of evidence it couldn't establish cleanly and the myriad unsupported insinuations and attenuated links it aims to establish.

50/ Chris Steele is one of the few heroes of a narrative with almost none. He and his work have been lied about by a bizarre consortium of FBI agents, top media outlets, and supposed iconoclasts like Greenwald and Taibbi—against *all* the hard evidence. And it makes me sick. /end

PS/ I forgot the worst part—the lies Greenwald/Taibbi tell about the Horowitz Report—but suffice to say Horowitz finding some dossier sources gave their intel in bars led Greenwald, Taibbi, and far-right loons like Jim Jordan to claim the DOJ IG found it was all just "bar talk."

PS2/ I'm not kidding; feel free to Google this. The mere fact that some sources did what sources often do—meet in public places to give info—led Greenwald, Taibbi, and other Trump apologists to imply that the men were drunk and not speaking seriously. It's...*straight lunacy*.

PS3/ And by the way, number of times Greenwald has demanded the NYT explain its false reporting on October 30, 2016, which influenced the election? Zero that I've seen. Number of times he's demanded accountability for the NYC field office leaking to Giuliani? Zero that I've seen.

PS4/ Instead, we get these insane panegyrics for Carter Page, who *admitted* to the FBI giving non-public intel to men he *knew* were Kremlin spies; who *admitted* in a letter to being a "Kremlin adviser"; who *lied* on *national television* about his trip to Moscow in July 2016.

PS5/ Finally, I don't want to forget *the most accurate thing in the dossier*, which Greenwald/Taibbi paradoxically choose to give Steele no credit for because it was—wait for it—*later confirmed*, so Steele having it months early suddenly means nothing: Russia was aiding Trump.