Thread by @bansisharma

1. WSJ: James Comey and Our Poisoned Politics

Five years ago, the FBI boss was busy selling the bogus Steele dossier.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of perhaps the greatest media scandal of our age.

2. Outlets like CNN and BuzzFeed flogged a bogus dossier of salacious claims funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, even while admitting they didn’t know whether the dossier’s allegations against Donald Trump were true or false.

3. It wasn’t necessarily that reporters had mistaken fake news for the real stuff—they simply didn’t care or acknowledge that they had an obligation to vet anti-Trump claims before disseminating them.

4. The pathetic media excuse for running with the story was that important people in the government were talking about it. And no one wanted to talk about it more than the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. He kept talking about it even after FBI had failed to corroborate it

5. Five years ago, Mr. Comey emailed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. As the dossier story was raging in the press, Mr. Comey mounted an effort to stop Mr. Clapper from publicly acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agencies had not deemed the dossier reliable.

6. According to the Obama-appointed Justice Department inspector general who reported on the government abuses in this case in 2019, Mr. Comey’s Jan. 11, 2017 email to Mr. Clapper included the following:

7. In the long history of Beltway bureaucratic maneuvering, has a government memo ever included so much inaccuracy in so few words? Mr. Steele had already been fired by the FBI as a confidential source, and his story was falling apart.

8. The day after Comey's email, the FBI received a U.S. intelligence report warning of a particular inaccuracy in the dossier and assessing that the material was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”

Comey never disclosed that.

The End