Why Is Christopher Steele Still a Thing?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
08 November 19
The ex-spy and infamous dossier author posits yet another elaborate theory
of foreign infiltration
From The Guardian this Monday, November 4:
Fresh evidence has also emerged of attempts by the Kremlin to infiltrate the
Conservatives by a senior Russian diplomat suspected of espionage, who spent
five years in London cultivating leading Tories including Johnson himself
The committees report is based on analysis from Britains intelligence
agencies, as well as third-party experts such as the former MI6 officer
Christopher Steele
Christopher Steele became famous in the United States as the author of a
dossier that claimed Russians had been cultivating, supporting, and
assisting Donald Trump for at least 5 years.
Now Steele is back, claiming that the Russians have been cultivating the
Tories and Boris Johnson for
five years.
You cant make this stuff up. The only thing comparable would be Ahmed
Chalabi lobbying for a sequel invasion after the WMD hunt in Iraq came up
empty, and having the same humiliated media figures and politicians reach
for pom-poms all over again.
Steele first appeared in connection with the Trump story as a well-placed
Western intelligence source in a 2016 Yahoo News article by Michael
Isikoff. The piece claimed a Trump aide named Carter Page was discussing the
lifting of sanctions with Rosneft chief Igor Sechin.
Steele, in fact, was a private opposition researcher hired by the premium
research firm Fusion-GPS, on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The
Yahoo story came out on September 23, 2016; it would be over a year before
Steeles status as a paid Clinton researcher would be made public.
After Isikoffs piece came out, the Clinton campaign released a statement
about how it was chilling to learn that U.S. intelligence officials were
conducting a probe into suspected meetings between Trumps foreign policy
adviser Carter Page and members of Putins inner circle.
If the merry-go-round trick of commenting gravely about a story you yourself
planted sounds familiar, its because its the tactic used by Vice President
Dick Cheney in the early 2000s, when he went on Meet The Press to comment
about a story in the New York Times this morning regarding Saddam
Husseins aluminum tubes. Press figures denounced such chicanery then.
Steeles report came out in full during the transition, in a sleazy series
of maneuvers by outgoing intelligence officials, who presented the incoming
president with a synopsis of Steeles work.
When details of this meeting leaked, news outlets that previously had been
sitting on Steeles report because it was unverifiable suddenly had a hook
to release news about the briefing: Intelligence chiefs relayed allegations
that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial
information about Mr. Trump.
The resulting viral furor spurred Buzzfeed to publish the entire dossier, so
Americans could make up their own minds.
In this way, the dossier was published without ever going through a vetting
process. For all the talk of hacking, this was a true Trojan Horse
penetration of the American news media system (not that most media companies
minded, of course).
Enthusiasts now cling to the idea that the dossier was merely a starting
point, and remains neither proved nor disproved (the New York Times
translation for unmentionable until published by someone less reputable),
but the whole shooting match should have ended once the world got a chance
to read Steeles reports. Any sane persons Malcolm Gladwell-Blink reaction
to these memos would be that they were lunatic conspiratorial horseshit on
the level of Avril Lavigne dying and being replaced by a clone named
Melissa.
Steeles most boffo-sensational charge was Russians having a tape of Trump
getting off to prostitutes peeing on a Moscow hotel bed once slept in by
Barack and Michelle Obama. This, he said, enabled the Russians to
blackmail Trump if they so wished. However, per Steele, Putin chose
instead to offer a regular flow of lucrative real estate deals that
Trump for some unknown reason kept declining, even though Steele
simultaneously reported Trump was exploring the real estate sector in
Petersburg as well as Moscow.
Meanwhile Trump who at the outset of the alleged conspiracy was issuing
reality TV challenges to heavyweights like LaToya Jackson, Meat Loaf, and
Jose Canseco was supposedly feeding Putin information about Russian
oligarchs in America, through Russian émigrés living in the U.S. as cover
(read: Russian immigrants). These middlemen were paid through the
mechanism of Russian pension disbursements.
Tens of thousands of dollars were involved, wrote Steele, echoing Dr.
Evil.
Finally, after at least five years of well-developed conspiracy, when
Russias prize asset at last became the nominee of the Republican Party,
Putin according to Steele withheld a secret kompromat file on Hillary
Clinton that was being personally run by spokesperson Dmitry Peskov (because
who doesnt put a press chief known to half the worlds foreign
correspondents in charge of a secret intelligence file?). However, it
wouldnt have mattered if Putin had given Trump the Hillary file, Steele
reported, because it didnt have anything unorthodox or embarrassing in
it, just eavesdropped conversations of various sorts.
Devastating revelations? Not to Trumps Team, who Steele claimed was
relaxed about Russia stories appearing in the press, as those only
deflected media and Democrats attention away from the real story, i.e.
the substantial
bribes and kickbacks in China. Steele said these would
have been very damaging to the Trump campaign if revealed, though Steele
didnt know what they were well enough to reveal them.
No part of this Clintonian 9/11 Truth tale of a world riddled with plotters
united by the same statistically rare urge to treason (and the same
strategic instinct to create unnecessary layers of felony witnesses) has
ever been proven out: not the moles in the DNC and hackers in the U.S.,
nor any of the sleeper émigré conduits, nor the sophisticated Russian
hackers in Prague who for some reason needed the direction of the medallion
taxi owner/Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
Trump aides Carter Page and Paul Manafort, named as key conduits, managed to
keep their conspiracy to act as intelligence go-betweens hidden even from
secret FISA monitoring, the vast Chinese swindles never emerged, and no one
ever found those cutout consular officials, whom Steele in an interview with
a State Department official seemed to have believed were being paid out of a
nonexistent Russian consulate in Miami.
If you read this and thought it was silly, you werent alone. In early 2017,
CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote to Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith in a snit,
complaining that Smith had been irresponsible and uncollegial when he
published the dossier. Was Tapper upset that Smith had broken with ethical
tradition by publishing unverified material, defaming a string of named
human beings as traitorous spies without evidence?
Nope. Tapper was mad that Smith had defamed the story by showing where it
came from! I think your move makes the story less serious and credible, he
wrote, in an email produced as part of a lawsuit against Buzzfeed. I think
you damaged its impact.
Tapper apparently liked the Steele tale better when it was coming out in
bits, through more politically astute sources like his buddy and future
co-worker, the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, one
of the four Sneaky Petes who presented Trump with the Steele synopsis.
The now-accepted notion that Steeles importance lay in his central claim
of Russian cyber-interference is still more revisionist propaganda. The
headline of Steeles first report was about Trumps compromising
relationship with the Kremlin, and the heavy focus of the original (i.e.
non-verifiable) material in the dossier is the two-way Trump-Russia plot.
The American intelligence community published a conclusion about Russian
interference in early January of 2017 (the many coverage oddities
surrounding that story comprise another subject for another time). America
didnt lose its mind for the two ensuing years because of Russian hacking,
but rather because of the widespread belief that the new president was a
long-cultivated Russian agent who would be found out at any moment, across
years of tipping points and beginnings of the end.
The original source of this madness was Steele, and the media and political
figures who leaned with all their might into this phony narrative
especially the ones who knew it originated as Clinton campaign research
should be as embarrassed as the newspapers and news networks who pushed the
WMD hunt.
This obviously hasnt happened, as the instinct instead has been to apply
the Scarlet Letter of conspiracy theory to those who didnt buy this
nonsense, usually on the grounds that any effort to discredit Steele is
just pro-Trumpism by another name.
This has nothing to do with Trump, and everything to do with restoring
controls that are supposed to exist to prevent the press from leading the
public off the deep end.
The WMD affair showed what happens when we dont require sources to show us
evidence, when we let political actors use the press to confirm their own
assertions, when we report on the journey of rumors instead of the rumors
themselves, and most especially when we lionize intelligence and law
enforcement figures, who usually turn out to be just as craven and
unreliable as the rest of us.
When we let stuff like this go, the public sees us as fools, at which point
it doesnt matter whether what we write is for or against any politician,
because nobody believes us anyway. Is this really the industry standard
were gunning for? Are we never going to own up to this one?
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