Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” needs to spend some time with the Horowitz report. That way, he might stop making sunny appraisals of the dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
Let’s check the timeline: Private intelligence firm Fusion GPS hired Steele in June 2016 to compile reports on Trump-Russia connections. The project was funded, ultimately, by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Steele filed the first of more than a dozen reports on June 20 of that year — nearly a week after The Post reported that Russian hackers had compromised the DNC.
Steele’s report alleged that the Russians did indeed have a bunch of information to release about Clinton, specifically “bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls.” Neither calls nor conversations have ever materialized; meanwhile, the report didn’t address emails. “The Steele report remained way behind public contemporaneous reporting on the hack-and-leak,” summarized Marcy Wheeler.
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On the WikiLeaks front, Steele was behind the news cycle again, as Andrew McCarthy pointed out in National Review. “Plainly, Steele uncovered neither the Russian hacking of DNC emails, nor that Russia used WikiLeaks to publish them.”
Reporter Matt Taibbi rebutted Maher’s dossier boosterism. “The stuff that was actually original in the Steele dossier — everything from the pee tape to the well-developed conspiracy of five years and the plan between the FSB and Trump — none of that panned out,” Taibbi told Maher. He might have added the claim that Michael Cohen had visited Prague in August 2016 to engage in collusion with the Russians — a story that McClatchy bolstered with reporting that has aged poorly. The FBI has found that claim to be “not true.”
For context, the dossier discussion was part of a larger back-and-forth about the Russia-Trump story, anchored by Taibbi’s claim — disputed persuasively by Maher — that the media’s coverage was “this generation’s WMD.”
The Steele dossier breathed its last gasp in December 2019. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz delivered a detailed account of what the FBI had found about Steele’s allegations that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” then-presidential candidate Trump for five years.From Horowitz’s report:
The FBI concluded, among other things, that although consistent with known efforts by Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections, much of the material in the Steele election reports, including allegations about Donald Trump and members of the Trump campaign relied upon in the Carter Page FISA applications, could not be corroborated; that certain allegations were inaccurate or inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team; and that the limited information that was corroborated related to time, location, and title information, much of which was publicly available.
Nor were Steele’s info-suppliers what MSNBC host Rachel Maddow termed “deep cover sources.” Horowitz revealed that the FBI had found Steele’s primary sub-source never expected the information to be presented “as facts.” This was just chatter “with friends over beers,” and the material about Trump’s sexual activities — i.e., the pee tape — was something that the source “heard made in ‘jest.’”
The primary source for the dossier eventually came to light: It was Igor Danchenko, who, as the New York Times put it, was not someone “with a history of working with Russian intelligence operatives or bringing to light their covert activities but instead a researcher focused on analyzing business and political risks in Russia.” His subsequent account of his work for the dossier falls short of fortifying the documents’ credibility.
As this blog noted in a series that followed publication of the Horowitz report, various pundits and media organizations — notably CNN and MSNBC — rooted for the Steele dossier during the first half of the Trump administration, snatching and hyping any tidbit or news squib that could be marshaled for its quasi-corroboration. Then, once the dossier fell to pieces, those organizations found other avenues of obsession, like Trump’s first impeachment, without ever properly correcting their mistakes.
Had they properly cleaned up their mess, perhaps they would have stanched all notions of the dossier’s visionary insights.
In his recent book “Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies,” former New York Times reporter Barry Meier attributes the dossier fiasco to the quirks of the paid intelligence industry that produced it: “Private spies prosper because they operate behind a facade, one that masks the quality of the ‘intelligence’ they sell to clients from scrutiny. … As long as their work never becomes public, operatives can claim to customers that they are selling them ‘strategic intelligence’ when what they are often doing is selling them smoke,” he writes. In this case, some of the “customers” are still buying.