Former British spy Christopher Steele worked with Fusion GPS Glenn Simpson to get the contents of Steeleās dossier into the media before the 2016 election. Byron York reported that Steele personally briefed reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the New Yorker, and Yahoo, all to little or no effect. Mother Jonesās David Corn gave the received version of Steeleās story on October 31 inĀ āA veteran spy has given the FBI information alleging a Russian operation to cultivate Donald Trump.ā
Cornās account gave us the heroic version of the dossier. Howard Blum followed up in the credulous Vanity Fair articleĀ āHow ex-spy Christopher Steele compiled his explosive Trump dossier.āĀ Blumās article is useful in helping us understand the line Steele and his employers were peddling to the FBI and to the media.
Blumās starstruck article presented Steele and Simpson (but especially Steele) as the heroes ofĀ The Dossiad. Read how Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson threw caution to the winds and selflessly gave their all to save the republic from Donald Trump. As I see it, this version of the story enacts an update onĀ The Dunciad. I have called itĀ The Dossiad. In this case, however, the satire is unintended. Only the Dullness remains.
The New Yorkerās John Cassidy painted a portrait of Glenn Simpson in this spirit inĀ āThe digger who commissioned the Trump-Russia dossier speaks.āĀ I commented on Cassidyās column inĀ āGlenn Simpson: The New Yorker version.āĀ Despite the New Yorkerās reputation for fact checking, Cassidyās laughable error of fact about the Steele dossier ā āhis first memorandum, which was thirty-five pages long and dated June 20, 2016ā ā remains uncorrected. (Steeleās June 20 memo was three pages long. The entire Steele dossier posted on BuzzFeed is itself 35 pages long.)
Now comes the New Yorkerās Jane Mayer to give us the definitive version ofĀ The DossiadĀ inĀ āChristopher Steele, the man behind the Trump dossier.āĀ Subhead: āHow the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trumpās ties to Russia.ā
Mayerās article is 15,000 words long. Reading it is an ordeal. Itās not all Dullness. She mixes Dullness with Dishonesty. Indeed, in MayerāsĀ Dossiad, Dishonesty predominates.
The dishonesty permeates the article and it is infuriating. An article at least as long Mayerās is needed to disentangle and rectify it. Mayerās pretense of impartiality in adjudicating questions of fact and credibility must count as the articleās leading misrepresentation. If only she had a sense of humor, one might thinkĀ surely she jests.
Mayer collects tributes to Steele from colleagues present and past. He is her hero. He is a super spy with impeccable Russian sources. Even so, the super spy had no idea for whom he was working when Simpson hired him in 2016. Behind Simpson ā as we know now thanks only to Rep. Devin Nunes and his Republican colleagues ā lay the law firm serving as counsel to the Clinton presidential campaign, the Clinton campaign itself, and the Democratic National Committee. Steele compiled his dossier in the service of the Clinton presidential campaign.
In his testimony before congressional committees, the incredibly devious Glenn Simpson insisted that Steele didnāt know the identity of his clients while also insisting that he had otherworldly powers to discern the veracity of his Russian informants. It didnāt add up.
Mayer is not completely dull. She depict Steele as a super spy. She ignores Simpsonās testimony on this score and instead reports: āSeveral months after Steele signed the deal [with Fusion GPS], he learned that, through this chain, his research was being jointly subsidized by the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C.ā
So it only took Steele āseveral monthsā to figure it out for whom he was working. How did he learn it? When did it come to him? How did he arrive at the realization? What do you mean exactly by āthrough this chainā? What did Steele think about it? You can bet that nobody in the New Yorkerās editorial āchainā cut the answers to these questions for reasons of space. Mayerās curiosity has predictable limits.
Mayerās article should not be ignored. Mayer and the New Yorker mean to fix ā repair and set ā the Democratsā story line. The article has not yet attracted the attention and commentary that it deserves from knowledgeable observers. As of this morning I recommend Chuck Rossās Daily Caller postĀ ā6 revelations in that Christopher Steele puff pieceāĀ and George Neumayrās American Spectator columnĀ āJane Mayerās publicity work for Christopher Steele.ā
Jane Mayerās 15,000-wordĀ New Yorker profileĀ of Christopher Steele reads in part like the stuff of breathless teen girl fan magazines of old āĀ Tiger Beat, say, orĀ 16. Mayer presents Steele as a left-liberal heartthrob. She has fallen for the guy and she wants you to fall for him too. The profile also reads like the tendentious brief of an extraordinarily dishonest lawyer ā perhaps a lawyer who has fallen for his client ā or a lawyer turned politician, selling a pile of goods in the service of a blinding cause. Here Adam Schiff is the incomparable model.
Mayer drones on at eye-glazing length. Having suffered through Mayerās profile, I want to address Mayerās ploys and maneuvers in bite-size portions. I will take it up in pieces that struck me as representative of MayerāsĀ slipperyĀ dishonesty.
In this installment I want to highlight two moments in which I hear the clock striking 13. In these moments our reporter reveals herself as highly invested in her story. She all but declares that she is not to be trusted.
Mayer makes a point in passing on the adoption of āpro-Russian positions on many issuesā which seemed to a Clinton foreign policy adviser to be āinexplicably outside the Republican mainstream.ā Mayer swallows and regurgitates whole the canard that the Trump team āappeared to play a role in modifying the G.O.P. platform so that it better reflected Russiaās position on Ukraine policy.ā Mayer quotes the Clinton adviser: āIt was all beginning to snowball.ā
There is at least one problem with this account. The modification of the Republican platform has been exposed by Bryon York as āone of the enduring misconceptions of the Trump-Russia affair.ā York publishedĀ his Washington Examiner columnĀ exposing the misconception in November 2017. A journalist peddling it as fact in March 2018 is peddling a lie; she is up to something other than journalism.
Perhaps more than anything else, Mayer seeks to vindicate the Steele dossier in her article. If youāre going to fall in love with Steele, youāre going to have to love the dossier with which he sought to save the republic. Mayer does what she can (and what she canāt or shouldnāt) on this score.
It struck me when I came across Mayerās reference to Michael Cohenās defamation lawsuit against Fusion GPS: On January 9th, Trumpās personal attorney, Michael Cohen, filed a hundred-million-dollar defamation lawsuit against Fusion. He also sued BuzzFeed. Cohen tweeted, āEnough is enough of the #fake #RussianDossier.āā Here she comments: āSteele mentioned Cohen several times in the dossier, and claimed that Cohen met with Russian operatives in Prague, in the late summer of 2016, to pay them off and cover up the Russian hacking operation. Cohen denies that heās ever set foot in Prague, and has produced his passport to prove it.ā
It sounds bad. This is the best Mayer can do: āA congressional official has told Politico, however, that an inquiry into the allegation is āstill active.ā And, since the dossier was published, several examples have surfaced of Cohen making secretive payments to cover up other potentially damaging stories.ā Translation: Iām pretty sure that the truth defense wonāt prevail against Cohenās claim. Mayerās apologetics are something worse than pathetic.
This is Mayerās only reference to a defamation lawsuit in her profile. In England, however, Steele is himself the defendant in a defamation lawsuit or two based on that dodgy dossier. Mayer doesnāt even mention them. And the reason for her omission has nothing to do with saving space. The space devoted to her profile by the New Yorker is wide as the plains.
Faced with a defamation claim āin a forum where it was clear to him that making exaggerated or false claims could cost him dearly, [Steele] decided his allegations were not of such āhuge significanceā after all. The quote comes from Andrew McCarthyāsĀ National Review column(the internal quote is fromĀ Rownan Scarborough). McCarthy continues:
One of the libel suits against Steele was filed in London by Aleksej Gubarev, whom Steele accused of participating in Russian intelligence hacking. To defend against the suit, Steele and his attorneys had no choice but to respond to interrogatories. In answering, Steele markedly downgraded the seriousness of his dossier reports.
According to Steeleās courtroom version, the dossier is merely a compilation of bits of āraw intelligenceā that were āunverifiedā and that he passed along because they āwarranted further investigationā ā i.e., not because he could vouch for their truthfulness. He gave them to American and British government officials, he maintains, only because they raised potential national-security threats, not because they actually established any such threats. That, he now says, was for government investigators to figure out. In sum, Steeleās defamation defense is not that what he wrote was true but that his reports āmust be critically viewed in light of the purpose for and circumstances in which the information was collected.ā
There is laugh-out-loud stuff here: Steeleās declamation of his profound commitment to discretion and secrecy lest his āraw,ā āunverified,ā and possibly false reports defame anyone. He claimed that he and Fusion GPS had a solemn agreement not to disclose his work . . . except for whenever they decided to disclose his work ā including to Fusionās clients and to major press organs during the stretch run of a contentious presidential election. But not to worry: These discussions were āoff the record,ā a term Steele claims to have understood to mean āto be used for the purpose of further research but would not be published or attributed.ā Right. Somehow though, when his briefings to journalists about his reports were published, he kept doing the briefings.
Mayer should have been especially interested in Steeleās disclaimer of the veracity of his dossier. She represented the New Yorker among the āmajor press organsā who met with Steele āduring the stretch run of a contentious presidential election.ā
The New Yorker is no different then Rolling Stone,Newsweek or Time leftists propeganda
The propaganda arm of the Democrat party (aka, “the media”) is beginning to realize that all that Russian collusion they were told was going to save them and install Hillary in her rightful place on the throne has sprung from the wonderful dossier. The FBI used the dossier almost exclusively to justify their entire campaign to undercut Trump and, sadly for them, it is turning out to be utter garbage. So the Ministry of Propaganda has to go to work propping up the crummy dossier.
Poor babies.