The GOP War to Discredit the Steele Dossier

With so much constant coverage on hurricanes - first Harvey, now Irma, and perhaps Jose  if it does a loop and turns back towards the U.S. Southeast coast - Russiagate coverage has been lost in the process. Yet, Robert Mueller's investigation is continuing and more and more details from the so-called Steele Dossier that contained sensational allegations, including the alleged existence of a Trump "golden shower" tape, are proving to be accurate. Naturally, the response of many Congressional Republicans is to attack the Steele Dossier and those connected to it rather than admit that they have backed a dangerous and unfit individual in the White House. One leading the charge is the always despicable Trey Gowdy, best known for his Benghazi obsession.  Imagine what Gowdy would be doing if the Steele Dossier had involved Hillary Clinton rather than Der Trumpenführer.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at Gowdy's quest to avoid the truth.  Here are highlights:

In January, a dossier about Donald Trump’s possible Russia ties, prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which had circulated like samizdat among certain journalists and politicians for months, got a spectacular unveiling by BuzzFeed. Since then, though, the 35-page document’s highest profile has been as a source for Stephen Colbert’s wishful jokes about the existence of a Trump “pee pee tape.” Yet more and more of the dossier’s less-salacious raw intelligence, if not every detail, is turning out to be prescient and surprisingly accurate: that the Russians were peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, for instance. A fresh sign of the dossier’s explanatory force is that, increasingly, it has become a target itself. Congressional Republicans appear to be trying to discredit Steele’s work as a way of undermining special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The House Intelligence Committee’s Republican majority has suddenly been firing subpoenas at the F.B.I. and its director, Chris Wray, plus the Department of Justice and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, demanding documents relevant to the F.B.I.’s relationship with Christopher Steele and to the bureau’s attempts to verify the information in Steele’s Trump-Russia dossier, which was originally compiled as oppo research for one of Trump’s Republican primary rivals.

Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, has claimed the subpoenas were necessary because the F.B.I. and D.O.J. haven’t cooperated with the committee’s less-formal requests. Some of his colleagues, however, believe they see a darker motive. “It’s an attempt to both delegitimize the dossier and delegitimize the F.B.I., particularly the work that was done under James Comey,” says Jim Himes, a Connecticut congressman who is the committee’s second-ranking Democrat. . . . . “This is the latest installment of ‘don’t look there, look over here!’ ” Himes says.

Why all this new high-stakes maneuvering? Time and events have bolstered the dossier’s credibility. “The outline of Russian interference in the election that Steele had assembled by June 2016 was months ahead of what anybody else had gathered,” says John Sipher, a 28-year veteran C.I.A. officer who was stationed in Moscow at the same time Steele worked for British intelligence in Russia, and who wrote a detailed analysis of the dossier’s credibility for the blog JustSecurity. “Steele had raw, contemporaneous reports about meetings prior to June, and predicted stuff in the future he would have had no way to know. There’s some weird stuff in there, and things that can’t be verified. But Steele’s report identified multiple elements of the Russian operation including a cyber campaign, leaked documents related to Hillary Clinton, and meetings with Trump affiliates to discuss the receipt of stolen documents well before there was any public knowledge of these events. And the notion that the F.B.I. brought Steele in and was willing to pay him means they took his information seriously and that maybe it fit with some of the other things the bureau had collected.” 

Gowdy’s tactics could have multiple ramifications for Mueller. “If you really have people who are seeking to undermine the F.B.I’.s investigation, even if they’re doing it for their own political reasons, it will help the Russians,” says Asha Rangappa, a former special F.B.I. agent who is now a dean at Yale’s law school. “There might be parts of the dossier that the F.B.I. has corroborated independently, and if you have a leaky committee, the Russians can try to cover their tracks and fabricate things to say, ‘Hey, that’s not true.’ They are not above that.” 

Yet Rangappa’s greater concern is long-term, and about national security. “There’s a misconception that this is something that happened and it’s done,” she says. “The Russian active measures are ongoing. . . . . So you don’t want them to know what you know, because they’ll change tactics and dry up your sources.” 

For the moment, however, some Democrats on the committee are trying to stay focused on one classic theme of investigations: following the money. Steele’s dossier makes reference to possible illicit foreign payments flowing to former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort, and it alleges that longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen provided cash to Russian hackers. Manafort and Cohen have vehemently refuted those claims. Investigators are still looking, though, and their interest was further piqued by Cohen’s efforts to cut a deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow, even as Trump was running for president.

Regrettably, most Congressional Republicans put their party ahead of the nation - even when it involves assisting Vladimir Putin. 

Why Won’t the American Media Investigate Trump-Putin Ties?

A piece in the Huffington Post raises a very important question: Why won’t the American media fully investigate what could be the biggest story in U.S. political history?  The piece goes on to contrast British coverage and investigation efforts and contrasts them with the laziness and irresponsible approach that largely holds sway among the American media outlets.  Yes, our media is fixated on short sound bites and page views, but what could be more sensational than proving that a traitor and Russian puppet is about to be sworn in as president?  I find the lack of attention disturbing, especially given Trump's documented history of lying incessantly.  Why give press coverage to his denials when all attention should be focused on verifying whether the dossiers released via BuzzFeed and CNN are true?  Here are highlights from the Huffington Post piece: 

What percentage chance that the incoming president has been compromised by a hostile foreign power is acceptable?

Most Americans, and the U.S. Constitution, would say “none.”

But right now Democrats and Republicans in D.C., along with almost the entirety of mainstream American media, are answering this question by ignoring it altogether.

Meanwhile, the media apparatus of our nation’s closest ally, England, has taken an entirely different approach: they’re reporting doggedly on the story, comparing the credibility of its two main players—former FBI asset and top MI6 agent Christopher Steele, and serial exaggerator and compulsive liar Donald Trump—and playing out various scenarios, including the possible impeachment of Trump not long after he is inaugurated.

Around the same time as The Guardian was pondering aloud how and whether Trump could be impeached for high crimes, the U.S. Speaker of the House was on CNN saying that the story of Trump’s possible compromising by a foreign power is so insignificant that it shouldn’t even be mentioned in U.S. media.

So why are the Brits looking out for Americans’ (and the world’s) interests so much more than our own elected officials and media outlets? Why, in England, is even a 5 percent or 10 percent chance of a U.S. president who committed treason to gain office unacceptable, while here in America one is told by top government officials to not even ask the question, and officials themselves are refusing to do so as well?

There are scary times, so it behooves us to compare British and American reports on Trump’s Russian controversy and try to determine (a) how we as citizens in a democracy should expect the story to be covered, and (b) what market forces in American media might be preventing our cable and network news, and many of our newspapers, from doing their jobs. The reason to ask these questions is that the intelligence services we rely upon to investigate questions such as this are less likely to feel the pressure to do so from our elected officials if our elected officials aren’t feeling pressure from the media—and therefore, in effect, from the American people.

So first things first: if you were alive and older than six in 2016, you know that Donald Trump repeatedly made inaccurate statements during the Republican primary and the general election, and has continued doing so near-daily in the current presidential transition period. 

Trump, who claims the memos are 100 percent false, has already lied about them repeatedly.

That’s pretty inexplicable, given his proclamations of innocence. Innocent men, absent strenuous interrogation by law enforcement, don’t lie about things they didn’t do. It’s practically a maxim in criminal law—which I used to practice—and it certainly applies here.

Now compare Mr. Trump to Mr. Steele, who was trusted by the FBI to do extensive work for them, who rose in the ranks at MI6 to run their Russia desk, who’s been described (in The Guardian) by former UK government officials as “one of the more eminent Russia specialists for MI6”; “very credible”; “sober, cautious, and meticulous”; “[a man] with a formidable record”; “not the sort of person who will simply pass on gossip”; “an experienced and highly regarded professional”; “a very straight guy”; “not prone to flights of fancy or doing things in an ill-considered way”; “highly professional, very effective”; and someone who, “if he puts something in a report, believes there’s sufficient credibility in it for it to be worth considering.”

One former UK Foreign Office official added, as if it were necessary to make the point in any clearer terms, that “the idea that his work is fake or a cowboy operation is false—completely untrue.”

If one of our closest allies [Israel] is refusing to send us intelligence because our government may be run by Russian puppets isn’t a constitutional crisis, nothing is.  All of which means the Steele memos must be fully investigated now. Not the day after tomorrow, not in a week, not in a month. Now.

[O]ne thing you don’t do is trust, as to the subject of a document’s veracity, the very people who’d be implicated by that document if it’s accurate. . . . . so then why is Chuck Todd of NBC calling the Steele document “false information”?

Why is Andrea Mitchell calling it a “smear campaign”?

Why is NBC reporting that the 35 pages of human intelligence gathered by Steele from Russian sources long considered reliable by him (and frequently relied upon by the United Kingdom) is “disinformation”—meaning, information planted by the Kremlin or made up from whole cloth by Steele himself?

Instead of covering what multiple experts on cable news have already called the greatest story in U.S. political history if true, CNN is engaged in a tit-for-tat with the Trump team over whether CNN accurately reported the events of a Trump briefing with intelligence services. Who cares about this feud? Well, CNN—and much more than the news story behind the feud, obviously—and perhaps also NBC and MSNBC.

[P]erhaps American media is intimidated by a President-elect so unpredictable that he’ll call a news organization “fake news” for correctly reporting a story he himself lied about?

In any case, this much can be said: when a news network repeatedly frames the news in a way that directly contradicts its own reporting, something is wrong. And that’s exactly what’s happened at MSNBC over the past three days, and it’s beginning to become a real concern for those Americans hoping that the memos written by a long-reliable source like Christopher Steele will be accurately covered by the U.S. media.

Today, Fox News declared that Trump had successfully “stuck a knife in” the dossier story. How? By tweeting about it, of course—and with, per usual (and here’s a correct use of the term) disinformation, as Trump falsely called Steele a “failed spy.” Fox News offered no correction of Trump’s mischaracterization of Steele, indeed it gave its readers no additional information about Steele’s career whatsoever, thereby letting the President-elect’s intemperate and dishonest tweet stand as its own proof.

Russia Today and Vladimir Putin would be proud—as under Trump, the media is learning its place.

[I]f America doesn’t investigate the validity of the information in the Steele memos in the next week, that investigation may never occur. And the consequences of that failure to doggedly pursue the truth on our nation’s standing in the world—even on our allies’ ability and willingness to work with us to keep the world safe—could be devastating.

The failure of the American media allowed this nation go to war in Iraq based on Bush/Cheney lies, allowed Trump to win the 2016 presidential election, and now may be allowing a Russian puppet into the White House.  I find all of this very distressing.