The Christopher Steele dossier is the most important political document in America’s modern era.
Imported from London, the dossier contained a dozen or so bogus felony allegations against a U.S. president, Donald Trump, and aides for purported Russian election collusion. It was designed to bring his end.
Unleashing it like a piece of destructive malware, Democratic Party operatives sent the dossier coursing through Washington’s power machines to program them to get Mr. Trump.
Recipients treated the collection of 2016 memos like precious jewels — FBI directorships and counter-intelligence; the Justice Department; the Barack Obama White House and his CIA and State Department; senior congressional Democrats, most notably intelligence chair Rep. Adam Schiff; and the most influential cluster of newsrooms in the world that shape and dictate Washington’s daily political struggles.
The Washington establishment’s acceptance is what makes the dossier — at its core a piece of campaign opposition research — historically unmatched.
It became a weapon to constantly harass, destabilize and distort Mr. Trump for much of his presidency. It was an astounding success from the Democrats’ point of view. It only cost them and Hillary Clinton’s campaign team about $160,000 for Mr. Steele and his ex-journalist handlers, the folks at Fusion GPS.
Dossier Democrats never paid a political price for trying to bring down a president with non-existent conspiracies.
Mr. Steele told us the 35-page booklet came directly from the lips of senior Kremlin insiders. Mr. Steele, the liberal press told us, especially the liberal British press, was the best spy ever during his time at MI6 as a Moscow embed.
The dossier enjoyed devotion from the Leftist media. (CNN and MSNBC vouched for its accuracy. Mr. Trump was a Russian agent.)
The FBI studied the dossier pages like they were a roadmap to the point where the story ends with the slaying of monster Trump. It wasn’t just FBI wiretaps based on dossier “probable cause” search warrants. Mr. Steele assured there was a well-developed Trump-Russia election conspiracy and, by God, the FBI gumshoes were going to find it.
When Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein sent investigative directions in 2017 to special counsel Robert Mueller, his memo read as if it came straight out of Mr. Steele’s brain.
When the CIA was writing the official intelligence history of Russia’s election interference in the fall of 2016, FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe insisted that it include the dossier. A public intelligence community report that was supposed to be based on verified facts would have contained the unverified claims of a poorly sourced dossier if the FBI had had its way. The CIA balked and relegated the unreliable dossier to an appendix.
Still, the FBI repeatedly soaked up dossier info via intermediaries, including the Justice Department’s No. 4 official. Agents met with Mr. Steele in Rome and agreed to pay him for more anti-Trump dirt.
By early 2017, Mr. Steele’s main source, Russian-born Igor Danchenko, told the FBI that Mr. Steele had embellished his report.
U.S. intelligence told the FBI that Moscow intelligence penetrated Mr. Steele’s dossier project and likely fed him disinformation, such as the fictitious Prague trip by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Vladimir Putin likes to mess with America, Republican or Democrat.
Put on notice, the FBI continued to rely on the dossier.
Eventually, Republicans and Washington’s plucky conservative press took over. Mr. Trump did not finance Russian computer hacking. There was no sinister trip to Prague to meet Mr. Putin’s goons. Nor did campaign operatives agree to end sanctions for gobs of Russian natural gas money.
Today, a small reckoning is appearing in Washington discourse.
Former New York Times reporter Barry Meier has written a book on the ubiquitous private intelligence industry. “Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies” gets around to looking at Steele handler Fusion GPS and its stable of ex-Wall Street Journal reporters.
What’s interesting is that the New York Times played host to a Meier book preview. While the Times promoted all kinds of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, the paper was decidedly neutral on the dossier itself. It tried hard to corroborate its specious allegations but never did, even as it wrote scores of stories that insinuated that a conspiracy did exist. The Times has never eviscerated Mr. Steele’s body of work despite its collapse.
Mr. Meier depicts Mr. Steele and Fusion co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch as united in the liberal contest to beat up, destroy and discard Mr. Trump. Mr. Steele sold his life rights to Hollywood. Oh, the fun that Democratic bastion would have made Mr. Steele a star on its Walk of Fame.
“Now the glow has faded — from both the dossier and its promoters,” Mr. Meier wrote in the Times. “Russia, as Mr. Steele asserted, did try to influence the 2016 election. But many of the dossier’s most explosive claims — like a salacious ‘pee’ tape featuring Mr. Trump or a supposed meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former attorney, and Russian operatives — have never materialized or have been proved false.”
Mr. Simpson and Mr. Fritsch have never acknowledged any dossier mistakes. They once adorned the New York Times op-ed pages. The Times published at least three Simpson-Fritsch columns attacking Mr. Trump in 2018-19.
Their rebuttal to Mr. Meier appeared on the community site Medium.com.
They paint Mr. Meier as a hypocrite because he wrote a book criticizing them — after previously seeking their opposition research on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
“By far, the most salient fact that Meier omits in his book and news story is that he himself repeatedly contacted us for help on Times stories before, during and after the 2016 election,” they write. “We would generally consider our correspondence with a journalist to be confidential, but Meier’s extraordinary hypocrisy warrants an exception.”
On June 6, Mr. Meier posted a photo on his Twitter account of Mr. Simpson and Mr. Fritsch, with the heading: “The dossier’s journey from media obsession to the slush pile. It’s one of the stories in SPOOKED.”
