Even Members Of The Very Progressive Left Are Admitting The Steele Dossier Was Garbage

Sarah Lee reporting for RedState

It’s a good sign the narrative is shifting when card-carrying members of the hard-left progressive wing of available political philosophies are forced to admit that what other members of that wing have been slinging stinks to high heaven.

Matt Tabbi, known as the man who authored an obituary of Andrew Breitbart titled, “Death of a Douche,” penned an article in Rolling Stone calling out the many, many media members who fell for the Steele dossier and admitting that it was always a piece of internet trash.

Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”

There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:

The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.

Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:

We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order. 

He then goes on to call out such luminaries as The Washington Post and the New York Times and their “sleight of hand” in getting the dossier in print without having it vetted properly.

What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.

Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.

Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.

Perhaps this is why, like CNN today in refusing to air much of the testimony by Horowitz, many news outlets have been almost church-mouse quiet about the FISA report.

Imagine how loud that silence will be when Durham drops his criminal report in a few months.