Excellent Read by Victor Davis Hanson
Those who trafficked in the
dossier’s concocted mess were infected, and their reputations are now
declining.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton
presidential candidate hired an ex-intelligence officer and foreign national,
British subject Christopher Steele, to use Russian sources to find dirt
(“opposition research”) on her then political opponent Donald Trump. So much
for the worry about “foreign interference” in U.S. elections.
The public would take years
to learn of the funding sources of Steele, because Clinton camouflaged her role
through three firewalls: the Democratic National Committee; the Perkins-Coie
legal firm; and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS opposition-research firm.
Steele had collected rumor
and gossip from mostly Russian sources in an effort to tar Trump as a Russian
colluder and asset.
We know now that his sources
were either bogus or deliberately warped by Steele himself.
Almost everything in the
dossier was unverified and later was proved fanciful. Yet with the help of high
Obama administration and elected officials, the dossier’s gossip and rumor were
leaked throughout the top echelons of Washington politics and the media. Its
lies spread because its chief message — Donald J. Trump was a fool, dangerous,
should never be elected, and once elected had no business as president — was
exactly what the establishment wished to hear. In other words, the dossier was
infectious because it was deemed both welcome and useful.
The inspector general of the
U.S. Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, after an exhaustive study, found
that the Steele dossier not just unverifiable but unethically and
unprofessionally used to delude federal judges to issue warrants to surveil an
American citizen.
Horowitz simply confirmed
what a number of journalists had already discovered, namely, that Steele was
both a pathological liar and an inveterate hater of Donald Trump who acted to
ensure that Trump would not be president. Although the befuddled special
counsel Robert Mueller, in sworn testimony before Congress, seemed to have
amnesia about the Steele dossier and its chief purveyor Fusion GPS, his own
investigation was de facto repudiation of the entire Steele dossier in its
conclusion that Donald Trump did not engage in collusion with the Russians to
warp the 2016 election.
As a result, all who
trafficked in the infectious dossier as if it were factual and disinterested
have lost all credibility. Many are now seeing their careers demolished and in
ruins.
Here is a small sampling of reputations that were marred or destroyed.
Rachel Maddow.
She is a Stanford graduate, Rhodes
scholar, and MSNBC host — and she is emblematic of how academic progress often
accompanies ethical and intellectual regress. Many of her 2016–19 evening cable
news commentaries focused on the supposed dangers that candidate and then
president Trump posed to the republic. She cited the Steele dossier chapter and
verse as factual in making her arguments that Trump was dishonest and amoral
and therefore an illegitimate president who should be removed. It will be
difficult for any audience to take Maddow’s on-air assertions seriously in the
future. She rose to high ratings promoting the dossier, and she will likely
suffer the consequences in reverse.
James Comey and the FBI.
It is no exaggeration that James Comey,
the former director of the FBI, knew intimately of the dossier, approved its
use to spy on American citizens and to launch an investigation into Donald
Trump’s purported Russian connection, and then serially lied about both the
dossier’s authenticity and his own agency’s use of its author Christopher
Steele, who at times was a paid informant for the FBI.
More than a dozen top FBI
agents, investigators, and lawyers who worked for Comey in the FBI’s
Washington’s office have now either been fired, disgraced, reassigned, demoted,
or they quit or have abruptly retired.
The common denominator to all their
fates is that in some fashion they either leaked false information to the
media, knowingly broke the law, lied to federal investigators, altered
documents, deluded federal judges, or were afraid that something they had done
would surface.
Trace the origins of such misbehavior, and at its font will be
the sensational Steele dossier and the nearly religious belief that it either
was true or should be true or somehow could be made to be true.
The late Senator John McCain.
McCain was tipped off about the dossier
by a British intelligence official, who apparently in turn had been prepped by
the ubiquitous Steele in an effort to promulgate his work among high American
officials. McCain, who had engaged in a well-publicized feud with Trump, almost
immediately met with federal officials and sent his former associate David
Kramer to the UK to talk with Steele. McCain himself then gave the dossier to
FBI Director Comey. Kramer made sure that the unverified dossier was leaked to
media sources before the 2016 election and well after it also. In McCain’s
final memoir, he and his coauthor were defiant about the senator’s role in
spreading the unsubstantiated gossip around Washington: “I would do it again.
Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”
By January 2019, almost all sane
and informed people did not like the idea of deliberately spreading false
information to destroy a presidential candidate and later president, and most
certainly they did not feel they should “go to hell” for voicing such outrage.
James Clapper and John Brennan.
James Clapper, the former director of
National Intelligence under Barack Obama, and John Brennan, the former CIA
director, both previously had been caught lying under oath to Congress. Both
then apologized, and their illegal behaviors were excused without legal
consequences. But both once again have not told the full truth about their own
knowledge of the Steele dossier, its unverified and mostly false information,
and the role they both played in circulating and promulgating the dossier to
the media and high government officials. That both directors were deeply
involved in spreading the dossier around Washington, leaking its comments, and
then denying their roles while they worked as paid television commentators on
CNN and MSNBC only ensured the rapid erosion of their beltway careers and
reputations. And both still may have a rendezvous with federal prosecutors in
regard to the dossier.
The United States Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court.
A
number of federal judges approved FBI and DOJ requests to surveille Carter Page
both before and after the 2016 presidential election, supposedly as a way to
learn of Trump-Russia collusion.
None of the judges seriously
probed government lawyers about the dossier before their court. Although they
were told in a footnote that it was a product of opposition research,
apparently none asked the nature of such sponsorship.
Yet if a judge is apprised
that the evidence before him to support a federal surveillance warrant is based
on political opposition research, and the dossier was related to candidate and
then president Donald Trump, would it not be prudent to ask attorneys to name
who had paid the dossier’s author? Worse still, in winter and late spring 2018,
Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) had twice warned the eleven-justice
FISA court that the Steele dossier was unreliable and had not been a sound
basis to authorize surveilling an American citizen. Nunes and his House
colleagues were essentially ignored and dismissed by the court.
It was only after the
issuance of the Horowitz report that the FISA court’s presiding justice,
Rosemary Collyer, blasted the FBI for deluding her court. Fairly or not, the
impression remains that FISA judges either were incompetent or simply did not
wish to learn evidence that might have discredited their decision to allow the
FBI to surveille a former Trump official, as part of a larger effort to
discredit Donald Trump. And like it or not, the entire reputation of the FISA
court is now in shreds, both for being so easily or willingly fooled, and for
so opportunistically and belatedly criticizing those who deluded them.
Hillary Clinton.
There are complex federal election laws
governing the role of foreign nationals and their U.S. handlers interfering in
an American election. The public became more aware of such statutes
paradoxically because Hillary Clinton, almost immediately after losing the
November 2016 election, claimed that she was defeated only because Donald Trump
had colluded with Russians.
Ironically, the origins of
that claim were the Steele dossier, which Clinton herself had paid for and then
hidden her sponsorship. In other words, while the dossier swept through the media,
helped to prime FISA warrants, played a key part in launching FBI
investigations, and ultimately kick-started the Robert Mueller special-counsel
investigation, Hillary Clinton remained immune from scrutiny.
Think of the paradox: While
Clinton pounded president Trump for supposedly using Russians to win an
election, she herself had used fraudulent Russian sources to obtain political
advantage by smearing her opponent, apparently in the expectation that she
would win the election and her modus operandi would never be discovered, or,
even if Steele’s work were publicized and thus discredited, her own
fingerprints would never appear — or no one would dare to question President
Clinton.
There were certainly lots of
firewalls. Anonymous Russians gave their scurrilous stories to Christopher
Steele who exaggerated and collated them for Fusion GPS, which was hired by
Perkins-Coie, which in turn had been assigned the task by the Democratic
National Committee, which in turn was ultimately working on the direction of
and in cahoots with Hillary Clinton.
One unspoken reason that Hillary Clinton
remains persona non grata among liberal circles is the suspicion that the
entire truth about her role in “collusion” with foreign actors will eventually
emerge and her presence will become at last toxic.
Adam Schiff.
Adam Schiff’s reputation hit rock
bottom in recent years. He lied about his relationship to the so-called
whistleblower. His minority-report memo was discredited by Inspector General
Horowitz. He read a bogus version of the Trump-Ukraine phone call into the
congressional record, and when called out, begged off by claiming it was merely
“parody.” And he began the impeachment inquiry in a basement without either
transparency or bipartisan rules of cross-examination and disclosure. But
Schiff’s two-year insistence that Steele’s research was reliable and that it
nonetheless did not provide the chief basis for FISA warrants was demonstrably
untrue. (How paradoxical that Steele’s promoters both defended the dossier and
yet denied that it was pivotal.) Schiff may remain a hero to the Never Trump
fringe for his any-means-necessary efforts to destroy Trump, but even the media
now distrust him. His own party will come to see him as a transiently useful
dishonest prevaricator whose utility is already waning.
The Steele dossier resembles
some sort of bacillus. Anyone who put currency into it was infected, and the
contagion was passed on as the dossier made its rounds throughout the media and
government. Those who were infected by it are now in the end-stages of career
decline. And the only antidote to the infection — honest admission that the
dossier was bogus and used for unethical and often illegal purposes — is
apparently seen by the stricken as worse than the terminal disease.