How the Steele Dossier Broke MAGAts’ Brains

The Steele Dossier broke America.

Not literally. Nearly three decades of Fox News, increasing wealth inequality, and unlimited money in politics likely did that.

But there are MAGAts who blame much of it on the dossier. There are MAGAts who situate their own shift in allegiance from the country to Trump based on a false belief that the dossier was part of a devious plot between Hillary Clinton and the Deep State to frame Donald Trump. That’s a key part of this thread from a right wing podcaster excusing January 6, which went viral just days after the attack.

Such views — mixing accurate criticism of the dossier with wild conspiracy theories — really did play a key role in polarizing the US. Phil Bump explained how the adoption of such conspiracy theories (which he fact checked) worked in real time. And I noted that if, as virtually all Republican members of Congress who spent years investigating the dossier concluded, it was riddled with Russian disinformation, it means MAGAts attacked their own country in response to Russian disinformation.

This didn’t happen by accident. Instead, it likely involved a brilliant multi-step disinformation campaign victimizing everyone: Hillary, Paul Manafort and Trump, and even the Deep State.

The first step was a brutal double game Oleg Deripaska deployed: using his tie to Christopher Steele to add to Paul Manafort’s legal insecurity — or perhaps to hide his own role in election interference by offering himself as a potential cooperator — even while using that insecurity to win cooperation from Trump’s campaign manager on the election attack.

The next step was, apparently, injecting garbage into the Steele dossier, some near misses that obscured the real attack and made Trump’s people less secure.

The third was an effort, partly deliberate and then later partly organic (albeit often on the part of credulous people who published obviously false claims from Konstantin Kilimnik), to conflate the dossier with the entire Russian investigation. Along the way MAGAt politicians, both right wing and quasi-lefty influencers, and even established journalistic institutions would join this effort. Because the dossier was unreliable, because it was used in the investigation of Carter Page (a guy already under scrutiny when he joined the Trump campaign) — this sustained propaganda campaign insisted — all the reporting on the Russian attack, the FBI investigation into it, and the results must be nought.

By substituting the dossier for the rest of the Russian investigation, this propaganda effort flipped Trump’s enthusiasm for foreign interference in democracy on its head, and allowed him — the guy who invited Russia to hack his opponent — to play the victim.

Deripaska’s double game

The first part of this process has gotten the least attention (indeed, Republican conspiracy theories covered it up).

There were two parts of the intelligence collection on Trump and his associates: with a few notable exceptions, accurate open source research done by Fusion GPS itself, and raw HUMINT collection from former MI6 officer Christopher Steele that may have been injected with disinformation. It has long been public that right wing billionaire Paul Singer indirectly paid for the open source research during the GOP primary, only to have the Democrats pick up the project during the general election.

What’s not widely known is that starting in March — the same month Manafort was publicly hired by the campaign (though, according to Sam Patten, Konstantin Kilimnik expected that to happen before it was public) — Deripaska paid Steele, through an attorney, to collect on Manafort.

[Steele’s] initial entree into U.S. election-related material dealt with Paul Manafort’s connections to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. In particular, Steele told the FBI that Manafort owed significant money to these oligarchs and several other Russians. At this time, Steele was working for a different client, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

And Steele paid Fusion to help with this effort. So before May, Deripaska paid Steele, who paid Fusion. After May, Democrats paid Fusion, which paid Steele.

But, as Igor Danchenko described, that earlier effort to collect on Manafort met with little success.

[H]e may have asked friends and contacts in Russia [for information on Manafort], but he couldn’t remember off-hand. He added that, for this topic, his friends and contacts in Russian couldn’t say very much because they were “too far removed” from the matter.

It was after that, on a trip Danchenko took to Russia, when Steele asked Danchenko to “look for information dealing with the US presidential election, including compromising materials on Donald Trump.”

Probably as a result of this close relationship, by July, intelligence reporting later assessed, one of Deripaska’s associates was probably aware of the DNC dossier project. Similarly, reporting found that, “two persons affiliated with [Russian Intelligence Services] were aware of Steele’s election investigation in early 2016.” As I have, John Durham linked these two reports, suggesting a likelihood that the Russian spooks had ties to Deripaska (though in making that link, Durham obscured Deripaska’s identity). Given Deripaska’s own alleged ties to Russian intelligence, if his lawyer knew and he knew, spooks close to him — including, allegedly, Kilimnik — would likely have known. Durham also described that Russian intelligence had identified Steele’s subsource network.

Paul Manafort’s former boss, Oleg Deripaska, probably knew about the dossier project in close to real time.

Christopher Steele denies that’s the case.

If Deripaska did know of the project, though, it dramatically changes the significance of a meeting Christopher Steele had with Bruce Ohr, then a top lawyer coordinating DOJ’s effort to combat multinational organized crime, in late July 2016. Steele had been trying to pitch Ohr to recruit oligarchs purportedly willing to cooperate against Russia. He had, earlier in 2016, assured Ohr that Deripaska had distanced himself from Putin. Earlier in July, he contacted Ohr about Deripaska.

Steele thought Deripaska could be trusted.

And on July 30, between the time Konstantin Kilimnik flew to Moscow to prepare for his Paul Manafort meeting and when he arrived in New York for that meeting, Steele met with Ohr in DC.

For years, Republicans claimed that this was an instance of Steele working every contact he had at FBI and DOJ to make sure his dossier reports got shared. Except Steele did more than share dossier leads at that meeting (one, about what Russian spooks had reportedly said about Trump, the other about whom Carter Page might have met with in Moscow). In addition, he shared information about Russian doping, a topic on which Steele reportedly had a good track record.

And most importantly, Steele pitched information from Deripaska about Paul Manafort (this is from Ohr’s testimony to Congress).

Mr. Ohr. So Chris Steele provided me with basically three items of information. One of them I’ve described to you already, the comment that information supposedly stated and made by the head, former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

He also mentioned that Carter Page had met with certain high-level Russian officials when he was in Moscow. My recollection is at that time, the name Carter Page had already been in the press, and there had been some kind of statement about who he had met with when he went to Moscow. And so the first item that I recall Chris Steele telling me was he had information that Carter Page met with higher-level Russian officials, not just whoever was mentioned in the press article. So that was one item.

And then the third item he mentioned was that Paul Hauser, who was an attorney working for Oleg Deripaska, had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Oleg Deripaska, had stolen a large amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, and that Paul Hauser was trying to gather information that would show that, you know, or give more detail about what Paul Manafort had done with respect to Deripaska.

[snip]

Q Were there any other topics that were discussed during your July 30, 2016, meeting?

A Yes, there were. Based on my sketchy notes from the time, I think there was some information relating to the Russian doping scandal, but I don’t recall the substance of that.

When I first understood how this worked together, I thought that Deripaska was primarily doing this to increase Paul Manafort’s legal exposure, making Manafort more vulnerable when Deripaska, via Kilimnik, started making asks in a cigar bar days later. It certainly may have increased the chance that the FBI would develop the criminal investigation into Manafort.

But it likely did another thing: it likely made the FBI more interested in treating Deripaska as a source, rather than a subject. And sure enough, in September 2016, the FBI interviewed Deripaska, at which interview (John Solomon parroted in advance of Robert Mueller’s testimony, during the period Solomon was a key player in Rudy Giuliani’s information operation) he scoffed that Manafort would have any tie to Russia.

“I told them straightforward, ‘Look, I am not a friend with him [Manafort]. Apparently not, because I started a court case [against him] six or nine months before … . But since I’m Russian I would be very surprised that anyone from Russia would try to approach him for any reason, and wouldn’t come and ask me my opinion,’ ” he said, recounting exactly what he says he told the FBI agents that day.

“I told them straightforward, I just don’t believe that he would represent any Russian interest. And knowing what he’s doing on Ukraine for the last, what, seven or eight years.”

As I’ve written, much of the outreach to Trump’s associates in 2016 involved people who had served as FBI sources. Deripaska knew Steele spoke with the FBI. People like Sergei Millian and Felix Sater had been FBI sources. More recently, of course, Alexander Smirnov allegedly attempted to frame Joe Biden.

A key tactic of this effort was to exploit FBI’s HUMINT efforts, to use FBI’s informants against it. So much so that Deripaska even feigned cooperation with the FBI himself!

The dossier would become an important part of — largely constructed — stories about the Russian investigation. But that all lay on top a foundation of efforts Deripaska made to use Christopher Steele to set up (and maybe even obscure) his asks of Paul Manafort.

A series of near misses

The knowledge that Deripaska and Russian spooks had of Steele’s network and the ongoing Fusion GPS project would have provided the means to plant disinformation.

As noted above, for a period, every one of the Republicans who examined the dossier at length concluded that Russia had succeeded in filling the dossier with disinformation. Lindsey Graham — who conducted an investigation into the circumstances of the Carter Page FISA — said it did. Chuck Grassley — who led the investigation into the dossier — said it did. Ron Johnson — who also made a show of investigating these things — said it did. Chuck Ross — the chief scribe of the dossier on the right — said it did. The high gaslighter Catherine Herridge said it did. Fox News and all their favorite sources said it did. WSJ’s editorial page said it did.

Then, they stopped saying it.

Maybe they thought through the implication of it being Russian disinformation. Maybe they started looking to John Durham’s efforts to blame Hillary Clinton by fabricating conspiracy theories instead.

Because, think about it: Unlike Rudy Giuliani, there’s no hint that Hillary set out to collect dirt that would be easily identifiable to the campaign as disinformation. She had no reason to seek inaccurate information; the reality was already damning enough.

“For us to go out and say a bunch of things that aren’t true, you know, can cause a lot of damage to the campaign,” Hillary Campaign Manager Robby Mook testified in the Michael Sussmann trial.

Hillary gained nothing by paying a lot of money for a project riddled with disinformation. Russian spooks simply took advantage of something every politician does — collect oppo research — to harm her, harm Carter Page, and harm the US.

Consider the effect it may have had (I examine the reports one by one here).

One effect possible disinformation may have had was to make Hillary complacent as she struggled to deal with a hack during the height of the campaign. For example, several of Steele’s reports said any kompromat Russia had on Hillary consisted of very dated intercepts, not recently-stolen emails. One report falsely claimed Russia hadn’t had success at hacking Western targets. Later reports provided purported updates on the hack-and-leak campaign, suggesting Russia was dropping any further efforts, that directly conflict with ongoing developments. Subsequent investigation showed those reports were all false.

And every one of those reports might have led Democrats (and the FBI) to be complacent about ongoing risks posed by the hack they had IDed in April (and indeed, they didn’t expect the files stolen from the DNC to be released).

Another report which could be disinformation (but which, if you can believe Danchenko, may also be Steele exaggeration of very tepid things he said about someone he believed to be Sergei Millian), would be to shield Konstantin Kilimnik’s role in the election interference. One of the most important reports for what came afterwards alleged that the,

“well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump’s team and Russian leadership “was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE and others as intermediaries.

If Page was Manafort’s go-between, no one would look at what Kilimnik was doing.

To be sure, this could be Steele’s doing. It appears in a report that misrepresented what Danchenko claims to have told Steele about his contacts with Sergei Millian.

And as the Senate Intelligence Committee Report noted — I hope, sardonically — nothing about Manafort’s ties to Deripaska (or Kilimnik) ever made it into the dossier.

Steele and his subsources appear to have neglected to include or missed in its entirety Paul Manafort’s business relationship with Deripaska, which provided Deripaska leverage over Manafort and a possible route of influence into the Trump Campaign.

Steele mentions Paul Manafort by name roughly 20 times in the dossier, always in the context of his work in Ukraine; and, in particular, Manafort’s work on behalf of then-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Deripaska, who had a long-standing business relationship with Manafort, is not mentioned once. Neither is Kilimnik, Manafort’s right-hand man in Kyiv, who himself has extensive ties to Deripaska. 5885 Despite Steele’s expertise on Ukraine and Russia, particularly on oligarchs, the dossier memos are silent on the issue.

Whatever the explanation — Danchenko’s failures to get dirt, Steele’s efforts to protect another contract, or disinformation — the dossier’s failure to note Kilimnik’s role (along with its silence about Natalia Veselnitskaya’s pitch of dirt to Don Jr. and George Papadopoulos’ shenanigans in London) effectively distracted from the most glaring signs of Trump ties with Russia. It served as camouflage. The things that don’t show up in the dossier that Fusion and Steele should have learned were almost as useful to the Russian project as the near-misses that did.

Perhaps the best established case of disinformation, however, is a tribute to its usefulness. Starting in October 2016 (in the period Michael Cohen was frantically cleaning up Trump’s Stormy Daniels problem), Steele produced first three (one, two, three), and then, in December 2016, a fourth report alleging that Michael Cohen was instead cleaning up the alleged coordination between Manafort and the Russians. Each report got progressively more inflammatory, with the last one alleging that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August or September for secret discussions with the Kremlin and its hackers; the discussion allegedly involved cash payments to operatives and plans to cover up the operation.

If true, this would have been a smoking gun.

Within weeks of the last report, on January 12, 2017 — two days after Buzzfeed published the dossier — the Intelligence Community got intelligence assessing that it was disinformation.

January 12, 2017, report relayed information from [redacted] outlining an inaccuracy in a limited subset of Steele’s reporting about the activities of Michael Cohen. The [redacted] stated that it did not have high confidence in this subset of Steele’s reporting and assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.

Of course, that was not made public for over three years. As a result, even as the story of Mike Flynn’s attempts to undermine Obama’s foreign policy rolled out, even as Cohen was accepting big payments from Viktor Vekselberg, the Cohen-in-Prague story became the measure of so-called collusion.

From the start of the public accounting of Trump’s ties to Russia, then, something the IC already understood to be likely disinformation was the yardstick of the Russian investigation.

Two aspects of the story make it especially ripe to be intentional disinformation, in form and content.

First, according to Danchenko, the Cohen story came from his childhood friend, Olga Galkina, who knew he worked in some kind of intelligence collection and who even tried to task him to collect information after the dossier came out.

In March of 2016, Danchenko had introduced PR executive Chuck Dolan to her. Dolan and Danchenko traveled the same DC-based circles of Russian experts, and she was looking for the kind of public affairs consulting that Dolan offered, on behalf of her company. Over the course of two trips to Cyprus as part of that business, Dolan and Galkina developed an independent relationship. Dolan’s company was at the same time working on a business development project for the Russian government, in which he directly interacted with Dmitry Peskov’s office. Through that networking, on July 13, 2016, Galkina claimed that Dolan had recommended her for a job with Peskov’s office (he told Durham’s prosecutors he didn’t remember this when they asked). And on October 15, 2016 — in the same week that she first shared the Cohen story with Danchenko — Galkina gossiped about knowing something via Peskov’s office.

On October 15, 2016, Galkina communicated with a Russia-based journalist and stated that because of her [Galkina] “acquaintance with Chuck Dolan and several citizens from the Russian presidential administration,” Galkina knew “something and can tell a little about it by voice. ” 882

As Danchenko told the FBI, when he asked Galkina if she knew anything about several people on whom Steele had tasked him to collect, Michael Cohen’s name was the single one she recognized.

[Danchenko] began his explanation of the Prague and Michael Cohen-related reports by stating that Christopher Steele had given him 4-5 names to research for the election-related tasking. He could only remember three of the names: Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. When he talked to [Galkina] in the fall of 2016 — he believes it was a phone call — he rattled off these names and, out of them, he was surprised to her that [Galkina] [later [Danchenko] softened this to “almost immediately] recognized Cohen’s name. [bold brackets original]

After that initial conversation, Danchenko asked Galkina to go back to her sources for more detail, which resulted in several more reports.

In other words, the source for the allegation that Michael Cohen, in an attempt to cover up a Trump scandal, had direct ties to the Presidential Administration — the Kremlin — is someone who had developed direct and lucrative ties to Dmitry Peskov’s office, and had been bragging about having dirt involving Peskov’s office that very week.

And Dmitry Peskov is one person who undoubtedly knew that Michael Cohen had called the Kremlin nine months earlier, because Trump’s fixer had called Peskov’s own office.

In the wake of Trump’s public denial on July 27 that he had any ongoing business with Russia, and in the period when Cohen was busy covering up other Trump scandals, a story arose that alleged Cohen’s cover-up involved ties to the Kremlin.

As Robert Mueller would substantiate two years later, Cohen’s cover-up did involve a ties to the Kremlin, a call in which he solicited Putin’s help for a business deal involving a sanctioned bank and the GRU. But those were entirely different ties, in time and substance, from the ties claimed in the dossier.

This is the kind of near miss story — a story that approximated Cohen’s real contact with the Kremlin, which he and Trump were lying to hide, a story that approximated Cohen’s real efforts to cover up Trump’s scandals — that could serve both to distract and raise the risks of the public lies Cohen and Trump were telling to hide that Trump Tower deal, the lies that Dmitry Peskov knew Trump was telling.

It also proved useful when Cohen doubled down on his lies, in 2017. As I pointed out in real time, as the Trump Tower deal started to get leaked to the press (though without the most damning detail, that Cohen did succeed in reaching the Kremlin; Trump Organization withheld the email that proved that from Congress) Cohen used denials of the dossier allegations as a way to deny the burgeoning Trump Tower scandal as well. Because there was nothing to substantiate the Cohen-in-Prague story, Cohen’s then lawyer claimed, it meant there was no story at all.

The entire letter is pitched around the claim that HPSCI “included Mr. Cohen in its inquiry based solely upon certain sensational allegations contained” in the Steele dossier. “Absent those allegations,” the letter continues, “Mr. Cohen would not be involved in your investigation.” The idea — presented two weeks before disclosure of emails showing Cohen brokering a deal with Russians in early 2016 — is if Cohen can discredit the dossier, then he will have shown that there is no reason to investigate him or his role brokering deals with the Russians. Even the denial of any documents of interest is limited to the dossier: “We have not uncovered a single document that would in any way corroborate the Dossier’s allegations regarding Mr. Cohen, nor do we believe that any such document exists.”

With that, Cohen’s lawyers address the allegations in the dossier, one by one. As a result, the rebuttal reads kind of like this:

I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague I Did Not Go to Prague

Cohen literally denies that he ever traveled to Prague six times, as well as denying carefully worded, often quoted, versions of meeting with Russians in a European capital in 2016. Of course that formulation — He did not participate in meetings of any kind with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016 — stops well short of other potential ties to Russians. And two of his denials look very different given the emails disclosed two weeks later showing an attempt to broker a deal that Felix Sater thought might get Trump elected, including an email from him to one of the most trusted agents of the Kremlin.

Mr. Cohen is not aware of any “secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship.”

Mr. Cohen is not aware of any indirect communications between the “TRUMP team” and “trusted agents” of the Kremlin.

As I said above, I think it highly likely the dossier includes at least some disinformation seeded by the Russians. So the most charitable scenario of what went down is that the Russians, knowing Cohen had made half-hearted attempts to broker the Trump Tower deal Trump had wanted for years, planted his name hoping some kind of awkwardness like this would result.

That is, Cohen used his true denial of having been to Prague to rebut the equally true claim that he had contact with the Kremlin.

Manafort’s plan

There’s good reason to believe that Cohen’s focus was not an accident.

That’s because, after meeting with a Deripaska associate, Paul Manafort advised Trump to use precisely this approach.

In early January, Manafort met in Madrid with a Deripaska associate, Gregory Oganov. Manafort’s explanations to Mueller’s team about the purpose of the meeting vacillated (it was one of the topics about which Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled he had lied). But according to a text from Kilimnik, the meeting was about recreating the old relationship he had had with Deripaska.

A May 2017 story from Ken Vogel (yeah, I know), described how after that trip, Manafort called Reince Priebus and told him that the dossier was full of inaccuracies, and that those inaccuracies — and the FBI’s reliance on Steele, the guy paid by a lawyer for Deripaska who brought claims about Manafort to DOJ — discredited the Russian investigation generally.

It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties among Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a person close to Manafort.

[snip]

According to a GOP operative familiar with Manafort’s conversation with Priebus, Manafort suggested the errors in the dossier discredited it, as well as the FBI investigation, since the bureau had reached a tentative (but later aborted) agreement to pay the former British spy to continue his research and had briefed both Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier.

Manafort told Priebus that the dossier was tainted by inaccuracies and by the motivations of the people who initiated it, whomhe alleged were Democratic activists and donors working in cahoots with Ukrainian government officials, according to the operative. [my emphasis]

Priebus shared Manafort’s comments with Trump.

Priebus did, however, alert Trump to the conversation with Manafort, according to the operative familiar with the conversation and a person close to Trump.

Notably, along with disputing that anyone with ties to Steele would know what Yanukovych would say to Putin, Manafort also debunked the claim that he was managing relations with Russia because he didn’t know Page.

In his conversation with Priebus, Manafort also disputed the assertion in the Steele dossier that Manafort managed relations between Trump’s team and the Russian leadership, using Page and others as intermediaries.

Manafort told Priebus that he’d never met Page, according to the operative.

As with Cohen’s later debunking of the Prague story to distract from the Trump Tower story, Manafort used a near miss in the dossier  to discredit the larger true claim, that he had been working with someone in Russia.

Manafort met with Kilimnik personally in February, and according to Rick Gates, at Manafort’s behest, Kilimnik kept hunting down the other sources for the dossier. Of course, according to later intelligence reporting, Russian spooks already knew that.

How about that?

Within a day after the release of the dossier, at a time when he was meeting with an Oleg Deripaska deputy, Manafort came up with a strategy to discredit the entire Russian investigation by discrediting the dossier. How was Manafort so prescient about the faults of the dossier?

But Deripaska had almost certainly known about the dossier project for six months by that point, and had funded an earlier collection effort targeting Manafort himself.

And Republicans followed that strategy — to discredit the Russian investigation by discrediting the dossier and FBI’s decision to rely on Steele, a strategy Manafort shared after a meeting with a top Deripaska aide — for three years.


This post is part of a series describing how Trump trained Republicans to hate rule of law. Earlier posts include:

LOLGOP and I are doing a podcast series that closely follows this series.

Patreon

Apple Podcast

Spotify

The series builds on this background.

 

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66 replies
  1. zscoreUSA says:

    Dang, this is truly amazing and really helps to understand a lot of the details and bigger picture from the Russiagate scandal.

    Btw, what’s the consensus on Carter Page? Was he a CIA asset during this time? Or assuming he might be, is that something that is not proper to even discuss or speculate about?

      • zscoreUSA says:

        Thanks, that’s a very thorough rundown.

        How about after 2013 and into the election time frame? There are several of factors that stand out to give me pause about what was going on there with Carter.

        If he did have a further relationship with the CIA, I suppose there would be every effort possible to prevent that information from becoming public, lest it would blow back.

        • emptywheel says:

          He was in no way a CIA asset. He was someone who wanted to stay on the good side of Russia and enthusiastically jumped at the chance to run a pro-Russian think tank.

  2. Alda Earnest Goodpeople says:

    “The idea — presented two weeks before disclosure of emails showing Cohen brokering a deal with Russians in early 2016 — is if Cohen can discredit the dossier, then he will have shown that there is no reason to investigate him or his role brokering deals with the Russians. Even the denial of any documents of interest is limited to the dossier: “We have not uncovered a single document that would in any way corroborate the Dossier’s allegations regarding Mr. Cohen, nor do we believe that any such document exists.””

    “On Monday, The New York Times followed up on the Post report, releasing portions of the e-mail exchanges between Sater and Cohen, which the Trump Organization turned over to Congressional investigators . “I arranged for Ivanka [Trump] to sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin. I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote in an e-mail to Cohen on November 3, 2015, the Times reports. “I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this,” he continued.”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/trump-tower-moscow-russia-presidential-campaign

  3. Mike Stone says:

    Very good explanation. However, I would add that the US had decades of Hillary bashing by a well funded number of political actors that had the effect of making half of the country believe she was some kind of monster.

    • Magbeth4 says:

      Hillary was her own worst enemy. She is brilliant, but suffers from hubris.
      I voted for her, in spite of her personal flaws: the arrogance, the air of being superior to other people, the affect of entitlement because she graduated from Yale, her attitude that certain groups of people didn’t count, i.e., “the deplorables,” the voters in swing states (the neglect of which cost her the election).

      Hillary might have been a good President, in spite of these personality flaws, but those same flaws might have thrown this country into big messes, and she might not have been able to compromise with a Congress which would disagree with her policies. It is a shame, because it would have been a good thing to have a female President who was well-educated, experienced in legislation, and most importantly, foreign relations.

        • David F. Snyder says:

          Yeah, no shit! What is wrong with a confident woman? For god’s sake!

          And Trump is the king of entitlement. The “entitled because she went to Yale” is a total fabrication enhanced by media and gossip. Saying she has an attitude that “certain groups don’t count” — she exaggerated the count (“half”) and apologized for that, but she was right about Trump being a rallying point for _____-phobes (xeno-, islamo-, homo-, …), Neo-Nazis, and racists, that has been proven over the past 8 years.

          My wife and I have several white liberal female friends who told us they didn’t vote for Hillary because she wasn’t likable and now they’re moaning about the loss of Roe. And, in my world, it’s chatter like the above coming from “hold their nose” Hillary voters who allowed the loss of women’s confidence in Hillary. They played right into Putin’s grimy psy-op clutches.

        • Rayne says:

          Reply to David F. Snyder
          May 29, 2024 at 12:38 pm

          Trump has bashed every possible group — even people who’ve supported him but let up for a second sucking up to his ass — but Hillary can’t call racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic people who attack other Americans and her personally a “basket of deplorables.”

          Really don’t need the double fucking standard applied to women here, let alone continued goddamned amplification of Russian influence operations in this comment section.

        • Magbeth4 says:

          A well-educated woman, which I am, at nearly 84 years of age, is allowed to speak and criticize other educated (or not) women without being accused of being “sexist.” One can call out Clinton for her actions, as well as for any male candidate.

          And, I am most certainly, as a “student” of Russian culture and history, having spent over 20 years doing so, including traveling there on an extended journey during the Breznev years, and delivering 12 lectures on the subject while writing letters to the leaders of Russia during a 10 year period in defense of dissidents, do not appreciate the insinuation that I am some kind of Russian “troll,” as suggested by someone further in the thread.

          Apparently, to be considered “liberal” one has to conform to non-liberal requirements to pass muster. To be liberal is to be open-minded and fair. Criticism does not connote unfairness.

        • Rayne says:

          Reply to Magbeth4
          May 29, 2024 at 4:00 pm

          Yours is an uphill struggle to justify your double standard against the best qualified POTUS candidate ever, using out of context a single snippet of a campaign speech in the same way the right-wing has and calling it a personality flaw. With your claimed background you have no excuses for amplifying right-wing talking points.

          This is not your first such amplification out of 19 total comments here to date, either. Not good percentages.

        • Krisy Gosney says:

          Yes, Rayne, exactly!! And to make comments about HRC after this brilliant and hard work analysis of Trump, Russia and Steele dossier reflects real dullness.

      • harpie says:

        Speaking of hubris, you come off as extremely, smugly sure
        that your opinion of Clinton is instead immutable fact.

        Wrt: “deplorables” you either have been misinformed or are yourself misinforming.
        [Quotes / links here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-28-2024 ]

        […] Clinton’s statement was consistent with polling, [she was discussing polling at the time…ie: “basket”] and she added that the rest of Trump’s supporters were “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” She said: “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

        • harpie says:

          In that letter, Cox discusses the fact that over the weekend,
          TRUMP got is fee-fees hurt when the Libertarians booooed him
          and lashed out the next day by reposting a violent video.

          Trump’s elevation of this video, [Greg] Sargent notes, is a dangerous escalation of his already violent rhetoric, and yet it has gotten very little media attention.

          Last November, Matt Gertz of Media Matters reported that ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News provided 18 times more coverage of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment at a fundraising event that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” than they provided of Trump’s November 2023 promise to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

          CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned the “deplorables” comment nearly 9 times more than Trump’s “vermin” language. The ratio for the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers was 29:1.

      • Savage Librarian says:

        One of the hardest lessons in life for me has been learning to separate the persona from the person. In some specific circumstances my inability to do so was heart-wrenching.

        And, conversely, I have also come to realize that some of the predicaments I have found myself in were the result of how others judged me by how they perceived my persona rather than by the person I am.

        In part, this was the result of a smear campaign by people with vested interests. It relied on organizational dynamics and disinformation. There was little I could do to counter it until after a great deal of damage occurred.

        I had an opportunity to speak with Hillary in December 2015. It was a brief, one-on-one, face to face conversation. At the end of it she made a very compassionate, unexpected and unplanned, small gesture that convinced me she is a woman of goodwill.

        It wasn’t anything she would remember or that others noticed. But I believe it was more of who she is as a person, rather than what her persona may or may not project.

        I am positive she cares about democracy, which is what I value as well. I am equally convinced that Trump, Deripaska, Putin and MAGA Republicans have contempt for democracy.

        • Ginevra diBenci says:

          This jibes with what everyone I know who’s met her says. The rest, including the original comment we’re all responding to, is a creation of a media-political nexus with its own deeply unexplored reasons to take her down.

          This includes the FBI’s NY field office, which of course saw its role as anything but political (and certainly not media!) when it set about to end her career in 2016, as I came to know from my inside source.

          Why do certain people feel so free to label Hillary Clinton with certain specific derogatory terms? To me the reasons are obvious, but I’m not the one who needs to do this particular work. And I’ve learned I can’t do it for those people.

      • ButteredToast says:

        … those same flaws might have thrown this country into big messes, and she might not have been able to compromise with a Congress which would disagree with her policies.

        It’s a moot point, but the idea that hypothetical failures to compromise would have resulted from a President Hillary Clinton’s “personality flaws” rather than the attitude of congressional Republicans makes me wonder if you paid any attention at all during the Obama presidency.

        • Buzzkill Stickinthemud says:

          I have a poignant memory of Obama, after negotiating in good faith with Boehner for something, went behind closed doors to finalize the deal, only to have Boehner stab him in the back and renege. When Obama emerged from the room, he had this look like Boehner just shot his dog.

          Republicans kept going downhill from there. And that’s what Hillary Clinton would’ve had to deal with.

      • dopefish says:

        The reaction to her “basket of deplorables” comment really pissed me off at the time. Why did Trump get (and even today still gets!) a pass on all sorts of deplorable comments he made about everyone under the sun, and yet Hillary got crucified for that one throwaway remark. It was pure sexism and right-wing hypocrisy.

        In 2015 or 2016, Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, he said John McCain wasn’t a war hero “because he was captured”, he insulted the wives of his primary opponents and claimed Hillary Clinton and John McCain were both “birthers”. He courted bigoted voters by calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. He claimed that “torture works” and said he would bring back waterboarding.

        He also made plenty of dismissive or contemptuous comments about American voters. “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs. Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

        By November 2016, anyone who could listen to a recording of Trump saying “grab em by the pussy” and still vote for him, deserved the “deplorable” label.

        • Rayne says:

          Reply to Spooky Mulder
          May 30, 2024 at 7:22 am

          Very good and specific example hinted at in your reply — the way the media particularly the NYT pushed “But her emails” to poison voters’ minds. Almost indistinguishable from a foreign influence operation, that.

          Now imagine having such ovarios masivos that one would amplify another very similar kind of media-borne attack in a comment thread discussing a matryoshka-like Russian influence operation. Or should I say such massivnyye yaichniki.

    • Bob Roundhead says:

      Think about how much better our country if not the world would be if we got rid of the electoral college.

  4. klynn says:

    “Within a day after the release of the dossier, at a time when he was meeting with an Oleg Deripaska deputy, Manafort came up with a strategy to discredit the entire Russian investigation by discrediting the dossier. How was Manafort so prescient about the faults of the dossier?”

    Damn! You are amazing! Please let this be a preview to a book? (BTW, write a documentary script on the side!)

      • klynn says:

        Love the podcast! Go all multimedia! You’ve got a book and a doco script in this content!

        • Krisy Gosney says:

          I second the documentary! Preferably a series! One, you can reach a lot more people. Two, visuals would help an audience in keeping straight the twists and turns and double-backs as well as putting faces to names.

  5. Bay State Librul says:

    In the future, we will see Christopher Steele appearing on Sixty Minutes to tell us what really happened.

  6. Super Nintendo Chalmers says:

    I remember two things about the Cohen-in-Prague denials:

    He claimed he had no Czech passport stamp, BUT, because of the Schengen Area, h wouldn’t of had his passport stamped when he entered the then-Czech Republic.

    At the time of this supposed trip, Cohen claimed he was in California with his son, who was being recruited by several college baseball programs. This seems more plausible. Perhaps the Czech passport/Schengen Area issue was used to create the illusion of credibility.

  7. Upisdown says:

    If I recall correctly, the only hints of the Steele Dossier’s existence before election day, came late in October from David Corn. It was pretty much unknown until December, 2016 and January 2017. But if you believe RW media, Hillary was banking that the dossier would destroy Trump’s candidacy.

    • Ginevra diBenci says:

      Good point. Also if you believe Durham’s fantasy world. Thanks for the reminder, upisdown.

  8. Sussex Trafalgar says:

    Putin and his oligarchs Mogilevich, Abramovich, Deripaska and Firtash have successfully corrupted Trump, the Republican Party, and too many key Federalist Society jurists, Republican politicians and attorneys from both parties.

    They are a cancer that will take decades to remove.

  9. Fancy Chicken says:

    Yes, many entanglements that will take years to unpeel from each other. It really seems like this material can’t be looked over enough especially as the depth of Russian infiltration of disinformation is still revealing itself.

    There is much to compliment this post on, but I actually really appreciate the clarification of: A. just how Chuck Dolan was involved with the Kremlin, B. Olga Galinka’s independent ties to Peskov’s office, and most importantly C. that Galinka was apparently Danchenko’s source for the Cohen disinformation. It just makes so much more sense now when tied to the bigger manipulation of the dossier.

    It is such a tsunami of information that I’d never understand without EW.

  10. bmaz says:

    Lol, maybe after all this horse manure, Rayne can tell the world about the nature of jury instructions and how they go. From her vast experience, I dunno, but maybe it would have been helpful to the blog. There are more than “three things” wrong here.

    • Rayne says:

      Maybe you, as an actual criminal lawyer, could offer your perspective on jury instructions based on education and years of experience instead of indulging in your own brand of horse manure bashing on me once again, going off topic and cluttering another thread.

      • bmaz says:

        If you allowed me to, I would . But you are too petty. Don’t pull that bullshit with me.

        • bmaz says:

          Guess I could also talk about how egregious the Scottie Scheffler case was too. But you wouldn’t want that either, now, would you?

        • emptywheel says:

          You’ve got five comments in this thread in which you chose not to talk about jury instructions but instead complained, unimpeded, about how we won’t let you speak.

        • bmaz says:

          Did not know I had a limit count. Learn something new every day after doing my best for you for 18 years.

  11. CitizenSane77 says:

    Lol, are you guys contractually obligated to not ban Bmaz? Was a deal made with the devil to allow his childish ranting to no end?

    Does anyone have executive decision-making regarding moderation? Or is it all done via a dysfunctional committee?

    Just ban the dude. This isn’t hard.

  12. ExRacerX says:

    bmaz: one response in the thread is directed at Dr. Wheeler. There have been others, as well. To me, that says something about “respect.”

    Sorry, mods.

    • bmaz says:

      Not sure what part of “respect” you understand. I would certainly give you, and most anybody, here a better shake. But that is just me.

  13. IainUlysses says:

    The first step was a brutal double game Oleg Deripaska deployed

    I wonder at what point Steele realized he was being used. Did he always know and just figured that was part of the civilian analyst job? Did he suspect he was being used a little until he woke up to being used a lot?

    I assume he knew he could be exploited, and how it would work, but maybe not.

  14. Savage Librarian says:

    Deripaska’ll rob a rascal,
    Sink his teeth into a task, he’ll
    chew & spit & when they ask he’ll
    pass a flask, he’ll wear a mask, he’ll
    outmatch by far dang Eddie Haskell.

    6/16/23; rev. 5/29/24

  15. Old Rapier says:

    Cohen could corroborate, or modify or debunk this outline of what went down. Would he answer questions about it? Would he If Professor Wheeler was directing the conversation? I would not trust anyone else not to be bamboozled if he was so inclined. I’m thinking only Cohen speaking out about it would catapult the story into the mainstream. Obviously three and a half years has shown nobody getting a paycheck will touch it otherwise.

    I don’t suppose either party would be game

    • Rugger_9 says:

      How would this proposed interview help Michael Cohen? I don’t see what he gains, and I don’t think he will do anything without a purpose these days.

      OT: We already have another ‘witness’ who wants to remain anonymous leak that Defendant-1 bragged about banging Daniels in Tahoe. The witness was concerned about MAGA blowback, but I’m sure it could have been relevant at trial to show just how ‘concerned’ Defendant-1 was about Melania finding out.

  16. Scott Maggelet says:

    I appreciate the thoroughness of the article, but I’m not sold that what you are describing is disinformation. I think it’s just the nature of raw intelligence that it’s not going to be 100% correct.

    How does Manafort denying knowing Page (and vice-versa) discredit the investigation? If that was the plan, wouldn’t you choose something more concrete that could actually be disproven? Page was announced as a foreign policy adviser a week before Manafort became campaign manager. I seriously doubt Trump knew the name Carter Page until Manafort put it in his mouth. The two never necessarily had to meet to be working as Steele described. Or the known liars could simply be lying about knowing one another.

    The Cohen saga is frustrating because Mueller appeared to merely ape back Cohen’s testimony in his report and refused to elaborate in his testimony to Congress. Meanwhile, a respected news agency in McClatchy runs a story that quotes 4 sources that Cohen’s phone was in Prague and chatter of his presence intercepted by Eastern European intelligence agencies. McClatchy stands by that reporting to this day – do we really believe that they got punked by their sources? Or is there just more to the story that has not yet come to light?

    At the end of the day I think the Steele dossier is what Steele always said it was – raw intel that needed follow up from the full resources of the FBI to discern how much was true (Steele estimated 70%, but I suspect it was higher). Carter Page was discussing Rosneft brokerage fees while reporting back to the campaign – if Igor Sechin wasn’t in the room, then the intel is 95% accurate instead of 100% accurate. That’s not disinformation. It’s just too bad the FBI and Mueller weren’t up to the task and either didn’t understand or care about the stakes.

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