The Washington Post has a a new bombshell report!
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.
Except that it's not a bombshell. Because so what? The Steele dossier contains raw intelligence, and its credibility or lack thereof has nothing to do with the sources of its funding. Its credibility or lack thereof is being investigated, and where it proves credible that will be because supporting evidence has been found from credible sources. Which has been happening all along. And where the dossier proves not credible that will be because supporting evidence won't be found. Certainly, not all of it will be corroborated, but much already has been. The dossier is just one small piece of a very large puzzle that is being assiduously investigated by people whose standards of proof are and must be much higher than that of the raw intelligence in the dossier itself.
The Post's story simply isn't a bombshell. The Post's story also isn't new. It's old news. In fact, David Corn of Mother Jones reported it almost exactly a year ago, but without the breathless spin.
In June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was assigned the task of researching Trump’s dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project’s financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) “It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, “there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.”
Got that? The research was initiated by a Republican Trump opponent, and the financing later switched to the Democrats. It was opposition research. Nothing nefarious in that, and nothing secret, either. And nothing at all new.
CNN’s first article on the story, from January, also noted:
The memos originated as opposition research, first commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans, and later by Democrats.
But the Trump crew desperately needs a new narrative. And they're certainly not afraid to fudge the facts of a story that isn't a story.
And the usual sanctimonious media hacks will do what they always do.
The leading practitioner of that blight known as access “journalism” is shocked—shocked!—that political operatives would deny involvement in opposition research. And even a usually competent reporter plays along.
But this would be relevant only if the dossier was going to be used as primary evidence, which it certainly won't be. Because it is raw intelligence, and while it has pointed investigators in certain directions, they won't file legal charges or refer for political justice anything from it that can't be credibly verified. And that particular story isn't exactly new, either. It was dated March 1. And even it explained that the dossier is just one piece of evidence, among many others:
The FBI obtained a version of Steele's dossier last summer and investigators there used it to compare to some of their own work related to Russia's attempts to influence the US election. The FBI used its own sources and worked with US intelligence agencies to try to check aspects of Steele's work. The FBI was able to match some communications that the dossier described as happening between people described and on the dates the dossier described.
And that same week, the New York Times itself was reporting:
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.
Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.
The disclosures about the contacts came as new questions were raised about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s ties to the Russians. According to a former senior American official, he met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, twice in the past year. The details of the meetings were not clear, but the contact appeared to contradict testimony Mr. Sessions provided Congress during his confirmation hearing in January when he said he “did not have communications with the Russians.”
In other words, there's been a lot all along, regardless of the Steele dossier. But the Trump crew is desperate to undermine the credibility of the investigations into the Trump campaign's cozy relationship with the current Russian regime. The Trump crew is desperate to change the subject from the toxicity it brings even to its relations with other Republicans. The Trump crew is desperate to change the subject from its unprecedented incompetence and unpopularity. Not to mention its unprecedented unhinged cruelty. So it will push a story that is not a story. And some in the media will play right along.