On Saturday the New York Times reported the sad, drunken origins of the FBI investigation into Trump–Russia.
During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The Australian diplomat, not being a member of Trump’s campaign staff, promptly reported the fact that Russia was conspiring to disrupt the US election by working with one of the candidates, and the FBI in turn found this something worth looking into.
However, this news isn’t making Team Trump happy. Fox News has already made multiple complaints about the “sudden interest” that the New York Times has demonstrated in Papadopoulos. With the primary reason being that it really puts a crimp in the main right-wing talking point about why the whole investigation is “illegitimate.”
If the Times were right, it would upend the assumed role played by the “Steele dossier” in launching the Bureau’s investigation. After all, the dossier – known to most Americans as the 35-page document alleging Trump’s treason with Moscow, along with his bawdy sexual interests – has long served as Exhibit A for proving Team Trump’s collusion.
This idea—that the dossier is the basis of the investigation—has been pushed hard by Trump supporters specifically because they think that the political connections behind the dossier, based on its funding by first Republican then Democratic opponents of Trump, gives them an opening. It’s become a standard attack from Trump’s supporters in Congress. Which means the news about Papadopoulos is a huge threat … to their talking points.
The idea that the entire investigation was based on the dossier, and nothing but the dossier, has been built up by Fox and other Trump organizations over weeks, and supported by statements from Trumpists like Florida Representative Ron DeSantis. Trump sprayed the whole thing out in a Christmas break twitter rant.
In truth, many items from the dossier have proven to be accurate, and former intelligence operative Christopher Steele continues to stand behind his work.
Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled an explosive dossier of allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, believes it to be 70% to 90% accurate, according to a new book on the covert Russian intervention in the 2016 US election.
But the political backing of the dossier makes it a target in Trumpland, where everything that has even a secondhand association with Hillary Clinton or Democratic sources is suspect. For Republicans, the idea that the investigation started with the dossier was the equivalent of a warrant based on bad information: It doesn’t matter that a search might turn up loads of evidence, it’s all tainted by that “crooked” beginning.
The idea that Papadopoulos triggered the investigation in July—months before the FBI met with Steele to discuss the dossier—leaves weeks of dossier-related outrage and plans for additional attacks looking … sad. And supporters like DeSantis, who has spent the last several weeks using the dossier connection as his primary reason why the Mueller investigation needed to be brought to a swift conclusion, falling back on even weaker arguments.
“If there was any evidence of collusion, that would've been leaked months and months ago,” Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Fox News. “You can bet your bottom dollar on that.”
Which is not even one notch away from saying “we should stop before they turn up something.”