House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes announced this week that he was carrying out his own, personal Russia investigation, and the first item on his agenda was to get his hands on information about the dossier put together by security firm Orbis International’s Christopher Steele. Nunes was so intent on getting this information, that he accompanied his request with a dire warning.
In the letter, he threatened to drag Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray before the committee for a public grilling and hold them in contempt of Congress -- a jailable offense -- if they don't hand over the documents.
Nunes’s intents are clearly twofold—first to discredit investigations by the FBI and special counsel by associating them with documents that have been widely dismissed as unreliable, and second to remind people that the so-called “Steele Dossier” was produced at the request of Donald Trump’s political opponents. But why make this extraordinary effort? After all, it’s not as if the media had been treating the dossier as gospel.
Almost immediately after the dossier was leaked, media outlets and commentators pointed out that the material was unproven. News editors affixed the terms “unverified” and “unsubstantiated” to all discussion of the issue in the responsible media.
The contents of the dossier became public days before Trump’s inauguration, and except for jokes about the “pee pee tape,” the whole incident has more or less passed from the public mind. However, there’s more to the dossier than that one infamous recording. What the dossier actually holds is a set of connected incidents that together form a cohesive story. A story about Trump, and Russia, and a connection to that extends over a period of years.
And as time goes on, that story seems to be holding up.
For professional investigators … the dossier is by no means a useless document. Although the reports were produced episodically, almost erratically, over a five-month period, they present a coherent narrative of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
The reports in the dossier are not polished, and not extensively vetted. They’re “raw” intelligence from field sources, and it shouldn’t be surprising if large swathes of the information proved to be in error.
In the case of the dossier, Orbis was not saying that everything that it reported was accurate, but that it had made a good-faith effort to pass along faithfully what its identified insiders said was accurate. This is routine in the intelligence business. And this form of reporting is often a critical product in putting together more final intelligence assessments.
Except that, rather than falling apart on close examination, as more evidence has appeared, the reports seem to hold up remarkably well. For example, the first report—which focused on a lengthy Kremlin effort to recruit Trump—featured this tidbit:
Perhaps more importantly, Russia had offered to provide potentially compromising material on Hillary Clinton, consisting of bugged conversations during her travels to Russia, and evidence of her viewpoints that contradicted her public positions on various issues.
Compare this to what Donald Trump Jr. was offered before the meeting he hosted in Trump Tower.
Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.
The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.
The date of the email from Goldstone is just three weeks before the date of the the dossier report. Not only are Trump’s Russian connections offering up information that appears to be similar to what Orbis reported, Goldstone acknowledges that this information …
… is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin.
That’s not the only place where the information that Orbis captured has turned out to be bolstered by subsequent reports. There’s Paul Manafort’s under the table funding in Ukraine, Carter Page’s communication with Kremlin officials, and Russian efforts to engineer distribution of propaganda through social media. In short, the items that have appeared in the news since the election tend to support the contents of the dossier.
So, more than a year after the production of the original raw reports, where do we stand?
I think it is fair to say that the report is not “garbage” as several commentators claimed. The Orbis sources certainly got some things right – details that they could not have known prior. Steele and his company appear serious and credible.
That doesn’t mean that everything in the dossier has proven out. There are many items that haven’t yet been confirmed by additional evidence, not least of all those tapes, and there are reasons to be skeptical of many of those unproven items. But the fact that the dossier has held up so well to this point, strengthens the credibility of the items that have not yet come through from other sources
But Nunes isn’t alone in worrying about the dossier. Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen—who stars in several episodes related in the reports—has also made it a point to attack the contents of the dossier in recent weeks.
… Cohen, sent a letter to House investigators earlier this month strongly refuting allegations made about him in a now infamous dossier compiled last year by a former British intelligence agent concerning Trump’s ties to Russia. In the letter to the House Intelligence Committee, Cohen addresses in turn each of the claims made about his conduct.
The dossier indicates that Cohen had multiple meetings with Russian sources, other than the meetings where he was known to participate, such as his meeting with Felix Sater, Paul Manafort, and a pro-Russian Ukrainian to draft a Russia-friendly “peace plan” that would gift Crimea to Russia and lift US sanctions.
One thing was notably absent from Cohen’s protests:
He does not, though, discuss the allegations made against Trump, including the salacious suggestion that the Kremlin possesses a so-called pee tape that allegedly shows the president getting Russian prostitutes to urinate in a Moscow hotel room on a bed on which Barack and Michelle Obama once slept.
Nunes’s actions concerning the dossier, and Cohen’s efforts to distance himself from the contents, both seem to be associated with increasing chatter about the contents—including the most famous contention, Trump’s 2013 association with hookers in a Russian hotel room. In several previous episodes, this kind of activity—such as Trump’s pre-emptive attempt to provide an excuse for Donald Trump Jr.—came just before the emergence of new information.
That may not be true in this case. As raw intelligence, the reports in the dossier can be expected to be both hit and miss, and just because an item has gotten wide play doesn’t make it any more likely. However, it’s interesting that such an effort is being put into attempting to discredit a report that had already slipped from the headlines.