What emerges is a complex but comprehensible story of gossip, intrigue, and spycraft. So, we’ve made our notes on the reordered dossier reports according to their file numbers and attempted to fit them into the relevant narrative of what was going on as they were written. democracy as well as Trump’s questionable personal and professional ties to friends of the Kremlin. The result is an often disorganized mishmash of snapshots a raw intelligence dump, using anonymous Russian sources, occurring in real-time as the international media began to uncover Russia’s attempted sabotage of U.S. As with Nixon’s White House tapes, the elisions in the text become more tantalizing than the text itself. Moreover, Report “095” (undated by Steele) appears immediately before “094” (dated July 19, 2016) in the dossier, which makes no sense. The second report is then labeled “086,” creating yet another mystery as to 81 through 85, and what content they might contain that would otherwise bolster or contextualize what came before or what follows. For example, the first report is labeled as “080,” with no indication given as to where the original 79 antecedents might have gone. One of the difficulties in reading the original document - at least as published by Buzzfeed - is that once the memos are put in order, there are evident gaps in the sequence. Our goal is to provide an annotated version of The Dossier, verifying its allegations where we can and offering context that might make unverified allegations more - or less - plausible. According to British journalist Luke Harding, Steele himself has told his friends that the dossier is “70 to 90 percent accurate.”Īll of which suggests that some of the material is true, some not. Other respected intelligence analysts, such as Steven Hall, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow and John Sipher, the former head of the Agency’s Russia program, are more inclined to believe in the veracity of Steele’s spadework. Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, has given three reasons to be wary of the contents of the dossier: that Steele himself never went to Russia to conduct his own investigation but relied on intermediaries of unknown trustworthiness that Steele would have been under surveillance by the Russians, given his well-known tenure in MI6 and that the Kremlin may have known about his fact-finding efforts through the hacked DNC emails, given that the party was Steele’s paymaster. Skeptics looking at Steele’s memos argue that they read a lot like a Russian disinformation campaign. The most commonly available version, published by Buzzfeed in January 2017, does not even present the memos in the order in which they were written. Meanwhile, what purports to be the full text of The Dossier is rarely scrutinized in its entirety, and even more rarely understood for what it is: a collection of raw and sometimes unreliable notes about intelligence gathered from secondary and tertiary sources and thrown together into one folder over the course of six months in 2016. And we heard from McClatchy that Trump’s consigliere, Michael Cohen, really did travel to the Czech Republic in 2016, despite his continued denials - but we don’t know whom he met there. We’ve also heard former FBI director James Comey say it is “possible” Donald Trump paid prostitutes to urinate on the bed the Obamas had slept in at the Moscow Ritz Carlton, although Comey said he really didn’t know. computers associated with the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, stealing documents and disseminating them with the intent of trying to sway the election. Most recently, federal investigators indicted twelve officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, for hacking U.S. And in the shadowland of espionage it is even possible that parts of it were planted by Russian operatives to distract and discredit investigators trying to get to the bottom of the Kremlin’s skullduggery.Įvery few weeks passages from The Dossier resurface like Delphic prophecies, full of promise, menace, and ambiguity. Most likely there is something in it of both. “The Dossier,” as everyone calls it, is talked about either as the key to what really happened in the 2016 presidential election, as likely ordered by Vladimir Putin or it’s an artful but largely invented tapestry of libels and innuendo meant to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency.
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