The Steele dossier has always been misunderstood 10/22/22
This likely ends the quixotic quest of Durham to discredit the Mueller probe into former President Donald Trump’s Russia ties and lend credence to Trump’s claim that it was always a hoax. History will look back on this week as another chapter in the saga of the Steele dossier, which has always been over-hyped and used by both sides to advance their agendas.
First journalists treated the sensational dossier as proof of Donald Trump’s Manchurian Candidate-style nomination for the U.S. presidency. Supporters of the former president believe he was the victim of a “witch hunt” and that the dossier was a critical part of it.
For those of us in corporate investigations, it is neither.
In the case of Donald Trump, a firm called Fusion GPS was paid — at first by Republicans and then later by Democratic operatives — to do a deep background check on Donald Trump. The Steele dossier was just raw intelligence based on rumors about Trump. At the time of the investigation, it would have certainly made sense to find out everything possible about Trump and his Russian ties — there was certainly enough smoke around this topic.
Much of the Steele dossier hasn’t been disproved to date, but rather has gained greater credence based on Trump’s turbulent presidency. For instance, Trump’s imprisoned campaign chair Paul Manafort passed along campaign data to a Russian agent. Trump lied to the public about having no aspirations for deals in Russia when his team had been chasing a project in Moscow throughout his campaign. Most infamously, Trump undermined U.S. intelligence in Helsinki with Russian President Vladimir Putin by his side by agreeing with the dictator that he thought Russia had nothing to do with interfering with the U.S election. In this way, much of what the Steele dossier claimed about Trump being influenced by the Russians seems true. We still don’t have hard proof and may never have it.
Christopher Steele is a British former intelligence officer who was hired by the Washington research firm Fusion GPS in June 2016 to investigate Donald Trump's ties to Russia. The 17 reports he filed — collectively known as the dossier — alleged that the Russians had compromising material about Trump and that they sought to tilt the election in his favor. Trump has denied the allegations in the dossier. However, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the Russians engaged in an elaborate operation to swing the election to Trump.
