OPINION:
Christopher Steele, importer of the embarrassingly inaccurate dossier, is determined to stop former President Donald Trump.
His 2016 dossier, filled with false felony allegations against Mr. Trump et al., was bankrolled by the Hillary Clinton campaign, which spread it to a welcoming and corrupt FBI to damage the opposition candidate and new president as a Russian agent.
The years-long dossier saga seemed over. But Mr. Steele now has a book coming out. You will never guess. Yes. It’s about Mr. Trump and Russia. HarperCollins’ Mariner Books on Oct. 8 will release, “Unredacted: Russia, Trump and the Fight for Democracy.”
HarperCollins is part of News Corp., which is controlled by the Rupert Murdoch family, which also heads Fox Corporation and its TV giant, Fox News. Mr. Steele is essentially in a book deal with the Murdoch media.
A better book project for Mr. Steele would be how he, a foreigner, interfered in an American election by peddling anti-Trump false rumors.
A clueless Mr. Steele, a former U.K. spy in its Moscow embassy, doesn’t seem to realize that it was the Obama-Biden-Hillary trio who placated Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
In Geneva, her first year as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton presented Mr. Putin’s foreign policy enforcer a “reset button” to apologize for George W. Bush being mean. She helped the Kremlin build a cyber farm outside Moscow. Mr. Putin returned the appeasement by capturing the Crimea.
Mr. Biden. Let’s see. He removed Trump sanctions on Mr. Putin’s prized Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He reversed Mr. Trump and extended the START Treaty. Mr. Trump had caught Mr. Putin cheating on other deals. Mr. Biden displayed his commander-in-chief skills with the 2021 Afghanistan disaster. A very rich Kremlin-connected Russian woman wired Hunter Biden over $3 million while dad was vice president. President Biden restarted a money flow to Putin ally Iran, which Mr. Trump had stopped.
Mr. Putin rewarded Mr. Biden by invading Ukraine.
If Mr. Steele is keeping score, that’s Obama/Biden 2 Putin invasions; Mr. Trump zero.
Since the anti-Trump liberal news media is sure to bathe Mr. Steele in praise during his pre-election book tour, lets go back to his dossier, vintage June-December 2016.
It was just 35 pages of his memos. But, as I’ve written — given the dossier’s reach into Washington power centers (the FBI, State Department, Democratic Party and liberal newsrooms) and given that the target was to become the most powerful man in the world who dossier questions would harass, and given that all its substantive criminal allegations were untrue — there has never been a bigger hoax in modern American political history.
With the smoke cleared away by 2022, The Wall Street Journal opinion page asked, “What Did the Steele Dossier Hoax Cost America?” BuzzFeed first published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017. Esteemed reporter Bob Woodward assessed and called it a “garbage document.”
But so intoxicating were the anecdotes of Russia/Trump that then-FBI Director James Comey led off his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee two months later by disclosing that the entire Trump campaign was under investigation.
Some of the dossier’s wildest allegations: The quote that glued the entire fiction together was “a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Kremlin and Trump campaign.
The quote supposedly came from businessman Sergei Millian. It was supplied to Mr. Steele by Russian Igor Danchenko, whom the FBI suspected during the Obama years of being a Kremlin spy.
Special Counsel John Durham investigated the dossier. He found that that whole section was a hoax.
“The evidence obtained by the Office shows that Danchenko, in fact, never received a phone call or any information from Millian, and Danchenko never made arrangements to meet with Millian in New York,” Mr. Durham’s 2023 report said. “Rather, the evidence demonstrates that Danchenko fabricated these facts regarding Millian.”
Mr. Steele said the Trump conspiracy was carried out in tandem by Trump campaign figures Paul Manafort and Carter Page. Subsequent investigations showed they did not know each other and never communicated.
And the blockbuster. Mr. Trump’s then-attorney, Michael Cohen, secretly traveled to Prague in 2016 to meet with Putin hoods and pay hush money to computer hackers.
Even the dossier-giddy FBI concluded this never happened.
What’s worse. Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican and bulldog on exposing dossier silliness convinced the intelligence community to un-censor key lines in the Department of Justice inspector general report. The unpeeling of Footnote 350 showed that the stuff on Mr. Cohen was made up by the Kremlin, who infiltrated Mr. Steele’s sourcing. U.S. intelligence “assessed that the referenced subset was part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations,” the footnote said.
Mr. Danchenko provided Mr. Steele with 80% of the dossier information. His sources included two Hillary Clinton supporters, one a Kremlin employee and the other a Washington PR executive.
So, Clinton loyalists supplied the rumors laundered through a fancy dossier delivered to Clinton operatives in Washington, who passed it around like it was gold to defame and defeat Mr. Trump.
As for Mr. Danchenko, he repudiated the end-product dossier, according to the IG report. He told the FBI that he told Mr. Steele he had “no proof” for what he was telling him, depicting it as “word of mouth and hearsay” and as “conversations that he had with friends over beers.” Mr. Steele “misstated or exaggerated” what he told him.
After the election, the FBI paid Mr. Danchenko hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove the dossier. He did not. This includes the fantasy tale of Mr. Trump at the Moscow Ritz Carlton.
In October 2016, as federal wiretaps based on the unverified dossier had just begun, the FBI offered Mr. Steele up to $1 million to prove the dossier. An FBI intelligence analyst testified that Mr. Steele never did.
After his probe, Mr. Durham testified before a House committee, “There is not a single substantive piece of information in the dossier that has ever been corroborated by the FBI or, to my knowledge, anyone else.”
So this was Mr. Trump’s greeting as he arrived in Washington as the new president. The world’s most powerful law enforcement agency was trying to destroy him based on a “garbage document.”
He would find out it was only the beginning.
“I realized early on I had two jobs,” Mr. Trump told Jeff Gerth for his expansive 2023 series in Columbia Journalism Review. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”
Correction: Due to an editing error, the amount the FBI paid Mr. Danchenko was misstated. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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