The Steele dossier continues to make a laughing stock out of the media which embraced it

Lee Smith:

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Paradoxically, it is the Mueller investigation that has most thoroughly tested the veracity of the dossier’s claims. After the FBI’s monitoring of Page for nearly a year, with access to his electronic communications prior to the warrant, the special counsel has brought no charges against the former Navy officer alleged in the dossier to be at the center of a criminal conspiracy.

Yet the dossier abides. Even as prominent and early collusion theory promoter journalist Michael Isikoff now questions its probity, many still contend that Steele’s reports have not been “disproven.” After nearly two years since the Steele dossier was published, it remains the cornerstone of the case for collusion. Moreover, the dossier model has given rise to similar operations, joining the press, political operatives, and intelligence officials, not all of them American, targeting Trump policies.

The reported murder of Arab intelligence operative and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi was used as a platform by Turkish intelligence, the government of Qatar, and U.S. operatives to advance a campaign through the press, with the Post playing a leading role, against the administration’s pro-Saudi policies.

Democratic officials teamed with the media to thwart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, also using an FBI investigation as a political tool. “We were very concerned when Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed for another FBI investigation of Kavanaugh,” said a congressional investigator on the Republican side familiar with the dossier operation. “We didn’t know who would get it at the bureau and who we can trust over there.”

Cyber-security experts hired by the Senate Intelligence Committee to write a report on how Russian social media accounts helped Trump beat Clinton themselves created fake Russian social media accounts to dirty the GOP Senate candidate in last year’s special Alabama election. As the dossier operation targeted Trump, the bot operation created the impression that Roy Moore was supported by the Kremlin.

The dossier operation has not only damaged institutions like the FBI and DOJ, it has also poisoned the public sphere, perhaps irremediably. As a result, it is now accepted journalistic practice to print, and reprint, any garish fantasy so long as it’s layered with Russian intrigue and Trump team treason. Even as the rest of the country sees an institution that has made itself a laughingstock, the press continues to salute itself for its bravery—or the courage and industry required to take leaks from law enforcement and intelligence officials and Democratic operatives in an effort to topple a president it doesn’t like, elected by neighbors it holds in contempt.

How did it come to this? Former FBI director James Comey ushered in the era of the dossier when he briefed Trump on January 6, 2017 on reports that “the Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013.”

Last week, the Department of Justice released a heavily redacted version of the two-page memo on the dossier with which Comey briefed the president-elect. The “source’s reporting,” reads the memo, referring to Steele, “appears to have been acquired by multiple Western press organizations starting in October.”

As Comey later recorded in a separate memorandum documenting the meeting, he told Trump that “media like CNN had [the reports] and were looking for a news hook.” The briefing provided one.

According to Comey’s recent testimony, James Clapper ordered the briefing. The former director of national intelligence is believed to have then tipped off CNN, which later hired him as a commentator. After the award-winning CNN story posted, BuzzFeed published the document, passed to the news organization by Republican aide David Kramer.
The Frame Game Is Bipartisan

In his testimony, Comey again pushed the fiction that Republicans opposed to Trump first paid for the dossier. Congressional Republicans are right that Comey is trying to muddy the waters—the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded Steele’s work.

But credit Comey for underscoring, and maybe not accidentally, a larger truth—the operation that sought to defraud the American voter had bipartisan support all along. Court documents released in December show that Steele gave his final report to Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s chief of staff, Jonathan Burks.

How is it possible that so many people knew and said nothing? Everyone knows it’s impossible to sustain a real conspiracy that size. People in the know talk and the press makes it public. But they did talk—all the time. But the conversations, implicit confessions, of FBI agents and other U.S. officials were hidden by colleagues who classified their talk, or deleted it, like FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s text messages.

The press didn’t report it because the press is part of the operation, the indispensable part. None of it would have been possible, and it certainly wouldn’t have lasted for two years, had the media not linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by Clinton operatives.
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There is much more.

This is one of the more elaborate hoaxes in the history of hoaxes.  It appears that the media was a willing accomplice in the hoax and to this day many in the media still pretend that the events were real.  So when Mueller indicts some people associated with Trump on completely unrelated charges the Washington Post is brimming with stories and op-eds of the "walls closing in on Trump."  It is fanciful nonsense.   Those responsible for the hoax planned all along to use the media in their attacks on Trump and the media was all too eager to go along because of their hatred of his policy positions.

While at least one of the original journalist who wrote about the dossier has said it is probably not true, I have not seen similar confessions in any of the major publications who supported the hoax.