Christopher Steeles Very Stupid Dossier by Daniel Lazare!
(2020-06-11 at 01:07:04 )

Christopher Steeles Very Stupid Dossier by Daniel Lazare!

"Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." So declared Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But he was wrong. The gods do not make them mad - they make them stupid.

Christopher Steeles famous dossier, back in the news now that the United States Senate Judiciary Committee has begun hearings on Russiagate, is a case in point. The Federal Bureau of Investigation took the dossier oh-so-seriously back in 2016, sending out agents to double-check the ex-MI-6 agents informants and using it to obtain secret search warrants against alleged Russia go-between Carter Page. Nicholas Kristof pronounced the dossier "plausible" in a January 2017 New York Times column entitled, "Donald Trump: Kremlin Employee of the Month," while Adam Schiff regaled a House Intelligence Committee hearing with its contents. Former FBI Director James Comey continued to insist that the dossiers most notorious finding - the celebrated "golden showers" episode in the Moscow Ritz Carlton - was "possible" well into 2018.

But as we now know, it was all nonsense. Mr. Steeles Russian sources began backing away from the dossier as soon as it came out, confessing in follow-up interviews that the Ritz Carlton incident was nothing more than "rumor and speculation" and that other stories that Mr. Steele passed along with a straight face were the sort of gossip that friends bat back and forth over beers. As for Mr. Steele himself, former intelligence colleagues told the bureau that, while enthusiastic, he suffers from "lack of self-awareness" and "did not always exercise great judgment."

The stories were baseless while Mr. Steele himself was unreliable - which is no doubt why the FBI kept such interviews under wraps. After all, why let the facts get in the way of a good investigation that is generating scads of headlines by the minute, especially since the target is an all-purpose whipping boy like Vladimir Putin? Indeed, under wraps is where they would have stayed if Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz had not ferreted them out and published them in a stunning report last December.

But the question is not so much why such findings were covered up, but why things got so far to begin with. The problem with the Steele dossier is not merely that it is uncorroborated and under-researched. The problem is that it is ridiculous on its face, a tale told by an idiot that only another idiot could believe. Any normal person would give it a quick read and toss it in the wastebasket.

Why? Let us begin with the opening line: "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Mr. TRUMP for at least 5 years."

Since Mr. Steele began compiling the dossier in June 2016, that means that the Kremlin had been working with Donald Trump since at least 2011. But this is absurd since 2011 was Donald Trumps annus horribilis, the year he fell flat on his face after putting out feelers about entering the upcoming presidential race. Pundits dismissed him as a reality TV star looking for cheap publicity, Barack Obama skewered him mercilessly at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, while Republican strategist Karl Rove dismissed his candidacy as "a joke." Writer Erik Hedegaard described Donald Trump as "a Barnum-type showman" with hair a "patriotic shade of amber waves of grain" in a hilarious Rolling Stone profile that is still a must-read.

Donald Trump was a walking, talking, bouffant-wearing punch line, in other words, which is why Russian intelligence would have had to have been positively clairvoyant to pick him out as someone who would one day be in a position to "sow discord and disunity both within the United States itself, but more especially within the Transatlantic alliance," as the dossier puts it.

A few pages later, however, Mr. Steele reports that the Kremlin has been cultivating Donald Trump not for five years, but for eight, i.e. starting back in 2008, which is even more absurd since Donald Trump, struggling to keep himself afloat amid the greatest financial crisis in eighty years, was threatening to default on a $40-million loan from Deutsche Bank. Smart as Mr. Putin may be, he would have to be a super-Einstein to see a foundering businessman like this as presidential material.

Thus, Mr. Steeles core thesis - that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin had a working relationship going back years - does not pass the most elementary smell test.

From there, things only get worse. "So far," he continues, "TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further the Kremlins cultivation of him." The implication is that Donald Trump was playing hard to get. Yet Mr. Steele goes on to say:

"Finally, regarding Mr. TRUMPs claimed minimal investment profile in Russia, a separate source with direct knowledge said this had not been for want of trying. Mr. TRUMPs previous efforts had included exploring the real estate sector in St Petersburg as well as Moscow but in the end Mr. TRUMP had had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success."

TRUMP - intelligence agents are fond of capital letters - was turning down business while struggling unsuccessfully to drum it up.

As for those St. Petersburg prostitutes, Mr. Steele confesses that the details are elusive because "all direct witnesses to this recently had been -silenced,- i.e. bribed or coerced to disappear." This sounds dark, mysterious, and very Russian. But no such difficulties exist with regard to the "golden showers" episode at the Moscow Ritz Carlton because the hotel "was known to be under FSB [i.e. Russian Federal Security Service] control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to." Video and audio tapes would certainly make for impressive evidence except that the dossier gives no indication of actually listening to or viewing such material. The result is an evidence-free assertion that is both unproven and incontrovertible - which is to say, trash.

Then there is the curious matter of the Jews. In describing a vast Russian intelligence operation aimed at sabotaging Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign, Mr. Steele accuses the Kremlin of making "heavy use" of "coercion and blackmail" to enlist "United States citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin." The dossier continues:

"On the mechanism for rewarding relevant assets based in the United States, and effecting a two-way flow of intelligence and other useful information, Source E claimed that Russian diplomatic staff in key cities such as New York, Washington DC and Miami were using the "emigre" "pension" distribution system as cover. The operation therefore depended on key people in the United States Russian emigre community for its success. Tens of thousands of dollars were involved."

Not only had the Kremlin entered into a working relationship with Donald Trump, evidently, but it had also entered into a working relationship with Americas large Russian-Jewish emigre community. Two kinds of paranoia, anti-Russian and anti-Jewish, thus merged to form a single great Russo-Judaic conspiracy stretching from Moscow to Miami Beach. Since the dossier provides nothing by way of back-up, this was another reason to throw it in the garbage. But the FBI, which collectively seems to have the cranial capacity of a brontosaurus, thought the theory was worth pursuing regardless.

An exchange between Lisa and Peter Strzok gives us an idea of the depths to which the bureau had sunk. Page was the Federal Bureau of Investigation in-house attorney who texted in August 2016, "[Donald Trumps] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" To which Mr. Strzok, the agent in charge of the Russia investigation, replied: "No. No he will not. We will stop it." Eyebrows went up all over Washington, D.C. when that little exchange got out.

But a conversation a few weeks earlier is no less revealing. After Page mentioned a news item about Donald Trumps alleged Kremlin ties, Mr. Strzok texted that he is "partial to any women sending articles about how nasty the Russians are." To which Page replied that Russians "are probably the worst. Very little I finding redeeming about this. Even in history. Couple of good writers and artists I guess." Strzok agreed: "f---ing conniving cheating savages. At statecraft, athletics, you name it. I am glad I am on Team USA."

The exchange was racist, bigoted, and most of all stupid - painfully so. Couple of good writers and artists I guess? Does that mean Page has never read Tolstoy or Turgenev, Babel or Bulgakov? That she has never heard of Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev? Never seen a movie by Eisenstein or an opera by Borodin?

The mind reels. But the conversation speaks volumes about how intellectual levels had fallen. Basically, intelligence agents would believe anything about Russia, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it put it in a negative light.

Undoubtedly, narrowness of this sort had something to do with twenty-five years of unipolarity, that belief that, with the fall of the Soviets, the United States was now "the indispensable nation," as Madeleine Albright put it in 1998, able to "stand tall and .. see further than other countries into the future." Since the United States of America could do no wrong, it no longer had to think about whether it was following the right course or not. It no longer had to think, period, and the fact that pundits hailed Ms Albright as inestimably wise and profound meant that it would only sink deeper and deeper into thoughtlessness.

The worlds sole remaining superpower thus plunged ever deeper into arrogance and idiocy, as the entire Russiagate disaster shows. Former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was fond of pointing out that no country can be both rich and stupid for more than a generation. He meant it as a reproach to the Italians, but he could have been addressing America as well. Now that it is crashing and burning from terminal stupidity, it has proving him right yet again.

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