The Steele dossier: Was ‘Russiagate’ just a hoax?
If we weren’t living in a “post-shame era,” said Jonathan
Turley in FoxNews.com, these would be days of contrition and atonement for those who promoted the “Russian collusion scandal.” Special counsel John Durham recently indicted a Russia analyst named Igor Danchenko, 49, for lying to the FBI. Danchenko, it turns out, was the primary source feeding information to Christopher Steele, the British former intelligence officer who compiled the 2016 dossier alleging that Donald Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia to steal the upcoming election. We already knew that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had funded most of Steele’s shabby work, but Danchenko’s indictment reveals that a major Democrat donor and Clinton supporter, Charles Dolan, actually supplied much of the rumor and innuendo Steele had claimed to gather from legitimate Russian sources—a damning fact that Danchenko concealed from the FBI.
Steele’s dossier was discredited long ago, said Paul Gregory in TheHill.com, not least by special counsel Robert Mueller, who found no evidence of the infamous “pee tape” or Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s supposed trip to Prague to meet with Russians. Thanks to Durham and Danchenko, though, we now know the dossier was a willful “hoax, one that paralyzed American politics for an entire presidential term.”
Notice the sleight of hand? said Max Boot in The Washington Post. By using “Steele dossier” and “Russia scandal” interchangeably, Trump’s defenders are trying to gaslight Americans into believing the only evidence of a corrupt relationship between Trump and the Kremlin came from Steele. That’s demonstrably untrue. The FBI launched its probe into Russian interference before receiving the dossier, when Trump adviser George Papadopoulos began boasting that Russian hackers had obtained damaging information on Clinton. After Trump was elected, Mueller documented more than 140 contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, and he obtained criminal convictions of numerous Trump insiders, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and longtime Trump crony Roger Stone, for lying about those contacts. While working for Trump for free, Manafort continued his long-standing contacts with Russian oligarchs and a Russian intelligence officer, Konstantin Kilimnik. He even gave Kilimnik campaign polling data. Mueller also documented 10 attempts by Trump to obstruct justice and thwart the investigation. Why did Trump engage in such a strenuous cover-up? He had “had plenty to cover up.”
The cover-up was ultimately successful, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. Both Manafort and Stone refused to cooperate with investigators, “calculating correctly that Trump would reward them with pardons for keeping silent.” Mueller couldn’t establish proof of a criminal conspiracy between Russia and Trump, but he found that Moscow did, in fact, interfere in multiple ways to help him win, and that Trump and his campaign welcomed that help. The investigation also proved that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “leverage” over Trump: Despite Trump’s oft-repeated claim that he had “nothing to do with Russia,” he was secretly trying during the campaign to get a lucrative deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered more bombshells, including evidence that Stone served as a gobetween between WikiLeaks, Russian hackers, and Trump. And yes, the committee found evidence that Trump had multiple sexual encounters with specific Russian women while on business trips to Moscow that the Kremlin could have used as kompromat. Steele’s dossier may have been a fraud, “but Trump was very, very guilty.”