The prime mover of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into then-candidate Trump wasn’t the Steele dossier, rather highly classified signals intelligence from American and allied spy agencies back in late 2015, which portrayed Trump’s relationship with Moscow in a troubling light, as I reported nearly a year ago. That assessment is starkly at odds with volumes of Trumpian mythology, tweeted regularly by the president himself, that Steele’s “ phony and corrupt dossier” was the cause of Robert Mueller’s “ witch hunt” (a term tweeted by the president 182 times) in the first place. In its admittedly highly redacted version, the report never implies that the dossier had any impact on the Department of Justice’s investigation into the president. It seems significant that the Special Counsel’s report on Trump and the Russians in 2016 barely mentions Steele and his dossier. To take a classic example, see the late summer 2016 meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney and Russian officials, alleged by the dossier, which may-or may not-have happened: we simply don’t know. While its portrayals of Kremlin atmospherics mostly rang true, many of the dossier’s specific allegations of shady activities involving Trump and the Kremlin were not just unproven but well-nigh unprovable. Subscribe to Observer’s Politics Newsletterįrom the outset, however, there were solid reasons to question the accuracy of much of its contents.
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