The report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, released Dec. 9, and Horowitz’s subsequent congressional testimony should put the final nail in the coffin of the Steele dossier’s credibility. Unfortunately, it comes long after many people ingested its contents and still wander through political discourse under its mind-altering effects.
The dossier was part of Democrats’ opposition research campaign into President Trump, compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. When its existence was reported by CNN just before Trump’s inauguration, BuzzFeed dumped the whole document onto the internet for readers with no background in spycraft or Muscovite intrigue to judge its truthfulness for themselves. Last week’s report and testimony confirmed that it played a key role in the FBI’s successful bid to get approval for a secret wiretap on onetime Trump adviser Carter Page. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York wrote on Dec. 10, the Horowitz report “makes clear the dossier never had even a shred of credibility. Steele had no firsthand knowledge of anything in the document. He got all his information secondhand or thirdhand from sources who themselves heard things secondhand or thirdhand.”
Its use in obtaining a surveillance warrant against Page is, thus, scandalous. But set that aside for a moment. As York wrote, news media reporting on the dossier “did terrible damage to a new president as he took office.” In fact, it did great damage to our politics generally and to the reputations of those people slimed by its contents, people without the president’s ability to defend themselves.
Page is one such person. The dossier erroneously claimed he’d been offered a Russian bribe to influence policy once Trump was in office. The dossier also implicated Russian-American Jews as figures of suspicion, suggesting they were at Vladimir Putin’s disposal. In April 2017, Politico picked up on that thread, baselessly claiming the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, a branch of Hasidic Judaism, “connects Trump and Putin.” Thus did Steele and Fusion GPS, the mercenary firm that hired him, turn the “collusion” theory into a 2019 version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
What they did was inject a paranoia into the political system that, ever since, has encouraged people, very much including journalists, to look upon their neighbors with suspicion on the flimsiest of pretexts.
The Steele dossier’s headline rumor was the “pee tape,” supposed videographic proof of Trump and prostitutes in Moscow in 2013. “It’s possible,” former FBI Director James Comey told ABC News last year, that “the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013.”
This kind of pornography-inflected McCarthyism has driven much political debate for nearly three years. Worse, it has spawned an entire journalistic industry that publishes reputation-destroying rumors aimed at anyone near Trump who has even a tenuous connection to Russia. Suddenly, standards of evidence have been tossed aside in favor of weasel phrases such as “in the orbit of,” taking guilt by association to a level that seriously degrades politics and journalism.
The centrality of the pack of lies in the dossier to securing permission from the federal spy court to surveil Page demonstrates abundantly that procedural reform is necessary. So does the astonishing record of deliberate deception by those repeatedly applying for extensions to their spying on the Trump campaign.
But reform is about the future. What we know already is that the dossier has poisoned political discourse in a way that is going to be far more difficult to undo.
