A Doozy of a Dossier

But thanks to the investigations it has spawned, we know a lot more about the provenance of the dossier than when it was first published, and it bears rereading in light of what we have since learned.

The dossier is a series of memos written from June to December 2016 by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, alleging a Trump/Kremlin conspiracy. Paying for Steele’s work was the opposition research company Fusion GPS; paying Fusion GPS was the law firm Perkins Coie; paying Perkins Coie was the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Given that Steele presents largely uncheckable allegations from anonymous sources, the reliability and credibility of the dossier has rested on the reliability and credibility that has been claimed for Steele himself. According to senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, during a briefing to senators in March 2017 then-director of the FBI James Comey vouched for Steele’s bona fides. In seeking a warrant from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on the communications of one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page, the FBI had relied on the dossier, Comey told the senators, “because Mr. Steele himself was considered reliable due to his past work with the Bureau.”

At a 2017 House hearing with Comey, Rep. Joaquin Castro began his assessment of the dossier by proclaiming his reliance on “the reputation of the author.” According to the Texas Democrat, the fact that “Christopher Steele is a former accomplished British intelligence officer with a career built on following Russia is important. This is not someone who doesn’t know how to run a source and not someone without contacts.” Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff has described Steele glowingly as “a former British intelligence officer, who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. intelligence.”

In all the scuffling over whether Clinton’s funding of the enterprise calls Steele’s credibility into question, little attention has been devoted to a more basic and obvious question posed by the dossier: How could a former spy in the U.K., in a matter of months, squeeze the highest ranks of the Russian government like a sponge and expose one of its most consequential and closely guarded schemes? Why do we pay CIA agents if a freelancer like Steele so easily runs circles around them?

Adding to the astonishing degree of difficulty of the trick, according to a fawning profile in the New Yorker, Steele hasn’t been to any former Soviet state, let alone Russia itself, since 2009. It’s a matter of personal safety—a contractor for his business-intelligence company warned him in 2012 that an agent of the FSB (the modern iteration of the KGB) had called Steele “an enemy of Mother Russia.” This is supposed to bolster the credibility of the dossier author. But it cuts the other way when it comes to the seeming ease with which Steele hoovered up information. Who in Moscow’s upper echelons is going to spill to “an enemy of Mother Russia”?

But spill, the dossier tells us, they did: The sources Steele describes are high-ranking. Source A is “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B is “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.” Source C is a “senior Russian financial official.” A “trusted compatriot” of Sources A and B is indiscreet enough to tell Steele that “the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald TRUMP for at least 5 years.” Source B blabbed “that the TRUMP operation was both supported and directed by Russian President Vladimir PUTIN.”

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Let’s stop for a second and take that in. On the first page of the dossier, Steele claims to have gotten senior Russian officials and their trusted friends to chit-chat about a secret plan crafted for five years by no less than Putin himself. Given the relative trivialities that can get one beaten to death in a Russian prison, these senior officials would seem to have exhibited an extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward their own health and well-being.

Is it plausible? One skeptic is an American journalist with a decade’s experience working in Moscow. He points out the obvious: It can be dangerous to be a reporter in Russia and difficult to get sources with real information to share it. People asking questions of top officials and their associates don’t go unnoticed in Putin’s surveillance state, whether it’s someone on the phone from England or just a nosy local. “Nobody Steele could have sent or talked to could have done so without it immediately coming to the attention of Russian internal security,” says the journalist.

From the earliest days of the dossier inquiry, Russian security services would have had at least a couple of options: (1) They could have shut Steele down immediately, or (2) they could have taken the opportunity to feed him stories contrived to cause the most chaos and damage to the United States. The journalist says, “Whatever is in the dossier is there because Russia wanted it in the dossier.” Unless, he adds, Steele just made things up and never had any serious Russian sources for the material in the first place.

Before moving on, let’s consider one further curiosity: the famously lurid story that kicks off the dossier, in which Trump is said to have paid prostitutes to pee on his bed at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. Steele’s associates supposedly didn’t want to include it—too sensational, they thought. But ever the straight-shooter, according to a “longtime friend” quoted in the New Yorker, Steele thought that “the possibility of a potential American President being subject to blackmail was too important to hide.” But here we have another problem of plausibility: The dossier repeatedly treats “perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB” as the ultimate stuff of kompromat. Yet if Trump engaged in a multiyear criminal conspiracy with Russia, as the dossier claims, he exposed himself to blackmail by Putin on a scale that would make a library’s worth of pornographic surveillance videos trivial by comparison. And yet when it comes to Trump, our prurient spy friend keeps coming back to kinky sex as the gold-standard of kompromat.

Aside from the difficulty of clearing basic-believability hurdles, the dossier also appears to be padded. COMPANY INTELLIGENCE REPORT 2016/086—the memo following the water-sports piffle—provides “A SYNOPSIS OF RUSSIAN STATE SPONSORED AND OTHER CYBER OFFENSIVE [CRIMINAL] OPERATIONS.” The report is an exercise in recycling. Though the date built into the title of the memo is 2016, most of the information is boilerplate dated to 2015 and in content and tone appears to have been written for one of Steele’s run-of-the-mill business clients. Not only does it have no information about Trump, the memo doesn’t mention anything about the 2016 election, nor anything about election-meddling of any sort. Here and there, whoever took the report off the shelf remembered to update it with a bit of data marked 2016, but the giveaway comes at the end of the memo, where Steele always puts a specific date. The memo is dated “26 July 2015.”

There are glaring inconsistencies. Whereas in a June dossier entry, the Trump/Kremlin conspiracy is described as a five-year affair, by July Steele cites a “Source close to TRUMP campaign” that “regular exchange with Kremlin has existed for at least 8 years, including intelligence fed back to Russia on oligarchs’ activities in US.”

Five years—let alone eight—is an extraordinarily long time to maintain an international covert operation. And that’s assuming top-notch, tight-lipped tradecraft. How does a conspiracy last five days if it’s comprised of Trump and associates on one end and loose-lipped Russians on the other? And what benefits was the Kremlin getting out of the bargain? Is it plausible that an FSB handler eager for info on oligarchs abroad would have recruited Donald Trump, in 2011 or 2008 or any other year, to keep tabs on them?

The one documented act of Russian footsie with Team Trump that we are so far aware of is the meeting Don Jr. took with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in June 2016. Somehow, the dossier missed that outreach (even though Veselnitskaya was also a client of Fusion GPS, the firm directly paying Steele for the dossier). We know that meeting happened, but it makes no sense in the context of the compromising relationship the dossier purports to have uncovered: If the Kremlin had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years,” as the dossier summarized, why the sudden need to reach out to Don Jr.?

Time and again the dossier attributes to Trump feats of political trickeration that would be astonishing if performed by a disciplined and experienced organization. Nothing we have learned of the Trump campaign suggests either the discipline or the competence. Take the memo labeled COMPANY INTELLIGENCE REPORT 2016/095. It alleges not just the quite creditable assertion that the Kremlin is “behind recent appearance of DNC emails on WikiLeaks” but the rather more difficult to credit claim that the Russian hacking relied on an “exchange of information established in both directions”—that is, help from the Republican candidate: “TRUMP’s team using moles within DNC and hackers in the US as well as outside in Russia.”

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As impressive as it would be for an independent operator to have even a single high-placed Russian government source, from memo to memo in the dossier the super-secret sources just keep coming. Among them is a “longstanding compatriot friend” of “a Kremlin insider.” And that insider has blockbuster stuff. Such blockbuster stuff that one is left scratching one’s head over why the FBI was wasting its time with a piker like Carter Page.

On October 18, 2016, just three days before the FBI sought a FISA warrant to surveil Page, Steele delivered one of the dossier’s most shocking allegations: “a Kremlin insider with direct access to the leadership,” he wrote, “confirmed that a key role in the secret TRUMP campaign/Kremlin relationship was being played by the Republican candidate’s personal lawyer Michael COHEN.” Shocking, because unlike Carter Page—a figure distant from Trump in the first place and who by October 2016 had already left the campaign—Cohen couldn’t have been closer to the candidate. Shocking, because the dossier accused Page only of entertaining the possibility of a bribe in exchange for lifting sanctions in the then-unlikely event Trump were to win the White House. Cohen, by contrast, was said to be personally managing the years-long international conspiracy: A “Kremlin insider highlighted the importance of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael COHEN, in the ongoing secret liaison relationship between the New York tycoon’s campaign and the Russian leadership,” alleged a dossier memo dated October 19, 2016.

Cohen was said to be tasked with covering up the conspiracy and worse. The memo dated October 20, 2016, tells of Trump’s lawyer going to Prague for “secret meeting/s with Kremlin officials.” The dossier claimed he went there to arrange payoffs: “The agenda comprised questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the CLINTON campaign,” one memo specified, “and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the TRUMP team more generally.” The hackers were “paid by both TRUMP’s team and the Kremlin.”

By mid-October, Carter Page was good and washed-up and Steele was reporting that all the action was with Michael Cohen. Nor would it be impossible to imagine Cohen as a bag man—the lawyer, after all, was the one who arranged to pay porn performer Stormy Daniels to keep mum about any affair she may have had years ago with Trump. And yet days after Steele pegged Cohen as the linchpin to the Kremlin/Trump conspiracy, the FBI relied heavily on the dossier to put in for a FISA warrant to sweep not Cohen’s communications but Page’s. Why?

Perhaps it’s because the dossier memos involving Cohen included readily checkable details. For example, according to the dossier, “COHEN’s wife is of Russian descent and her father a leading property developer in Moscow.” (His wife left Ukraine as a child 40 years ago; her father is not any sort of property developer in Moscow, let alone a “leading” one.) The dossier alleges Cohen skulked to Prague with some associates “either in the last week of August or the first week of September.” (Cohen has paraded his passport to prove he made no such trip.) Cohen has since brought defamation suits against Fusion GPS and BuzzFeed.

It’s quite possible the FBI didn’t seek a FISA warrant on Cohen because they discovered, rather quickly, that the claims against Trump’s lawyer did not square with the available evidence. If so, kudos to the FBI for professionalism. On the other hand, if what was checkable in the dossier so readily proved false, why present Steele’s work to the FISA court as reliable and credible when it came to surveilling Carter Page?

Does the dossier still matter? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) told the New Yorker last week that “to impeach Steele’s dossier is to impeach Mueller’s investigation.” Which raises the question: Why is Sen. Whitehouse selling special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation so short?

If Mueller is half the professional he is advertised to be, he will look for provable facts, not the fancies peddled by Steele and his sources, such as they may be. The opposition researchers were paid to collect allegations damaging to team Trump; Mueller is charged with finding the truth. These are fundamentally different undertakings.

The dossier has launched investigations and lawsuits and thousands of arguments since its original publication. Rereading it now, in light of all that has subsequently come to pass, shows that the best summary of its contents is still the one BuzzFeed began with: The allegations remain unverified, and the report contains errors. And how.

Eric Felten is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.