On a first read, the Nunes memo from the House Intelligence Committee doesn’t look good for former British intelligence officer and Trump dossier author Christopher Steele.
But reading the memo with a specific focus on the intelligence import and context of what is said, Steele comes across significantly better.
The key here, as I’ve explained on a few different occasions, is that intelligence jargon is very nuanced. In that regard, let’s first consider three memo excerpts. First up:
The operative words here are “less than reliable.”
From my perspective, that language is distinctly political rather than language from an intelligence assessment. While Steele’s interactions with the media would clearly render him “less reliable” to the FBI, they would not render any intelligence service to assess him as “less than reliable.” The distinction is important when we consider the context and timing here.
After all, the political sensitivity of dealing with an investigation pertaining to a presidential candidate (Donald Trump) would have made the FBI especially cautious to avoid the political toxicity of one of their sources speaking to the media. Like any bureaucracy, the FBI wants to protect itself. Yet, seeing as Steele was effectively a contract agent (an external researcher) rather than an infiltration agent (someone inside the campaign), he would normally be given more latitude to his conduct as long as he kept delivering information of value.
This is especially true if Steele’s information had previously been assessed as high-confidence credible. And Nunes’ memo admits as much.
The key words here are “credible reporting.” We know that Steele had previously worked with U.S. intelligence services on a range of issues over many years, both in his capacity as an SIS officer and as a private citizen. Moreover, paid contract agents such as Steele are always assumed — by FISA judges, FBI agent, and intelligence analysts — to have their own motivations for providing intelligence. That the dossier was used in court successfully is an indication that the material was of assessed legal value.
More importantly, we must assume that other U.S. intelligence analysts retained confidence in Steele’s reporting following the FISA applications. This speaks to what I believe is the last key point related to Steele.
Here, the key words are “minimally corroborated.”
The language here indicates a source validation team was specifically formed to pick apart Steele information that was previously regarded as credible. While these validation teams are crucial in the aftermath of any source termination (the Iraq War intelligence explains why), they are also predisposed to taking an extremely tough line on intelligence after the point of use. And considering Trump’s campaign was front and center in the investigation here, the FBI would have a bureaucratic impulse to protect itself by being able to tell the intelligence oversight committees that it took its sourcing due diligence very seriously. A validation team could give the FBI that credibility.
That said, the benefit of hindsight, new intelligence, and newly developed circumstances all play into validation assessments, even where a validation team attempts to marginalize the influence of those considerations.
In turn, a validation report cannot be considered the defining measure of a source’s reliability and intelligence. Rather, it is an analytical product designed to give new context to collected intelligence, the credibility of its reporter (Steele), and that reporter’s potential utility for future intelligence collection.
Crucially, however, Nunes notes that the validation team did corroborate at least some of the dossier. The question then becomes, “How much?”
We don’t know, obviously, but “minimally corroborated” sounds like layman’s language rather than an analytical assessment from an intelligence officer.
That matters because his assessment may (and I would bet is) be a misrepresentation of the totality of the validation team’s ultimate product. It is definitely a misrepresentation of Steele’s overall credibility.
Remember, Steele was one of the top Russia production officers for one of the world’s premier human agent recruiters, the SIS.
Finally, there’s the fact that former FBI director James Comey briefed Trump on the dossier even after the validation report. Comey would only have done so if the FBI’s overarching assessment of the dossier’s credibility led him to fear that Trump might credibly be blackmailed by Russia.
When it comes to the Nunes memo and Steele, we are only seeing half the picture.
