This week, BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how proud he is about publishing the still-unverified dossier on Donald Trump that paints his 2016 presidential campaign as having deep ties to the Russian government.
The dossier, compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, exposed how then-candidate Trump had colluded with and been compromised by the Russian government. The dossier was shopped to numerous news organizations before BuzzFeed finally published it in January 2017. Then-President-elect Trump called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage,” and with good reason. To this day, there are still several reports that cannot be verified independently, such as Trump’s encounter with Russian prostitutes.
In his op-ed, Smith writes, “A year of government inquiries and blockbuster journalism has made clear that the dossier is unquestionably real news. That’s a fact that has been tacitly acknowledged even by those who opposed our decision to publish. It has helped journalists explain to their audience the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election. And Mr. Trump and his allies have seized on the dossier in their efforts to discredit the special counsel leading the investigation, Robert Mueller.”
He continues: “Without the dossier, Americans would have found it difficult to understand the actions of their elected representatives and government officials. Their posture toward Mr. Trump was, we now know even more comprehensively than we did in January 2017, shaped by Mr. Steele’s report. The Russia investigation, meanwhile, didn’t turn out to be some minor side story but instead the central challenge to Mr. Trump’s presidency.”
Smith might be proud of how the Steele dossier characterized the relationship between Trump and the Russian government, whether or not the actual details in it are true. But everything comes with a price. As we learned on Tuesday, it may have cost someone’s life.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., released a 312-page transcript of the testimony that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee in August. Fusion GPS is the opposition research firm that funded the Steele dossier. The biggest takeaway that has only created more questions is whether one of Steele’s sources was killed because of the dossier. According to Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, stressed the importance of protecting his sources, saying, “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier, and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work.”
The reason this is relevant is that, if what Levy said was true, Smith could very well have contributed to the death of one of Steele’s sources. Is that really something to be proud of?
In addition to that, questions still remain as to whether information revealed in the Steele dossier was used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
Apart from the fact that publishing an unverified document with incredibly salacious claims about the president of the U.S. is shoddy journalism at the very least, Ben Smith, in his own right, has arguably become a chaos agent.
The more transparency the American public have about their elected leaders and officials, the better off we will all be. Still, Smith is trying to play the role of stirring the pot under the BuzzFeed banner in the name of journalism, when journalists should be reporting on independently-verified facts. All Smith is admitting to is that he’s proud of the damage he caused and dragging the entire journalism profession through the mud.
Siraj Hashmi is a commentary video editor and writer for the Washington Examiner.
