Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth.
With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history.
The media have a problem, then, given that they repeatedly led viewers and readers to believe Steele was a master spy. They can almost get away with ignoring the recent news that once again shows their previous reporting was catastrophically wrong. In fact, some media outlets did just that.
But after breathlessly reporting — day in and day out for years — what they claimed were important updates buttressing Steele’s collusion narrative, they can’t completely hide the on-the-record revelations showing how the collusion narrative was invented and used to undermine the Trump campaign and administration.
The New York Times’ Adam Goldman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role in pushing the Russia collusion narrative, and his colleague Charlie Savage came up with an inventive framing for how to downplay the latest declassified document revealing in detail that the FBI knew by January 2017 that the dossier was bunk. Perhaps because The New York Times played such a pivotal role in advancing the Russia collusion narrative, they buried the explosive news deep in the second half of the lengthy story and instead went with “The F.B.I. Pledged to Keep a Source Anonymous. Trump Allies Aided His Unmasking.”
It is a common trope for media who pushed the collusion hoax to fret that transparency about the Russia collusion hoax will harm the republic. Here are a few other times they did that.
The reporters provided no evidence for their main claim that the FBI pledged to keep Danchenko’s identity a secret, although they do report he was given immunity for speaking with the FBI about his conversations with friends that ended up in the dossier. They do not explain why such immunity was requested or granted.
In his December 2019 report, Michael Horowitz repeatedly wrote that the FBI’s interviews of Steele and the person now identified as Danchenko should have made the agency realize that their Russia investigation had massive problems. Horowitz strongly criticized the Russia collusion investigators for falsely portraying the dossier and the results of the interview to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to be able to continue spying on Trump associate Carter Page.
The Times begrudgingly admits late in the story that “[t]he Steele dossier was deeply flawed,” and that “Danchenko’s statements to the F.B.I. contradicted parts of the dossier, suggesting that Mr. Steele may have exaggerated the soundness of other allegations, making what Mr. Danchenko portrayed as rumor and speculation sound more solid.”
It’s a remarkably dry way to describe the seriousness of the wrongdoing.
All four of the applications to spy on Page relied on a particular part of the dossier to support probable cause. Steele told the FBI the information came from a sub-source “close” to Trump, and that this person was the original provider of the pee-tape information. It strongly appears this source is supposed to be Sergei Millian, a Russian-American businessman. Steele also said Danchenko met with this individual two or three times. But Danchenko said he never met this individual and that the pee-tape story came from someone else. Millian says he got two emails from Danchenko, but never acted on them.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/03/media-silent-as-christopher-steele-hero-spymaster-narrative-crumbles/
end part 1