The news media’s Steele dossier scandal is even worse than you thought
By Becket Adams
September 25, 2020 - 5:57 PM
Just when you think you have grasped the enormity of the U.S. news media’s Steele dossier scandal, it gets worse. Much worse.
Finally someone pointing out the news media was in collusion with the coup. This is why the MSM will go bust, and it freaking should
The “primary subsource” for the so-called dossier was suspected once of being a Russian operative and a “threat to national security,” according to newly declassified FBI records.
To put things more clearly: The document the FBI used to secure authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page is based largely on the say-so of an individual the FBI itself once suspected of being a national security risk.
This revelation comes after the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that the Steele dossier, a deeply flawed piece of opposition research funded by the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, likely contains a great deal of Kremlin disinformation.
This is why you never, ever go to press with uncorroborated, unverified allegations of grave and obscene behavior about public (or even private) figures. You never know whose dirty work you may unwittingly be doing. It should not be this easy to play the sap to Moscow, but it seems clear by now that the media in the United States have been blinded by partisan rage.
The Steele dossier’s “primary Sub-Source was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011 that assessed his/her documented contacts with suspected Russian intelligence officers,” according to a newly declassified footnote from the Justice Department inspector general's report on suspected FISA abuse by the FBI. The report focuses specifically on whether the FBI acted improperly when it obtained authorization to spy on the Trump campaign.
Attorney General William Barr this week made a declassified summary of the aforementioned FBI counterintelligence investigation available. Like the declassified Justice Department footnote, the summary of the FBI counterintelligence investigation, which was closed in 2011, does not mention what the bureau ultimately concluded about the “primary subsource.”
“The FBI commenced this investigation based on information by the FBI indicating that the Primary Sub-Source may be a threat to national security,” reads the abbreviated FBI summary. It adds that the subsource was an employee at a “prominent U.S. think tank” and that “in December 2016, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation identified the employee as Christopher Steele’s Primary Sub-Source.”
It would have been nice to know these things before corporate media pushed the dossier and its most salacious claims on the public, casting an immediate shadow over the Trump administration in its infancy.
We were led to believe the Steele dossier, named for British so-called spy Steele, was the product of a genuine intelligence operation. But it is almost certainly a work of fiction. It is almost certainly the product of a sophisticated, targeted disinformation campaign by Moscow.
When it comes to news media legitimizing the document, BuzzFeed News is guiltiest. It took the unprecedented step in 2017 of publishing the 35-page report in its entirety, dumping directly into the public square a product the chief subsource of which was suspected once of being a Russian operative. BuzzFeed News's editors even acknowledged at the time that the document's most salacious claims were unverified, yet they published it anyway.
But it was not just BuzzFeed News that treated the Steele dossier as authentic. CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, you name it The media could not get enough of Steele's supposed spy work.
But we know now that the thoroughly discredited dossier’s primary subsource was at one time suspected of being in league with Russian spies. We know now that the FBI at one point even suspected this person of being a “threat to national security.” We also know the dossier likely contains direct Kremlin disinformation.
Yet this stupid document was treated initially as genuine by our very serious news media. The Russians are probably laughing so hard that they’re choking on their borscht.
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