Disputed Dossier

Baby Donald and the Disputed Dossier

Sorry, Mr. President: The Russia scandal is not over.

By JACK SHAFER

On Tuesday, the Washington Post solved the mystery of who funded the controversial Steele Dossier, thus guaranteeing that a year from now we will be still be reading and talking about its provenance and its accuracy.

The funding of the dossier was only half a mystery, but that second part is still big news. After BuzzFeed published the dossier on Jan. 11, 2017, CNN reported that Republicans and Democrats had funded the dossier. And two months before that, Mother Jones’ David Corn wrote the same thing. What we didn’t know was that Democratic attorney Marc E. Elias—who previously denied a connection to the dossier to journalist Ken Vogel—had assigned the dossier to the oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS in April 2016 at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Building on previous oppo conducted for a Republican client, whose identity remains unknown, Fusion’s dossier project continued until the end of October 2016. Former British spy Christopher Steele researched and wrote the 17 reports that make up the dossier, which teemed beyond the overflow mark with kinky sex and allegations that the Russians had compiled scathing kompromat on Donald Trump.

The Post also reports that the FBI agreed after the election to pay Steele to continue gathering Trump-Kremlin material for the counterintelligence probe the agency started in summer 2016, but that the deal was never consummated.

President Trump immediately seized on the Post story to portray the dossier as fake, and to allege that the Real Scandal is the Obama administration’s approval of a Russian firm’s purchase of U.S. uranium supplies. Speaking outside the White House on Wednesday, he said that the Democrats “made up the whole Russia hoax. Now it’s turning out that the hoax has turned around and you look at what’s happened with Russia and you look at the uranium deal and you look at the fake dossier.”

It was a valiant stab at magical thinking by Baby Donald, but the dossier is only a slice of the evidentiary pie being thrown at him. As the anti-Trump Republican operative Rick Wilson tweeted, even if the dossier was “a farrago of utter fantasy,” other U.S. government and foreign intelligence findings point to Trump’s Kremlin entanglements. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has the makings of an obstruction of justice claim against Trump, wrote former U.S. Attorney Renato Mariotti last month. It’s also likely that Mueller has Trump’s tax returns, with which he could prosecute possible money laundering and tax fraud charges. A recent Brookings Institution study made the argument that the obstruction case is strong.

But back to the dossier. The fact that the Clinton campaign and the DNC financed it does not make it fake or a hoax because Trump said so. As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee told Reuters earlier this month, none of the dossier “has been disproven, and considerable amounts of it have been proven.” And former CIA officer John Sipher wrote last month that many of his former agency colleagues take the dossier’s raw reporting seriously. (For a different perspective, see this Phil Bump analysis.)

That Elias lied or equivocated or misled about his connection—and Clinton and the DNC’s connections—to the dossier absolutely undermines his credibility. Likewise, what Hillary Clinton knew about the dossier and when she knew it would speak to her credibility. The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers writes today that Clinton complained in her recent campaign memoir about the press corps’ reluctance to report on the dossier during the campaign. Borchers diagnoses hypocrisy on her part: “She hoped the media, before Election Day, would publish claims about Trump to which she was unwilling to attach her own name.”

The identities of oppo-research funders matter. As my colleague Josh Dawsey tweeted, “Ok, people saying DNC/dossier news isn’t a big deal: Why did Clinton lawyer Marc Elias and others deny it for months?” The media’s general willingness to allow the oppo-gang to do their business in secret is a bilious—although common—practice and worthy of a column-length discussion itself. But until we uncover evidence that Steele loaded the deck, don’t toss the dossier out with the bathwater.