I’m Tired of the Republican Mantra that “Russian Lies” Were the Basis of the Steele Dossier

Originally published Apr 2 2019

When partisan hacks like Sean Hannity claim that “Russians” were the source of the malicious, egregious lies and fantasies of the Steele dossier, it is evidently his intent to imply that it was the Clinton campaign that was in “collusion” with the vile Russian menace to sway the 2016 election. In other words, underlying both the Democrat and Republican narratives is the tacit assumption that “Russia” interfered in our election. Both sides are eager to stoke and exploit the mindless Russophobia that our Deep State is at such pains to foster.

In fact, we have little knowledge of the sources on whom Steele drew when producing his fantasy document, as the matter has so far received little formal investigation. But any notion that sources inside the Kremlin were involved seems fantastical on its face. While we don’t have any credible evidence that Putin’s government had a formal plan to intervene in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf — regardless of what Mueller’s report may claim or imply — it is hard to imagine that the Russian government would have attempted to abet the election of practiced war criminal and neocon fellow traveler Hillary Clinton. In fact, Putin has acknowledged that he had hoped for a Trump victory.

According to David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Steele has confided to Glenn Simpson that Belarusian-American businessman Sergei Millian was one of Steele’s sources. There is no reason to believe that he had received his marching orders from Putin. Additionally, Lee Stranahan has marshalled evidence that Steele and Orbis solicited Ukrainian sources for dirt on Trump.

Ukrainian Consultant Reveals Steele Sought Bogus Stories for Trump Dossier
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201808281067517362-Steele-Sought-Bogus-...

What is particularly notable about this story is that when the designated Ukrainian source protested that he didn’t have credible, confirmable info to tarnish Trump, he in effect was told to just make stuff up. In other words, those assembling the dossier didn’t have any intention of producing a confirmable intelligence product — the charade that Fusion GPS intended to pull off by positioning former MI6 agent Christopher Steele as the dossier’s “author”; they just wanted a mélange of defamatory fantasies targeting Trump. And you can bet that Fusion GPS, Steele, Orbis, and Clinton’s acolytes don’t want this to become common knowledge.

Which may cast an interesting light on the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. As a close associate of Steele’s business partner Pablo Miller, with knowledge about the inner workings of the Russian state, Skripal would have been an obvious source for Steele to draw on if he wanted reasonably credible dirt on Trump’s involvement with Russians. And some analysts have noted that the stilted language of much of the dossier sounds as if it were crafted by a Russian intelligence agent.

I have seen no concrete evidence that Skripal played a role in creation of the dossier. But on the not unreasonable presumption that he did, it’s also reasonable to imagine that Skripal might have gotten greedy and demanded further payment to keep quiet about his role in the dossier’s sleezy origins — in particular, to keep quiet about the fact that no effort at all was made to produce a credible analysis. The British Deep State could then have achieved a two-fer by poisoning Steele — either killing him outright or encouraging him to keep his mouth shut, while also blaming Russia for the incident.

This is nothing but quasi-informed speculation. But it underlines the desirability of getting to the bottom of the origins of the Steele dossier. Is it too much to ask that US government investigators put at least a fraction of the resources into this effort that were expended on the “Trump colluded with Russia” fantasy?

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