Russiagate

The Steele Dossier

Dirty Tricks, Inc.

Perkins Coie Partner Marc Elias' operation

Unlike the Alfa Bank hoax, the Steele Dossier hoax was a scam from the get-go.

The Clinton campaign was being hammered with Hillary's email scandal, and the campaign needed a distraction, so, the campaign hired a bunch of shady operatives to put together a collection of lies and innuendo about Donald Trump and shop it to the FBI and anyone else that would pay a nickle. It was the ultimate political dirty trick, one that was aided and abetted by the media.

Igor Danchenko, the guy who supposedly gathered all the spurious “dirt” in the infamous Steele dossier, really had no sources for his claims -- in some cases, the sources were Clinton associates.

How’s that for a vicious circle? Clinton officials feed their Russian stooge disinformation, it gets laundered through British spy Christopher Steele, and the FBI uses it as the basis for wiretapping the future president and his team.

The Steele Dossier was the jewel in the crown of the Russiagate conspiracy

America media openly speculated on Trump’s imminent arrest for treason, with Twitter aflutter with phrases like tik-tok, walls closing in, and the like. The FBI’s James Comey and CIA’s John Brennan briefed the newly-elected Trump on the dossier simultaneously with the full contents spilling into the media. Talk shifted to impeachment, alongside claims Hillary might still deserve to be president.

We know now the fiction. Steele’s raw information was provided by the Clinton campaign, with his chief source working for the Brookings Institute.

Organizations

Buzzfeed

Released dossier to the public

Fusion GPS

Christopher Steele's employer

Perkins Coie, LLP

Facilitator and bag man -- provided attorney confidentiality and distance to the conspirators

People

Michael Cohen

False allegation that Cohen met with Russians

Igor Danchenko

Russian analyst who was prime contributor to dossier

Charles Dolan

Igor Danchenko source of Steele Dossier material

Marc Elias, Esq

Hired Fusion GPS as sub contractor

John McCain

Relied on the source being a US senator

Bruce Ohr

Hand-carried Trump-Russian collusion disinformation to FBI

Nellie Ohr

Did research for dossier

Glenn Simpson

This hoax was Simpson's pride and joy

Christopher Steele

Dossier author

Activities

The Alfa Bank Hoax

Dossier made reference to Alfa Bank

The Trump Tower Meeting

A fun side trip

Additional Information

The Steele Dossier was written from June to December 2016. It contained allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign. Five years later, it was described as "largely discredited", "deeply flawed", and "largely unverified."

During the summer of 2016, the conspiracy attacked the campaign. After losing, the conspirartors attacked the administration.

ALLEGATION: The Russians had “kompromat” on Trump, including videos of him with prostitutes.

VERDICT: False. Agents and reporters found no evidence. Nothing was ever released. Trump denied it and there was no support for the allegation. In fact, Durham alleges a Democratic operative was the source for Steele, meaning it was rumor-fueled, and likely made up, by people in Clinton’s orbit.

ALLEGATION: Trump will help lift sanctions and boost Russia because he is compromised.

VERDICT: False. Trump increased sanctions as president and, though he wanted to forge a new relationship with Russia, gave Vladimir Putin nothing that he wanted.

ALLEGATION: Trump officials regularly met with Russian officials secretly.

VERDICT: False. The dossier says that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with Russian agents in Prague. That was denied repeatedly by Cohen and others and debunked by the Mueller report. After the election, Russian officials tried to contact Trump and inquire about top aide positions, information they should know about if Trump was really compromised.

Sources of Dossier Information

Now we know why the allegations it contained were so lurid, clumsy and (to anyone with an iota of sense) obviously fake.

Steele’s central charges were based on idle gossip. Not from intel-community insiders with vast source networks, but from a trio of unremarkable hacks with zero insight into covert affairs, whose only real connections were to Clinton World.

These nonentities were: Dem stalwart and PR man Charles Dolan Jr.; Olga Galkina, paid flack of a Russian tech entrepreneur; and the primary "researcher" on the dossier, Igor Danchenko.

Dolan -- the apparent source for, among other fantasies, the tale of Trump cavorting with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel -- was shocked that some of his chatter was published and reported on as fact. "I'm hoping that this is exposed as fake news," he reportedly wrote mere hours after the dossier saw the light of day

Galkina, a school buddy of Danchenko's, came up with the totally bogus storylines about first Carter Page and then Michael Cohen serving as Donald Trump's Kremlin cutouts -- and helped drag her employer, Aleksey Gubarev, into the muck by alleging with no real evidence that he and his company had aided Internet attacks against Hillary Clinton.

Danchenko, now under indictment for lying to the FBI, passed on these "findings" orally to British ex-spy James Bond Christopher Steele (who'd forbidden him to write notes). Steele then ran with it all, as he (or the Fusion GPS sleaze merchants who'd hired him, after Clinton lawyer Marc Elias hired them) claimed it all came from his supposed Russian sources or, alternately, sources close to Trump. (Steele doesn't speak Russian, by the way.)