Rightwing propaganda about THAT dossier: Twelve counterarguments

The Republicans are pretending that the entire "Russiagate" scandal derives from the Steele dossier. They also pretend that the dossier has been discredited due to the "revelation" that Clinton's lawyer paid Fusion GPS. These pretenses have given rise to a massive propaganda campaign.

Here are twelve counterarguments:

1. This "revelation" is nothing of the kind. To the best of my knowledge, the first public reference  -- and the only pre-election reference -- to the dossier came from David Corn. Of the funding, Corn said:

This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project’s financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.)

Since there was only one Democratic candidate after Sanders dropped out, Corn as much as admitted that the client was part of Camp Clinton. In other words, we've been told nothing new.

2. The pretense that the scandal traces back to that dossier is ridiculous. Most of what we've learned -- including the Trump Tower meeting, the dirt which deep-sixed Michael Flynn, the secret confabs which led to Sessions' recusal, the alliances between Trump and various oligarchs like Felix Sater, and on and on and on -- has nothing to do with the dossier. The FBI was looking at Manafort and Carter Page well before the election, and well before they were given the dossier.

The dossier was not released until after the election, yet the intelligence community released its findings about Russia's efforts before the election. Paul Ryan joked about the Trump/Russia connection in June. There were many, many stories -- and jokes -- about Putin/Trump collusion before the election. (For what it's worth: On June 16, this humble blog became the first blog to claim that Putin was trying to put Trump in office; that post name-checked both Manafort and Carter Page.)

In short and in sum: If the dossier had never existed, we'd still have quite a scandal on our hands.

3. The Clinton oppo file on Trump was released during the campaign after Russian hackers obtained it; that file contains no reference to anything in the dossier. It is thus fair to presume that most people in Camp Clinton had not idea of the dossier's existence.

(How did Corn get hold of the thing? I don't know, but his Spookworld contacts have always been impressive.)

4. The Trumpers are arguing that it was acceptable for DJT Jr. to seek oppo research from a Putin-linked Russian lawyer but that it is UNacceptable for Clinton's lawyer to pay a British spy who claims to have uncovered startling information about Trump.

Come off it. Even in this corrupt age, there are limits to hypocrisy.

5. Despite what the conservative propagandists are now saying, Steele's work was originally funded by a Republican, almost certainly Jeb Bush.

6. There's a difference between research and a smear. Opposition research has value only if it reflects reality. The dossier's claims are not affected by the identity of the funders any more than the potency of tequila has anything to do with the store from which it was purchased.

Steele certainly seems to think that he was onto something. Here's what he told Corn:

“It started off as a fairly general inquiry,” says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, “there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit.”

This was, the former spy remarks, “an extraordinary situation.” He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative—without the permission of the US company that hired him—he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was “sufficiently serious” to share with the FBI.

If the dossier were a baseless smear, Steele would never have sent it to America's foremost law-enforcement agency. If Steele were in the smear business (as opposed to the spy business), it would have made more sense for Steele to put his work up on the internet before the election, much as the GOP placed Clinton Cash all over the internet.

7. It's impossible to claim that the FBI is party to a smear. Comey did not release any hint of this information before the campaign. To the contrary: Comey deep-sixed Clinton's chances when he issued that public statement about the Weiner laptop.

I know that Breitbart-addled conspiratards love to pretend that Comey (a Republican) was always a secret member of Team Clinton, but that accusation is utterly insane.

8. If the dossier were nothing but a smear, then why has so much of it checked out?

Some of his material now tracks with what’s become publicly known. Steele’s first memo, written in June 2016, reported there had been secret exchanges of information between the Russian government and Trump and his team. This past July it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort met with a Russian emissary in June 2016 in an effort to obtain dirt on Clinton as part of a secret Russian government scheme to help Trump. That initial Steele memo also reported that the Kremlin had for years been trying to cultivate Trump by offering him lucrative real estate deals in Russia. Though Trump’s efforts to score a big project in Russia has long been known, only recently was it disclosed that during the 2016 campaign, Trump—while he was making positive remarks about Putin—was secretly trying to land a deal to build a Trump tower in Moscow. Was that part of a Russian attempt to woo the developer-turned-candidate?

9. If the dossier were fake, why does Trump act so damned guilty? Trump refuses to enforce congressionally-mandated sanctions against Russia -- a refusal which, in and of itself, is grounds for impeachment. (Sanctions are the law. Presidents swear to execute the law.) Trump hired Steve Bannon, whose Russian links are well-known (for example, he hired a Sputnik writer). Trump hired others with secret Russian links. Trump refuses to investigate Russian tampering with the election. Trump refuses to do anything to safeguard the voting machines. Trump fired James Comey, and tried to lie about why he did so. Tried put out a false cover story about his son's meeting in Trump Tower.

As Josh Marshall says:

He is charged by his oath with preserving the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. He pledged to defend against all attacks but he’s actively assisting one. That is just as much the case as it would be if he repeatedly denied an adversary power were moving conventional arms into positions which threatened the United States.

He is actively and directly assisting the attack and the attack is on-going. Why he’s doing that is not really relevant. He’s doing it.

10. There is no evidence that Hillary Clinton herself knew anything about the dossier. I would not be surprised to learn that she did, but right now, we do not know. If she was aware of its existence, she obviously did not consider it of political value -- otherwise, she would have made use of the thing.

As the WP notes:

It’s also unclear how much the Clinton campaign itself knew about the work, since Steele was a subcontractor to a subcontractor to a law firm representing the campaign, and the dossier itself read like an early draft, not remotely like a finished product that would be presented to the campaign.

To repeat: Nobody used the dossier during the election. Quoting again from the WP:

Is the scandal that there were some wild charges in the Steele dossier? So what? The Clinton campaign didn’t leak them to the press, use them in ads, or make any other use of them. The document came out after Trump was already elected, when Buzzfeed published it on January 10.

But none of that matters to Republicans, who are now trying to argue that this story proves that there’s nothing to the Russia scandal and the whole thing is Hillary Clinton’s fault anyway. “DOSSIER DECEIT” screams the headline on the story at the top of FoxNews.com. There are three separate articles about it dominating the front page of Breitbart. “CLINTON, DNC PAID FOR DIRT; RUSSIAN DOSSIER” says the huge headline on the Drudge Report, illustrated with a photo of Vladimir Putin whispering into Hillary Clinton’s ear.

That photo may tell us something important about what the GOP/conservative media strategy is now. You might watch for Republicans to start referring to it as the “Russian dossier,” as though it were not a dossier about Trump’s connections to Russia but something that Clinton cooked up with Putin.

Everything is topsy turvy! There is no evidence that Putin had anything to do with that dossier. Nothing in that dossier benefits Putin in any way -- quite the opposite, in fact. Putin hates Hillary Clinton.

The right is engaging in baseless smears.

If you try hard to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have something resembling a coherent argument here, it seems to be that since the Clinton campaign was indirectly paying Steele, and since in his attempt to determine the extent of Trump’s dealings in Russia, Steele spoke to Russian sources, then that means Hillary Clinton “colluded with Russia.” That is positively insane.

Of course Steele had to talk to Russians in his inquiry, just as detectives are going to have to talk to criminals when they’re investigating a criminal enterprise. Those are the people who might have information.

Let me get this straight: A British spy, using God-knows-what kind of tradecraft and subterfuge, gets raw information from a variety of Russian sources. To the Breitbarters, this translates to "Hillary works for Putin!" By the same logic, we could claim that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher -- along with every president from Truman to Bush I -- worked for the USSR, because they all relied on information from various spies who had developed contacts in the old Soviet Union.

Is it possible that this absurd argument actually makes sense to anyone, even to the rubes who voted for Trump? And yet this sub-Alex Jonesian exercise in inchoate paranoia is now being sprayed all over the Federalist, which ridiculously insinuates that Comey was working for the dreaded Putin/Hillary conspiracy.

11. The dossier also contains harsh words about Hillary Clinton herself. Nothing involving stained bedsheets, true. But the dossier's repeated accusation that she is Janus-faced could hardly have been something she wanted publicized.

12. The FBI used the dossier as a partial basis for wiretaps. Would they have done so if they considered the British spy unreliable or a pro-Democratic hack? Since when are MI6 agents considered friendly to American liberal politicians? MI6 tends to attract Tories.