Given What We Know Now, Some Of The Steele Dossier's Claims Aren't So Crazy

By SAM THIELMAN Published SEPTEMBER 21, 2017 3:25 PM


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Here are some of the dossier’s claims that have solidified, at least in part, in light of what we know now.

The claim: Russian government collected and distributed damaging information about Hillary Clinton

In 2015 Steele began producing the document, which BuzzFeed News published earlier this year, for Republican opposition research firm Fusion GPS at the behest of Republicans worried Trump could win the Republican nomination. In June 2016, Steele wrote about efforts to discredit Clinton that he’d heard about from sources: “A dossier of compromising material on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct.”

So what happened to that dossier, if it exists? We don’t know. But we do know that a Kremlin-connected lawyer brought a folder of printed-out documents to a June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., according to the account of a Russian-American lobbyist who also attended named Rinat Akhmetshin. An email to Trump Jr. from Rob Goldstone, a publicist who arranged the meeting on behalf of a Russian oligarch’s son, promised “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

The material contained in the folder wasn’t transcripts of bugged conversations, according to the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya—she has said the information pertained to records of incriminating donations to Democrats—but it was presented as damaging, regardless. Akhmetshin told the AP he thought Veselnitskaya left with the folder.

The claim: Russia probably distributed stolen DNC, Podesta emails through WikiLeaks

Steele wrote that he’d heard about rising cyberwar activity in Russian intelligence. We never saw scandalous information emerge from wiretaps or bugs, the preferred methods alleged by Steele’s sources, during the 2016 campaign.

But we now know state-sponsored Russian hackers breached Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Campaign and a Clinton campaign staffer’s email accounts, and that emails probably obtained through those breaches were distributed through the DCLeaks website, by Guccifer 2.0 and by WikiLeaks.

Steele blames WikiLeaks for Russian collusion, citing “an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, [who] admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership.” Steele’s source said “the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the Wikileaks platform.” A difference source said “further hacked CLINTON material”, likely campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, “already had been injected by the Kremlin into compliant western media outlets like Wikileaks.”

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