Moon of Alabama

The Steele dossier about Trump and Russia has now been fully debunked as a collection of made up stories that it had obviously always been. That it took nearly five years to be officially acknowledged as such points to undue power of media who had pushed it.

Today I went down into the Moon of Alabama archive to look up when and what I had first written about it. I am quite happy to have found that I had been on top of the issue.

But first a recap from Thursday’s story to bring everyone up to speed:

The 2016 Clinton campaign paid the legal firm Perkins Coie to produce dirt about Donald Trump. A Perkins Coie lawyer hired Fusion GPS, a shady ‘research’ firm run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter. Fusion GPS hired the British private spy company Orbis to find (or makeup) the Trump dirt it needed. The ‘former’ British MI6 spy Christopher Steele of Orbis was tasked with developing a dossier about Trump. Steele hired Igor Danchenko, a Russian living in the United States, to come up with Trump-Russiagate stories. Danchenko’s problem was that he had no sources. But he also worked for Chuck Dolan, a Clinton operative who was also working to hold a business conference in Moscow and knew some Kremlin related people.
…
Clinton operative Dolan fed Danchenko several stories which Danchenko then dramatized and sent to Steele. Steele revised those stories and put them into his ‘dossier’. This was then peddled by Fusion GPS and Steele to the media and the FBI. Some of the tales Dolan fed to Danchenko were simply taken from media reports.In October 2016 The FBI used the Steele dossier to get a wiretap application to snoop on the Trump campaign. It continued to use the Steele dossier to renew its snooping application even when it already knew that the dossier was nothing but nonsense.

The media had loved the dossier and used it as a weapon against Trump. See Aaron Maté writeup for the details on that.

Russiagate has no rock bottom
The indictment of the Steele dossier’s key source newly humiliates the Clinton campaign, FBI, and US media.

The dossier was first published by Buzzfeed on January 10 2017, ten days before Trump’s inauguration. It was not a single sensation but part of a much larger campaign.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/11/a-look-back-at-russiagate.html#more