But above all else, Republicans unanimously condemn the Steele Dossier. They disagree on whether it is acceptable to accept dirt from foreign operatives, but all agree that one way or the other, the Steele Dossier is definitely worse than the Trump Tower meeting, and that while the Trump Tower meeting may have been attempted collision with the Russians, the Steele Dossier was actual collusion.
This is a remarkable conclusion to reach. The position here appears to be that if the Clinton campaign had wanted to investigate whether Donald Trump had suspicious business dealing with Russia, any talking to real live Russians should have been out of the question. How you are supposed to learn about Trump's dealings in Russia while scrupulously avoiding talking to Russians is rather less than clear. At another link I cannot find someone compared this to a candidate suspected of ties to organized crime. The Republican viewpoint, if taken seriously, would say that a political opponent must not hire a retired cop to talk to his tipsters and inside sources, and that to do so is exactly equivalent to accepting help from organized crime directly.
Well, what about the ban on accepting assistance in campaigns from foreigners, Trump supporters ask. If assistance includes opposition research, doesn't the ban apply to allies as well as adversaries? Here I must confess to ignorance. I know that Christopher Steele was not working for the Democratic Party directly. Rather, the Democratic Party hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research and Fusion GPS hired Steele, not telling him who their client was. Whether the Democratic Party was aware who Fusion GPS hired is not clear, though as I understand it, the usual practice is not to ask opposition researchers too many questions where they are getting their information. Is this a sufficient laundering of the information to make it legal? I don't know, but presumably the parties involved knew enough about the letter of the law to stay within it. Is accepting such information as legal so long as it is laundered through an opposition research firm that doesn't reveal its sources and methods hypocritical? Yes, obviously, but them's the breaks.
It also appears that Fusion GPS is considered "reputable" within the sleazy bounds of opposition research, meaning, at a minimum, that they do not resort to Watergate-style illegality such as break-ins or wire tapping. They do milk the rumor mill, a perfectly legitimate beginning for gathering information. What Steele was doing was milking a particular rumor mill -- the Russian rumor mill. This opens him up to two absolutely reasonable forms of criticism. One is that milking the rumor mill is not a reliable source of information, and that all sorts of unverified gossip could have found its way into his report. The other is that the Russians may have figured out what he was up to and seeded the report with deliberate misinformation. This probability seems a lot stronger since the revelation that Steele and Bruce Ohr, his contact in the FBI has been cultivating Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska as an informant. Deripaska is widely believed to be Paul Manafort's handler and assumed to have passed everything he heard up the chain. So there is, indeed, a strong probability that the Steele Dossier was deliberately seeded with false information.
But this does not appear to be what Republicans are alleging. Republicans are alleging, not merely that Steele may have been played for a fool, or that as an seasoned intelligence agent, he may be unable to admit that to himself. What Republicans are alleging appears to be that Steele, the Clinton campaign, the Deep State, and the Russians deliberately worked together to concoct the dossier in order to slander Trump. There is no evidence for this belief whatever.
Furthermore, it makes no sense. Why would the Russians go to such lengths to slander Trump even as they were attempting to rig the election in his favor? The usual answer is so the could then use the information to undermine if in case he won the election.
Why would Steele, hitherto a reliable and reputable source of intelligence, suddenly start fabricating? The usual answer given is out of hostility to Trump. But this is to reverse any common sense line of causation. It assumes that Steele, as a Briton, had such a strong dislike for a US candidate that he would go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate a dossier against him. Surely a more plausible explanation is that Steele, investigating Trump's ties to Russia, came across evidence (real or fabricated) of conspiracy and as a result became strongly hostile to him. Republicans seem to believe that researchers (and FBI agents) should be will-less automatons, unaffected by anything they may discover.
What actually happened was much simpler. The Clinton campaign, and many media outlets received the Steele Dossier. However, what that had was pure rumor. Neither the campaign nor the media, with two notable exceptions,** published the report because there was not enough evidence to support it. The FBI did not reveal that it was investigating Trump because its normal practice is not to reveal counterintelligence investigations lest it jeopardize them. So the public went to the polls believing one candidate was under FBI investigation, and that the investigation had recently been reopened, while unaware that the other was under investigation at all. And ever since then Trump and his supporters have been claiming the Deep State was out to get him because it investigated at all.
I have quoted this article before and I will quote it again:
Trump’s position, and the consensus position of the conservative movement, is that, having become aware of a foreign intelligence service’s successful efforts to infiltrate a major party presidential campaign, the FBI should have done nothing about it, because the campaign in question happened to be a Republican one.
. . . . . . .
Where Trump’s campaign was open for business with high-bidding autocrats, the people who saw what was happening, and understood it was wrong, didn’t think to rush to the Clinton campaign, or leak their intelligence in a manner designed to maximize harm to Trump. As representatives of a rules-based order, they understood that it was a matter for the FBI, which in turn understood that it had to hold its investigation very tightly, in order to protect the innocent and avoid tampering with the election. (This was a norm and a courtesy that the FBI famously did not offer Hillary Clinton.)_______________________________________
*And yes, I know they had legitimate reasons for doing so. The Clinton investigation was of past and well-publicized actions. The Trump investigation was of ongoing and highly secret actions and might have been jeopardized if it had become public. But the result, though perhaps inevitable, was no less real for that.
**One report was a Yahoo News Article by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff dated September 23, 2016. It reported that Carter Page was a businessman with extensive ties to Russia (true) a longstanding Russian apologist (true), and that he had traveled to Moscow in July, 2016 and made a speech at the New Economic School in which he denounces US criticisms of Russia (true). It also reported that he was believed to have discussed lifting sanctions with Igor Sechin, chairman of Rosneft oil company and Russian official Igor Divekin. The source of this report was Michael Steele, although the author appears to have spoken with officials in Congress and implied that those officials were his source. The article did not attract significant attention at the time. The other, better known report David Corn, writing for Mother Jones. reported that an unnamed "former Western intelligence officer" deemed a credible source had found evidence that Trump was directly conspiring with the Russians. The report was extremely vague about details, saying only that “[T]here was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit,” that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance,” that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals,” that Trump had been "compromised" and could be blackmailed. Emphasis was more on the existence of the dossier than its contents. Coming as it did right after Comey's announcement that he had reopened the Clinton investigation, it looked like the flailing of a desperate campaign in trouble. But Corn's source does not appear to have been either the Clinton campaign or the FBI, but Steele.
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