It Never Had Any Credibility

You just pretended it did, and now you’ve been caught lying.

CNN: ‘The Credibility Of The’ Steele Dossier ‘Has Significantly Diminished.’ Network Now Has ‘Legitimate Questions’ | The Daily Wire

Remember, you used this to try to bring down a Presidency. Now, three years later you think it’s okay to just say “whoops” and move on? This is the reason people were screaming “impeachment” on the day President Trump took office. Do I need to remind you of the Steele Dossier hysteria?

These videos show the hysteria you tried to drum up. And it was all based upon a lie.

Now you have “legitimate questions”.

“[F]ive years later, the credibility of the dossier has significantly diminished,” wrote Marshall Cohen in an article posted on CNN’s website last Thursday.

“Legitimate questions are now being raised about the dossier — how it was used by Democrats as a political weapon against Trump, how it was handled by the FBI and US intelligence agencies, and how it was portrayed in the mainstream media,” belatedly stated the 3,820-word article, titled “The Steele dossier: A reckoning.”

In fact, federal sources shredded the credibility of the dossier years ago. Robert Mueller noted in 2019 that his “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in his December 2019 report that the dossier had “zero” corroboration. We now know that as early as December 2016, before Trump took office, Obama administration Assistant Attorney General Bruce Ohr expressed doubts because the report’s primary subsource, Igor Danchenko, lived in Washington, D.C. Danchencko has since been indicted for lying to federal officials about his sources

#ThisIsCNN

Liberal Media Is Never Wrong, It’s Just ”Fake but Accurate”

We learned that in 2004, with CBS’s fake National Guard story on George W. Bush. It continues today.

Why No Media 'Reckoning' Over Phony Steele Dossier? (dailysignal.com)

Because they can’t admit they were wrong. That would mean that they faked an entire set of stories just to damage a President they didn’t like. Admitting that would destroy what remains of their reputation. Better to just stay silent on the issue, and those that only follow them will never know what happened.

Axios says there’s a “reckoning” in the media over coverage of the Steele dossier after the partisan oppo document’s primary source was charged with lying to the FBI.

“It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” writes Sara Fischer, “and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.”

Tepid is a nice way of putting it.

While The Washington Post “corrected” some of its discredited reporting on the dossier, removing portions of reporting connecting former President Donald Trump to Russia, there has been virtually no other accountability. And, really, it’s become modus operandi for the news organizations to “correct” stories in which the entire premise is false.

Any sort of “reckoning” would mean a retraction, followed by investigative deep dives, not only reporting the problems with the story themselves, but also outing the fraudulent sources who participated in the deception.

If any of that is happening, it’s just so they can figure out how to not get caught next time. They aren’t upset over their stories. They’re upset they got caught fabricating them.

He Repeatedly Told Us He Had Seen Evidence Backing up the Steele Dossier

Which he could not have done, since we now know the dossier to be false.

Morgan Ortagus Grills Schiff Over Steele Dossier: You ‘Spread Disinformation Yourself For Years’ | The Daily Wire

“But you’ve made false, spread disinformation yourself for years by promoting this,” Ortagus said. “I think that’s what Republicans and what people who entrusted you as the Intel Committee chair are so confused about your culpability in all this.”

Schiff refused to accept the premise of Ortagus’ question and claimed that it was “impossible” to “have foreseen in advance that some people were lying to Christopher Steele” about political gossip.

That’s just BS. Schiff didn’t tell us just to believe the dossier. He said he’d seen evidence supporting all of its claims. He told us it was fact. He can’t back down from that and pretend that he was just misled about the dossier. He lied to us. And he used those lies to try to take down an American President. He should be expelled from Congress. At the very least, he should be removed from his position as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Ha! What a Funny Question!

Erik Wemple: Are the sites who reported false information about the Steele dossier going to correct the record? – HotAir

No, of course not. They knew it was false at the time. Truth wasn’t the purpose. Harming Trump was the purpose and it served its purpose admirably.

Erik Wemple has really done an exemplary job of holding onto the receipts for all the media’s sunny claims about the Steele dossier. With the recent indictment of Igor Danchenko, Wemple is once again pointing out that the people who hyped the document don’t seem nearly as eager to correct the record. His article today covers some of the same ground I covered here, such as the fact that one of Steele’s sources turned out to be a Democratic strategist at a PR firm named Charles Dolan Jr. But Wemple also points to another one of Steele’s alleged sources, a man named Sergei Millian.

Danchenko never spoke to Millian. Danchenko apparently fabricated the claims of a phone call. So given that the previous stories and the indictment can’t both be correct, Wemple asks all three outlets that published those previous stories the obvious question: Will the stories be corrected/retracted? None of the sites, not even his own, would answer the question:

The Wall Street Journal on Friday published a story noting that the indictment contradicted the newspaper’s original reporting on Millian. “We will continue to follow the Danchenko case closely and report updates as they develop,” a Journal spokesperson said in a statement. We asked the Journal if it intended to add an editor’s note/correction/retraction to the January 2017 story. A spokesperson declined to elaborate.

Read the whole thing. I can’t do it justice in quoting. The point is that many of the most “explosive” of the Russia stories have now been shown to be unequivocally false. The news organizations must retract these stories, if they have any kind of ethics.

They won’t. But they should.

Durham Investigation Keeps Netting Little Fish, but They’re Getting Bigger

This one has huge implications.

Althouse: "Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was taken into custody as part of the Durham investigation."

Dangchenko was Steele’s source. This taints the entire Steele Dossier and those who funded it.

The NYT reports.

Some claims from the Steele dossier made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in....F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier....

Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

More on this in the days to come. I imagine this arrest has made some people in Washington, D.C. very nervous.

This is still a somewhat little fish. The news of it made The New York Times, but you can be certain they won’t spend much effort on analysis of the broader implications. But it clearly shows that Durham is still working and making real progress.