They Need to Retract the Entire Series

WaPo Issues Major Corrections To Reports On Steele Dossier | The Daily Wire

The Post rewrote parts of stories published in March 2017 and February 2019, removing claims in the stories that the Steele dossier’s “Source D,” who is responsible for some of the most salacious and outrageous claims in the document, is Belarusian American businessman Sergei Millian.

“The newspaper’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said The Post could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story,” the Washington Post reported, in a separate story on the changes it made. “The story’s headline was amended, sections identifying Millian as the source were removed, and an accompanying video summarizing the article was eliminated. An editor’s note explaining the changes was added. Other stories that made the same assertion were corrected as well.”

“The Post’s decision to edit and repost the Millian stories is highly unusual in the news industry,” the Post added.

Durham’s indictments have made these stories unsupportable. But don’t worry. They’ll stick with them as long as they can. And it doesn’t matter now, anyway. The stories accomplished their purpose, which was to hinder and weaken President Donald Trump (R-USA). And the corrections won’t get much publicity. People will continue to think that Trump colluded with the Russians.

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.