"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated: not the salacious allegations of events at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, not the allegation of there being a 'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' between Trump and the Russians, not the allegations of a secret meeting involving Page and certain sanctioned Russians (namely, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin), and not the allegation of Page serving as Manafort's conduit for information between the Russians and the Trump campaign. This is true even after the FBI offered Steele $1 million or more for such corroboration and after Danchenko was signed up as an FBI CHS [Confidential Human Source] and paid more than $220,000 for information on other matters."
"When [the FBI] checked with another U.S. intelligence agency on matters relating to the Steele reporting, they received no corroborating information back. As one long-time counterintelligence expert at that agency told [the Durham investigation], the Dossier contained unverified allegations from sub-sources who allegedly provided the information, information that the government could not obtain despite its vast intelligence resources and paying millions of dollars for intelligence. Indeed, after the Steele Dossier was leaked and became public, that expert's reaction was to ask the FBI, 'You didn't use that, right?'".
From Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaign (the Durham Report), submitted to Merrick B Garland on May 12, 2023 (pages 236-37)
It was all a fantasy, a cleverly designed fantasy, paid for and promoted by the Clinton campaign, masterminded by Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, seized upon by the Intelligence Community, media, and others and converted over time for different uses by Donald Trump's opponents. In an astonishing twist, it turns out that the narrative of Trump connections with the Kremlin was created by those who themselves had multiple connections with Russian intelligence services and oligarchs!
FusionGPS, retained by the Clinton campaign to investigate Trump and Russia was, at the same time, working for a Russian oligarch on repealing Congressionally imposed sanctions. Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative, hired by Fusion to compile the dossier was, at the same time, working for yet another Kremlin connected oligarch (currently under U.S. indictment). Steele's main sub-source for the dossier was a Russian national, Igor Danchenko, of whom the FBI had earlier conducted a counterintelligence investigation because of his connections with Russian intelligence (only to incompetently lose track of him), allegations of which he was never cleared. The source for the notorious alleged incident when, in 2014, Trump supposedly demanded President Obama's suite at the Moscow Ritz Carlton and had a group of prostitutes come to the room and urinate on the bed, was a DC lobbyist doing PR for the Kremlin, meeting regularly with Putin's spokesperson, who was also a long-time Clinton associate; a senior advisor to Hillary in 2008 and Virginia Chairman of the Clinton-Gore Campaigns in 1992 and 1996, along with being former Executive Director of the Democratic Governors Association! Raising the question, who was playing whom in 2016?
It helped that they were dealing with a gullible and conspiratorial minded Donald Trump, around whom they created an actual conspiracy, and aided by candidate and President Trump's reckless rhetoric which played right into that narrative.
There has not been, and now appears there never will be, any personal or
institutional accountability for the combination of deliberate and
negligent actions taken to undermine the campaign of a Presidential
candidate and then to obstruct and impede the normal proceedings of the
Executive Branch after January 20, 2017, using a continued series of
false claims in a conspiracy designed to defraud the American people and manipulate our
election processes. Hey, maybe someone could file some indictments
based on that theory! (1)
I've written a lot about the Russian collusion story and my initial take that there might be something to it based on Trump's own statements and demonstrable ignorance of history and the basics of foreign policy. By the fall of 2017, and with the revelation that the Clinton campaign was behind the Steele Dossier, I decided to spend more time examining the evidence and reading source documents, including the Intelligence Community Assessment, court filings and rulings, the Page-Strzok texts, the Mueller report, the DOJ Inspector General reports, the more than 5,000 pages of House Intelligence Committee witness transcripts suppressed by Adam Schiff for almost a year and a half, and finally the Durham Report.
The Russia Collusion Hoax is the greatest political scandal of my lifetime; a scandal much worse than Watergate with the added bonus that it was as if Watergate happened but the New York Times and Washington Post were taking the side of the Nixon Administration.
In a subsequent post I'll plunge into the details of the Durham Report and the story behind the conspiracy.
Since 2016 there has been a deliberate attempt to confuse two questions. Did the Russians attempt to influence the 2016 elections? Did the Trump campaign collude with the Kremlin on a plan to win the election? As to the former, I have no doubt. It's what they did as the Soviet Union and now do as Russia. As to the latter, it's a definite no. I'm addressing the latter. My take on the former can be found in What Was Putin Up To In 2016? The bottom line is that Putin was about sowing the maximum discord within America and weakening its institutions. With the revelations since 2017 we now know that Clinton, Schiff, the Intelligence Community, the Democrats, the New York Times and Washington Post, were Putin's collaborators in sowing that discord, acting effectively as agents of the Kremlin.
One further point before plunging into the details. Those who still believe in the Russia Collusion fantasy like to say that there was more to it than the Steele Dossier. Actually, with only one exception that's not true. The Dossier covers all the "greatest hits" - Moscow Ritz Carlton, Trump Tower Moscow, Deutsche Bank, Alfa Bank, the Republican Platform on Ukraine, meetings of Trump campaign officials with Russians and more. The only significant event not in the dossier is the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, about which I wrote here. That fiasco was due to the stupidity of Fredo Trump Jr, who lacks the feral instincts and weird charisma of his father. The Clinton Campaign knew how to do it right - when you deal with the Russians you do it through cut-outs.
. . . more to come
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(1) This is a reference to Robert Mueller's disastrous failed prosecution of Russian entities, and Special Counsel ongoing criminal case against Donald Trump, both of which use this theory, a theory that could have been applied to the principals in the Clinton Campaign as well as against the 51 former Intelligence Community officials who signed the letter, coordinated by the Biden Campaign, stating the Hunter Biden laptop incident had "all the hallmarks" of a Russian disinformation operation.
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