BuzzFeed News’s decision three years ago to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier was not just a major breach of journalistic ethics. It appears it was also one of the most significant, if not the most significant propaganda victories for Moscow.
The dossier, a deeply flawed work of opposition research funded by the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, almost certainly contained a great deal of Kremlin disinformation, according to a report released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Yet it was that same dossier (named for its author, former British spy Christopher Steele) that the FBI relied on to secure authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page. As if it were not already bad enough that a U.S. intelligence agency relied on likely Russian agitprop to spy on a presidential campaign, BuzzFeed News also took the unprecedented step in 2017 of publishing the 35-page Steele dossier in its entirety, dumping directly into the public square what appears to be largely a work of Kremlin fiction. BuzzFeed News's editors even acknowledged at the time that the document's most salacious claims were unverified, yet they published it anyway.
The Senate's bipartisan report this week suggests Moscow may have duped the dossier’s author into obscuring from U.S. investigators Russia’s election-year interference. The report also suggests the possibility that Steele’s role as a so-called corporate intelligence consultant, which included work for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, described by the Senate Intelligence Committee as “a key implementer of Russian influence operations around the globe,” made him particularly susceptible to Kremlin disinformation.
“The Committee found multiple links between Steele and Deripaska, including through two of Deripaska’s lawyers, and indications that Deripaska had early knowledge of Steele’s work,” the Senate report claims. “Steele had worked for Deripaska, likely beginning at least in 2012, and continued to work for him into 2017, providing a potential direct channel for Russian influence on the dossier.”
Just so we are all on the same page: As Steele compiled a dossier supposedly detailing the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Steele himself worked for a known Kremlin flunky and conduit for Russian disinformation. Even more damning than this fact is that the dossier, which dedicates a great deal of space to investigating one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, never once mentions Manafort’s ties to Deripaska. It is probably just a coincidence that the link between Manafort and Deripaska is never mentioned in a dossier that is otherwise heavy on all things Manafort.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report this week stressed that the dossier’s most obscene allegations are likely the work of a shrewd Russian disinformation operation. The investigation also found that the FBI did little to verify the content of Steele’s dossier before using it as justification to spy on the Trump campaign.
“Steele’s reputation as a productive FBI confidential human source,” the Senate report said, “led to the FBI treating the memos as credible before they were corroborated, and FBI’s vetting process for Steele himself was not sufficiently rigorous or thorough.”
Steele, who neither traveled to Russia nor personally interviewed his alleged sources over there, choosing instead to rely on a third-party contractor to do his supposed fact-gathering, said himself that the dossier was never meant for publication.
This is the document that the FBI used to justify spying on the Trump campaign. This is the document that BuzzFeed News saw fit to publish at the outset of the Trump administration, shaping the “public narrative about Trump in the first two years of his presidency,” as Bloomberg Opinion's Eli Lake put it.
If this especially embarrassing episode in U.S. intelligence and media malfeasance is not a major victory for Moscow, nothing is.
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