John Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the Russia mess, lost his case in a DC courtroom. Those incriminating words and actions constitute a truly damaging dossier, and it’s not Russian disinformation.That’s the Occam’s Razor conclusion behind court action in Washington last week that added new details to a growing mountain of evidence about the true forces behind the sensational “Russia collusion” allegations that nearly brought down the Trump presidency. He was put in the dock of the House by his own words - and deeds, such as the administration’s stalling of security assistance to Ukraine. Trump, of course, dismissed the scandal that led to his impeachment as a hoax and a continuation of a “witch hunt.” But it was far from that. And it can be argued that Trump did exactly that in 2016 when he said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The difference, of course, is that Trump was president when he pressured Zelensky, which makes his conduct even worse than a presidential candidate inviting a foreign power to involve itself in a U.S. Trump’s infamous July 25, 2019, telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky occurred the day after Mueller testified to Congress about the Russia investigation. There is no doubt that he asked Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential (now almost certain) 2020 opponent. ( debunked that talking point here.)īut for purposes of evaluating Trump as a candidate for reelection, the question of whether his campaign colluded with Russia in 2016 is old news. Moreover, the inspector general made clear that, contrary to what some Trump supporters believed, the Russia investigation didn’t begin with the Steele dossier. That demolished a key pillar of Trump’s “witch hunt” narrative.

(A Los Angeles Times editorial mentioned that possibility in 2017.) In Horowitz’s report, he wrote that the FBI should have done more to examine Steele’s contacts with Russian oligarchs “in order to assess those contacts as potential sources of disinformation that could have influenced Steele’s reporting.” He also found fault with decisions made in the Page surveillance.īut Horowitz also wrote that his investigators “did not find documentary evidence that political bias or improper motivation” influenced decisions to investigate people with connection to the Trump campaign. The idea that the Steele dossier might have contained Russian disinformation isn’t new. Steele’s material was cited by the FBI in application for a court order to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign advisor. The vehicle for that meddling, the editorial suggested, was the so-called Steele dossier, a collection of reports provided to the FBI by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, as part of an investigation funded by Democrats.

“The latest disturbing news is that Russia may have received an assist from no less than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” “Russia interfered in America’s 2016 election, as several government reports have established,” the editorial said. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general.Īccording to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, the new information showed that the FBI was duped by Russian intelligence. The impetus was the release of previously redacted footnotes from last year’s report on the Russia investigation by Michael E. In 2018 President Trump tweeted: “The only ‘Collusion’ is that of the Democrats with Russia and many others.” This week the idea that Trump was the victim, not the beneficiary, of Russian meddling in 2016 was revived.

Russian dossier report