The Trump’s Dossier Explained

The Dossier Explained ~~~Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) made the first criminal referral from congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election on Friday in a surprising way.

They requested charges not against anyone involved in the underlying crimes committed, but against Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who worked during the 2016 campaign cycle on compiling a dossier alleging the existence of a conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russian government. That brings the Steele dossier — yes, this is the document alleging the existence of a “pee tape” that the Russians may have used to blackmail Trump — to a strange point. Its origins of liberal hopes of exposing a massive conspiracy that would bring Trump down have led to its current status as the center of a conservative conspiracy theory that’s supposed to bring Robert Mueller down.

The allegations in the dossier played essentially no role in either the GOP primary or the general election, and, contrary to the dueling myths of left- and right-wing conspiracy theorists, it is not the case that subsequent investigation has vindicated the dossier’s claims or that the Trump investigation is primarily based on those claims. It’s a piece of ephemera whose waxing and waning reputation and varied political valence says more about the shifting politics of Trump and Russia than anything else.

Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele to investigate Trump. Fusion GPS, the company that created the dossier, was co-founded in 2011 by Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, and Thomas Catan — three former Wall Street Journal journalists who were part of a larger 21st-century trend of experienced reporters adapting to the changing economic climate by leaving the field in favor of various forms of “strategic intelligence” or research for hire. The company’s extremely terse website describes it as simply providing “premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence services to corporations, law firms, and investors worldwide.” As a DC-based firm, some of their work has been political. A 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed revealed that Fusion GPS worked for Democrats doing opposition research on Mitt Romney. According to Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti and chair Michael Goldfarb, the firm was were engaged early in the 2016 cycle “to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary.” Later, in April 2016, Marc Elias — a top Democratic campaign lawyer — retained Fusion GPS through his firm of Perkins Coie on behalf of both Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Perkins Coie, at Elias’s behest and with the bills ultimately paid by Clinton and the DNC, continued to fund Fusion’s work through the end of October 2016, though the people involved say that neither the campaign nor the DNC was aware of the details of Fusion’s work.

Fusion, in turn, subcontracted with Christopher Steele, a retired MI-6 officer with considerable expertise on Russian matters, to use his contacts in Moscow to find what he could about Trump’s connections to the Russian government. That work led to the compilation of Steele’s dossier, written up in the style of an intelligence report and based on unnamed sources, that contained a variety of serious charges against Trump.

Steele’s dossier circulated in the media during the fall of 2016, but news organizations largely failed to verify any of its key claims. Steele also shared the document with the FBI, where it was apparently taken at least somewhat seriously in light of Steele’s record as an intelligence professional, and the existence of the dossier was subsequently revealed by David Corn of Mother Jones on October 31.