From Esquire

Monday brought the news that President Trump's State Department has been granted $120 million to fight Russian election meddling - which intelligence officials are supremely confident will continue during the 2018 midterms - and the agency has used exactly none of it. With last week's revelation that Trump has not given NSA Director Mike Rogers "day-to-day" authorization to fight Russian cyber attacks, it's further evidence the Trump administration is reluctant to counter Russia. Viewed in the light that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to benefit Trump, and that members of Trump's campaign are under investigation for possibly colluding in that effort, the number of coincidences really start to pile up.

Which takes us back to the now-infamous Dossier, a collection of memos written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele detailing Trumpworld's ties to Kremlin-connected figures. Monday also brought an exhaustive report from Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, examining Steele, his Dossier, and how its findings have been borne out in the subsequent Russia investigations from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Here are some of the report's most telling details.

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Steele was long concerned with Russian interference in Western elections before he got involved in Trump and 2016.

In April of 2016, not long before he took on the Fusion assignment, he finished a secret investigation, which he called Project Charlemagne, for a private client. It involved a survey of Russian interference in the politics of four members of the European Union - France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany - along with Turkey, a candidate for membership. The report chronicles persistent, aggressive political interference by the Kremlin: social-media warfare aimed at inflaming fear and prejudice, and “opaque financial support” given to favored politicians in the form of bank loans, gifts, and other kinds of support. ...The Kremlin’s long-term aim, the report concludes, was to boost extremist groups and politicians at the expense of Europe’s liberal democracies.

We know more about the sourcing of the so-called "Pee Tape."

The allegation was attributed to four sources, but their reports were secondhand - nobody had witnessed the event or tracked down a prostitute, and one spoke generally about “embarrassing material.” Two sources were unconnected to the others, but the remaining two could have spoken to each other. In the reports Steele had collected, the names of the sources were omitted, but they were described as “a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,” a “member of the staff at the hotel,” a “female staffer at the hotel when trumphad stayed there,” and “a close associate of trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow.”





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