Ross Douthat had an excellent column in the New York Times on Sunday about the state of the Trump-Russia investigation. He homed in on the Steele dossier and its four major claims (or, as he put it, the four “big possibilities” it raised). The first of these “was that Russian intelligence was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the release of stolen emails through WikiLeaks.” Ross adds that this big possibility was “soon well corroborated.”

I want to take issue with both the suggestion that Steele should get any credit for this claim and the implication that the corroboration of it is in any way a corroboration of Steele. On the matter of Russia’s culpability for hacking the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, Steele was just following the crowd. His vaunted Russian sources clearly gave him no foreknowledge about it, notwithstanding that he’d been poking around for Trump–Russia conspiracy evidence for well over a month by July 22, 2016, when publication of the DNC emails began.

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This is worth exploring because it highlights an insidious aspect of the dossier that has gotten too little attention: This opposition-research screed produced by the Clinton campaign did not, through Steele’s purportedly well-placed sources, foretell events. Rather, after events occurred, Steele wove them into the Democrats’ Trump-Russia conspiracy narrative.

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By autumn 2015, the FBI knew that the DNC servers had been hacked and that Russian operatives were surely the culprit. The Times reported as much on December 13, 2016.

It is well known in Western intelligence circles that WikiLeaks is, at least in part, a willing agent of Russian intelligence.

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