This post wrongly called out MarilynW. I'm not taking it down because at this point the harm has been done. However, I refer you to this post, in which I apologize to Marilyn. There I explain exactly why my apology is necessary. I also specifically explain in detail what I did wrong and why it was wrong. In the future, I promise I will will not call out any member of this site on the front page.

Steve

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This is a response to a number of comments by MarylinW a/k/a Agathena at TOP) in La Feminista's essay, "Why is the inauguration still going ahead?" MarylinW/Agathena is of the opinion that we, as a community, are not taking the allegations in the recently published "Trump dossier" seriously enough.



Dear Agathena:

Your concern about our collective naivete at c99 is duly noted. Clearly, we have been lax in our analysis of these reports and dossiers and whatever else has been going on in Trumplandia.

You question our dismissal of the dossier's allegations and then go on to make this further claim:

Perhaps you are right, but, if I may ask a question, what is bothersome about President-elect Trump's adviser, Michael Flynn, Trump's named selection to be his national security adviser, and Obama's former head of the DNI, contacting or being contacted by the Russian ambassador (not Putin) on a day when Obama was taking aggressive and, to my mind, excessive action to ramp up conflict between Russia and the United States?

The three sources stressed to Reuters that they did not know who initiated the five calls between Flynn, a former three-star Army general who headed the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama, and Kislyak. Nor did they know the contents of the conversations, and declined to say how they learned of them. One source said there was nothing intrinsically odd or wrong about a Russian diplomat speaking to a member of Trump's team following the U.S. announcement. Moscow, the source added, probably would want to have some sense of what Trump's team thought about the measures.

Contacts, btw, that were revealed to the media by anonymous sources whose revelations clearly show this information about General Flynn's contacts with the Russian ambassador were obtained by the use of "sources and methods" of intelligence gathering - likely NSA taps or "hacks" of the Russian embassy, but perhaps intel from human spies placed there as well. The potential disclosure of such "sources and methods" has been used, paradoxically, by the US intelligence services to justify not releasing any substantial proof of the allegations that Russia "hacked" the email accounts of the DNC and John Podesta and gave them to its "co-conspirator/agent" Julian Assange and his organization, Wikileaks, in order to influence the election.

What makes this fight so tricky is that the CIA’s best evidence really might be information that it can’t release publicly without compromising valuable sources of future intelligence.

Trump made no secret that he wanted better relations with Russia during the election campaign. Obama, after using the "Red Phone" connection to the Kremlin, a communication that threatened Putin with "armed conflict" over possible cyber attacks by Russia, merely because Wikileaks continued to release documents from 2015 and early 2016, (a story leaked to NBC by an senior administration official). Obama then followed that threat up post-election (despite admitting that Russia did not "hack" or harm the integrity of the voting process on election day) with these high level diplomatic sanctions and nine months of massive military training exercises on Russia's borders, coincidentally timed during the same week this alleged Trump/Russia dossier (and now your claimed second dossier) alleging Trump's "treasonous" connections and ties to with Russia (and the possibility that he was compromised by Russian spy agencies.

To me, this suggests a lame duck President who is pulling out all the stops to de-legitimize Trump's electoral victory on the eve a transition to a new Presidential administration. Trump, as President-elect, holds views antithetical to those of the Obama administration, GOP and Democratic party neocons, the Pentagon and the US intelligence services regarding US-Russian relations and the conflict in Syria.

Moscow said the two men discussed combining efforts in the fight against terrorism, talked about "a settlement for the crisis in Syria" and agreed that their aides would begin working on a face-to-face meeting between them. Trump's office later said that Putin had called to "offer his congratulations" and that they had discussed shared threats and challenges, "strategic economic issues" and the long-term relationship between the two nations. [...] Those views put Trump at odds with many GOP defense hawks, who have praised his promise to increase military spending but are uniformly suspicious of Moscow and have denounced Russian actions in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Syria. The offer of cooperation could also immerse Trump in a deep controversy with the Pentagon, where military and civilian leaders have strongly opposed collaboration with Russia, particularly in Syria. U.S. intelligence officials have also expressed concern, noting that the Kremlin is believed to have been involved with hacking the email accounts of prominent Democrats, in hopes of injecting chaos in the U.S. electoral process and perhaps swaying the outcome of the vote.

I'm all for March Wheeler looking deeper into this, as I am no fan of Trump, or his policies (other than a lessening of our current renewed cold war approach to Russia), but to date I've seen nothing to change my mind that these are trumped up charges and part of a deliberate smear campaign suspiciously timed to distract and divide Americans further, and advance the interests of the MIC and it's neocon supporters in and out of Congress. They bet heavily on Clinton and lost.

Yet, supposedly this "oppo research" was available to Clinton prior to the election and she did not choose to publish it herself or use it other than to spread rumors of its existence. She certainly did not give it to the FBI herself (unless the person who compiled it did so st her bequest - see my discussion of that point below).

Nor did the first media outlets who were offered this "dossier" for publication choose to do so, including the NY Times.

In a brief interview in the Times newsroom on Tuesday evening, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, said the paper would not publish the document because the allegations were “totally unsubstantiated.” “We, like others, investigated the allegations and haven’t corroborated them, and we felt we’re not in the business of publishing things we can’t stand by,” Mr. Baquet said. [...] Immediately after BuzzFeed’s publication, some reporters volunteered that they, too, had received copies of the report. “Raise your hand if you too were approached with this story,” Julia Ioffe, a journalist who has written extensively on Russia, wrote on Twitter, adding that she had not reported on the information in the document “because it was impossible to verify.”

Other organizations and outlets given the dossier refused to publish it, including the Brookings Institution's blog Lawfare, hardly a Trump friendly outfit. The Baltimore Sun, in perhaps the strongest language to date, condemned the publication by Buzzfeed as harmful to all journalists and professional media outlets:

In crossing one of the few lines left for mainstream news outlets, a demand for some level of verification, BuzzFeed could not have given Trump better ammunition with which to vilify the press as dishonest, biased and all the other claims he makes in trying to inoculate himself against valid criticism. [...] The word “dossier” has been used to describe it. But that’s as phony as the language Smith used to try and wrap his site’s reckless click-chasing in the mantle of journalism. If BuzzFeed was really doing anything approaching journalism in trying to confirm the information it published, it would have known that the “dossier” had been available to other journalists and they passed on it because they could not confirm. [...] Thanks to BuzzFeed, all of us in the press are diminished. Worse, instead of verified information they can trust, citizens get more salacious rumor from the Web and rancor from the president-elect.

I assume you approve of the actions of Buzzfeed, and the dissemination of this unverified information by a an alleged former (or perhaps current) British intelligence officer (MI6), Christopher Steele. A man the Telegraph is now saying has cast a shadow on the reputation of MI6.

For the past eight years [9-11 Grosvenor Gardens in London] has been the headquarters of Orbis Business Intelligence, where one of the desks is occupied by Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who compiled a toxic dossier on Donald Trump that now threatens Mr Trump’s relationship with Britain, Russia, and the US intelligence services. For more than a year, Mr Steele, a Cambridge-educated father-of-four, has worked in the shadows, building up intelligence from sources in Russia on Mr Trump’s dealings with the country after being hired by anti-Trump Republicans and then Democrats to find mud and make it stick. More worryingly, he has also dragged MI6 into the growing row, with Russia claiming he is still working for his former employer. [...] ... Mr Steele was described by one source as a medium-ranked officer of middling ability, who spent most of his 20-year MI6 career on the Russia desk. [...] By 2009 he had founded Orbis with Christopher Burrows, another MI6 retiree, offering clients access to a “high–level source network with a sophisticated investigative capability”. So it was to Orbis that Jeb Bush, one of Mr Trump’s opponents in the Republican presidential primaries, reportedly turned when he wanted to find material that would damage the billionaire businessman. Associates of Mr Bush hired FusionGPS, a Washington DC-based political research firm, which in turn hired Orbis in December 2015. When Mr Trump became the presumptive nominee, the Republicans ended the deal with FusionGPS, but Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton stepped in and continued funding Mr Steele’s research. By May last year journalists in Washington were already beginning to hear rumours about the dossier, and by October its existence, and the role of a “former spy” were being written about in US publications.

People hired to find dirt on other people for use in political campaigns usually manage to find something, no matter how far-fetched or implausible. That's the purpose of oppo research. It doesn't have to be verifiable or even truthful, it merely needs to be damaging. Clinton's team mentioned the thinly sourced 35 page "dossier" to favored reporters such as David Corn in October, but even they and he refused to publish its contents, though they did use its existence to attack Director Comey of the FBI and its investigations of the Clintons.

So forgive my naivete, and my failure to jump on board the "Trump's a traitor" bandwagon, despite my distaste for the man and disgust over his impending inauguration. I haven't seen much of anything to substantiate the charges against Trump in Christopher's Steele's document, and apparently neither have many, many reputable journalists. Yet, here we are, days before Trump becomes President, discussing this scandal, one which doesn't have much "there there". It's a lot of noise, to date, but not much else.

Nonetheless, its mere existence has been used to justify increased conflict with Russia, calls for investigations of Trump by Republicans and Democrats alike, and more anonymously sourced stories that say little other than "Trust us - Trump is a Russian mole." If the shoe was on the other foot, and this dossier (or one similarly outrageous in its allegations) was being used to attack President-elect Hillary Clinton, would you feel the same way and express the same concerns about her impending Presidency that you are posting here about Trump's?

Please, feel free to take your time and answer honestly.