AP Photo Fourth Estate The Coup Before the Inauguration To hear Donald Trump tell it, BuzzFeed and CNN teamed up with a rogue intelligence community to slime him and destroy his presidency. But what other choice did they have?

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Donald Trump, who implored the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and reveal her MIA correspondence, is getting something close to a taste of his own prescription. CNN broke the news that top U.S. officials had informed Trump of a raw “intelligence” dossier compiled by an opposition researcher and shopped around to journalists during the campaign alleging that Kremlin agents had acquired compromising information on Trump. The oppo dossier, published soon thereafter by BuzzFeed, has thrown Washington into several states of crisis: Are we about to inaugurate a Russian stooge as president? By publishing uncorroborated information, has BuzzFeed spun the wheels off ethical journalism? And what did the establishment know about Donald Trump and Russia and when did they know it?

The dossier, which many top newsrooms saw late in the campaign and passed on, makes for wonderfully pervy reading. Trump trapped in a Russian honey trap, almost anybody can believe. But golden showers while denouncing Obama? Almost too good to be true, and Trump denied it, noting he’s “very much of a germophobe.” But as my friend Mark Feldstein points out, the public portions of the dossier read like the fantastical Anthony Summers book on J. Edgar Hoover’s secret life, which alleges that his relationship with Clyde Tolson included public cross-dressing and Bible-defiling orgies with the dirtbag lawyer Roy Cohn. As Feldstein continues, to succeed, rumor-mongering must be plausible. Surely Trump knew he was being watched and recorded during his Moscow visits. Would the pussy-grabber really be so reckless?


Well, maybe. But until the dossier is fully vetted, the debate will center on whether CNN and BuzzFeed did the right thing by airing its allegations. The debate is among the oldest in journalism: At what point must journalists divulge to news consumers the substance of an unseemly report that cannot be nailed down but is common knowledge among journalists and members of the political class? As the press has reported, Sen. John McCain thought the report was sufficiently believable to have alerted FBI Director James Comey to its existence in early December and its gist has been distributed to the intelligence community, the president and other Hill leaders.

In the old days before the Web, such a secret dossier may have remained submerged for months or even years as news organizations justifiably buried it and not surfaced until, say, the less-inhibited foreign press caught wind of it or an enterprising book author decided to side-step the journalistic order and published it. But those days are as ancient as three TV networks and the Washington Post-New York Times-Los Angeles Times-Wall Street Journal news cartel. In the new regime, if something exists, somebody is going to publish it. The odd thing isn’t that CNN and BuzzFeed went with the story, but that it took this long for a news outlet to pull the trigger and finally snuff the old journalistic order.

If you’re asking if I would have published the raw report if I had been sitting in the editor Ben Smith’s BuzzFeed cockpit, the answer is yes. No competent journalist publishes oppo research without confirming and placing it in context, so I stand with the major news organizations that did not publish during the campaign. But when such a report is flung about by people in power, as this one was, and its allegations are beginning to inform governance, more damage is done to trust in government and confidence in journalism by withholding it from public scrutiny. As BuzzFeed put it, they published the dodgy dossier so that “Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” (For a view opposing Smith’s, see this Washington Post column by Margaret Sullivan.)

Before we start weeping about the journalistic sky falling, let’s accept that the press has long been a public venue for partial and unproved allegations. Not to equate the two dossiers, but the U.S. government's recently unclassified hacking report does not “prove” that the Russian government sponsored the intrusions. The methods and practices that would lend proof to official assertions were not included, leaving plenty of room for debate on the veracity of the claim. With the Goldengate dossier, even more is left up in the air—it was, after all, conceived as a document of political destruction that could not find its target during the campaign and only now has struck its intended. It includes little information that would allow even difficult corroboration, and does not contain the usual qualifiers in an intelligence-caliber study that signal the levels of confidence that should be accorded its assertions. In other words, it’s a raw hunk of venison in need of cooking before news patrons chow on it. (For an early tick-tock on the provenance and path of the dossiers, see this Guardian piece. For the Wall Street Journal’s unmasking of its author, see this article about former British spy Christopher Steele.)

Perhaps the leading indicator that the dossier isn’t pure invention comes from Russia itself, which has officially announced that the report is “pulp fiction” and an “absolute fabrication.” A Kremlin spokesman said, “The Kremlin has no compromising information on Trump.” Oh, come on! The Kremlin must have some compromising information on everybody in the U.S. within reach of the tendrils of power, especially folks like Trump who have traveled there. The Russians are protesting a tad too much. Hell, the Kremlin probably has compromising information on your mother. (For that reason, I never trusted Molly Shafer with state secrets.)

So far, the U.S. government appears to have been overly prudent about leaking or sharing the sensitive Trump information it holds. Like BuzzFeed’s Smith, I believe the public has an interest in knowing what the much-disparaged elites have been gossiping about for months now. Information like this can’t be bottled up forever, especially in the Web era. You can say it’s “wrong” to publish raw scuttlebutt like this, and I can agree with you. You can see hypocrisy in liberals whinging about the rise of fake news, only to embrace Goldengate, and I can agree with you. But to reprise an earlier point, conventional journalists no longer have the capacity to gate-keep in a perfect way. Complaining about it is pointless.

And even if the dossier turns out to be pure bunk, there is a good bit of karma blasting back at Trump for inciting the Russians to hack and leak on Hillary, not to mention all the birther stuff. How does it feel to be the aggrieved party, Donald?

What does the intelligence community know about Trump? Plenty, I’ll guess. If you don’t think the U.S. government keeps tabs on businessmen like Trump who do business with Russia, you’re as disingenuous as a Kremlin spokesman. Trump has deliberately rattled the members of the deep state with his brazen criticism of U.S. intelligence findings about Russian hacking. Deep government does not stand idly by, as David Runciman wrote recently in the London Review of Books, and allow itself to be shat upon by newcomers. The president-elect has enemies in profusion on the inside who are practiced at the art of the leak. They may have had no official role in this attempt to stage a coup against Trump before he’s even inaugurated, but they must be cheering BuzzFeed’s naughtiness as they sharpen their knives for his administration.

This is only the beginning. Even the president of the United States must sometimes stand naked, the poet once sang. In Trump’s case, he’s been fully pantsed before he's taken the oath.

******

My mother was a red. A redhead. Send your motherly news to [email protected]. My email alerts have no friends at the CIA, my Twitter feed isn't read at the FBI and my RSS feed gets broken and rebroken because the NSA has it in for me.