No harm, no foul, yes?

by Tom Sullivan



U.S. President Donald Trump, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin greet each other during bilateral meeting, July 2019. Image via Voice of America

The acting president, his staff, enablers in Congress, and red-hat true-believers have their golden oldies. Donald Trump's Greatest Hits are material he trots out at rallies when he needs an applause line whether or not riff is already yesterday's news or overtaken by subsequent events. "Lock her up" still shows up occasionally. "Fake news" is a staple. So is the "the phony, fake dossier, the disgusting fake dossier," as he describes the report developed for Fusion GPS by former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele.



Fusion GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch have taken considerable heat for the material Steele leaked to the press. Simpson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his firm's role in contracting the opposition research on candidate Donald Trump. BuzzFeed published the dossier in early 2017, but it had floated around Washington for months. Days before the election, David Corn of Mother Jones named Christopher Steele as the veteran British spy with a bundle of human intelligence detailing Trump's ties to Russia.



Obscured by right-wing smears is the fact an unnamed conservative Trump opponent first contracted the opposition research project through the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. Once Trump became the presumptive Republican nomination, the pair explain, the donor pulled the plug and Democrats resumed the funding. Their interest was in Trump's overseas business deals. They hired Steele for his Russia experience because of the opaqueness of the country's business arrangements. Steele turned up troubling information that Russians had tried to cultivate Trump and develop blackmail material on him.



Simpson and Fritsch are making the rounds of talk shows promoting their book, “Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump.” Simpson and Fritsch explain they never met or spoke with Hillary Clinton. “As far as Fusion knew, Clinton herself had no idea who they were. To this day, no one in the company has ever met or spoken to her,” they write.



Steele defends his research as based on "tried and tested” sources, neither a fabrication nor Russian disinformation. Jane Meyer of the New Yorker adds:

Steele points out that the most critical criteria for judging disinformation is “whether there is a palpable motive for spreading it”; the ultimate Russian goal in 2016, he argues, “was to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and therefore, the idea that they would intentionally spread embarrassing information about Trump—true or not—is not logical.”



Steele, according to Simpson and Fritsch, is equally dismissive of those who claim that the Russians spread disinformation in order to discredit him. “The stakes were far, far too high for them to trifle with settling scores with me or any other civilian,” he said. “Damaging my reputation was simply not on their list of priorities. But helping Trump, and damaging Hillary was at the very top of it. No one denies that anymore.”