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This
week marks the fifth anniversary of perhaps the greatest media scandal of
our age. Outlets like CNN and BuzzFeed flogged a bogus dossier of salacious
claims funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, even while admitting they
didn’t know whether the dossier’s allegations against Donald Trump were
true or false. It wasn’t necessarily that reporters had mistaken fake news
for the real stuff—they simply didn’t care or acknowledge that they had an
obligation to vet anti-Trump claims before disseminating them.
The
pathetic media excuse for running with the story was that important people
in the government were talking about it. And no one wanted to talk about it
more than the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. He kept talking about it
even after his department had failed to corroborate it, and even though the
CIA viewed it as mere “Internet rumor.”
On this
day five years ago, Mr. Comey emailed Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper. As the dossier story was raging in the press, Mr. Comey
mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop Mr. Clapper from publicly
acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agencies had not deemed the dossier
reliable and were not relying upon its claims, which had been compiled by
former British spy Christopher Steele.
According
to the Obama-appointed Justice Department inspector general who reported on the government abuses in this case in
2019, Mr. Comey’s Jan. 11, 2017 email to Mr. Clapper included the following:
I just
had a chance to review the proposed talking points on this for today.
Perhaps it is a nit, but I worry that it may not be best to say “The IC has
not made any judgment that the information in the document is reliable.” I
say that because we HAVE concluded that the source [Steele] is reliable and
has a track record with us of reporting reliable information; we have some
visibility into his source network, some of which we have determined to be
sub-sources in a position to report on such things; and much of what he
reports in the current document is consistent with and corroborative of
other reporting...
In the
long history of Beltway bureaucratic maneuvering, has a government memo
ever included so much inaccuracy in so few words? Mr. Steele had already
been fired by the FBI as a confidential source, and his story was falling
apart. The day after the Comey email, the FBI received a U.S. intelligence report
warning of a particular inaccuracy in the dossier and assessing that the
material was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S.
foreign relations.” Read the article (paywall) https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-comey-and-our-poisoned-politics-11641944998?
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