Whose stuff did Steele shovel?

I have repeatedly observed here that if the so-called Steele dossier commissioned by the Clinton campaign is what it purports to be, it disseminates intelligence supplied by Russian authorities and, further, the intelligence is highly likely to constitute Russian disinformation. Eric Felten comes at the related issues from different angles in articles carried in the past two issues of the Weekly Standard.

In “The Romanian ruse” Eric traces the origin of the Steele dossier’s allegations about Trump attorney Michael Cohen going to Prague to collude with Russia on Trump’s behalf. He asks: “Where did [the dossier’s] baroque tales of illicit meetings to pay Romanian hackers come from?” Based on “the exhaustive investigative work done for the Mueller team,” Eric suggests that the Steele dossier incorporated the fictitious story provided by Russian military intelligence. “Steele,” he concludes, “seems to have fallen for it.”

In his most recent article Eric raises the question whether whether Steele was disseminating Russian disinformation to the State Department. Eric notes that before Steele compiled the dossier (assuming that the dossier is indeed his work), Steele “had for years been funneling reports on Russia and Ukraine to senior State Department Russia analysts. Materials recently turned over to Congress show that while Steele was giving memos to State he also maintained close ties to the billionaire Russian industrialist Oleg V. Deripaska. Some congressional investigators are thus concerned that his memos may have been a channel of Russian disinformation.”

Given the evidence laid out in Felten’s article, I think you’d have to be a fool to think otherwise. His findings apply even more so to the Steele dossier itself, but Felten leaves the related questions applicable to the Steele dossier implicit in his article.

NOTE: I have embedded the Steele Dossier below for readers who may not previously have taken a look themselves.

The Steele Dossier by on Scribd

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