President Trump calls it the “Fake Dirty Dossier.” We have been through every line of former MI6 agent Christopher Steele’s allegations to assess their accuracy
“The Dossier,” as everyone calls it, is talked about either as the key to what really happened in the 2016 presidential election, as likely ordered by Vladimir Putin; or it’s an artful but largely invented tapestry of libels and innuendo meant to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency. Most likely there is something in it of both. And in the shadowland of espionage it is even possible that parts of it were planted by Russian operatives to distract and discredit investigators trying to get to the bottom of the Kremlin’s skullduggery.
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Skeptics looking at Steele’s memos argue that they read a lot like a Russian disinformation campaign. Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, has given three reasons to be wary of the contents of the dossier: that Steele himself never went to Russia to conduct his own investigation but relied on intermediaries of unknown trustworthiness; that Steele would have been under surveillance by the Russians, given his well-known tenure in MI6; and that the Kremlin may have known about his fact-finding efforts through the hacked DNC emails, given that the party was Steele’s paymaster.
Other respected intelligence analysts, such as Steven Hall, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow and John Sipher, the former head of the Agency’s Russia program, are more inclined to believe in the veracity of Steele’s spadework. According to British journalist Luke Harding, Steele himself has told his friends that the dossier is “70 to 90 percent accurate.”
All of which suggests that some of the material is true, some not. But which?
Our goal is to provide an annotated version of The Dossier, verifying its allegations where we can and offering context that might make unverified allegations more — or less — plausible.
