Seemingly the only people in the dark were the public. In other words, the Steele Dossier was an open secret in Washington even before the CNN story, no less its publication by BuzzFeed. CNN declined to publish the dossier itself (a mistake, in my judgment) even though it spoke with what it described as “multiple high ranking intelligence, administration, congressional and law enforcement officials, as well as foreign officials and others in the private sector with direct knowledge of the memos.” John McCain, former Republican presidential nominee, war hero and Trump adversary, had, CNN noted, given the materials to the FBI director in December, but CNN also said that the Bureau had already had copies of much of the dossier. David Corn of Mother Jones had quickly followed the Reid letter, and provided a good bit of detail on Steele’s work in a story published on Halloween, eight days before the election. (Actually, that detail of the CNN story was wrong-the four officials had agreed that FBI chief Jim Comey alone would do the deed with Trump.)ĬNN noted that an October 2016 public letter from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to Comey had made a then-mysterious reference to “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government,” and CNN now said that the dossier was the “explosive information” in question. On the afternoon of January 10, 2017, 10 days before Trump’s inauguration, CNN reported that a two-page synopsis of the Steele Dossier, which it initially described as “classified documents,” had been presented to Trump and President Obama by the director of national intelligence, the FBI director, the CIA director and the director of the National Security Agency. (Michael Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying, but broke with Trumpian omerta, and so was not pardoned.)īut the truth of the dossier wasn’t the real issue confronting BuzzFeed editors. Just in case you’ve forgotten, Roger Stone (lying under oath to Congress), Paul Manafort (bank and tax fraud) and Michael Flynn (lying under penalty of perjury to the FBI) were all convicted of federal crimes and were all pardoned or had their sentences commuted by a self-serving Trump. Some of the gravamen of the dossier, though, is, in retrospect, right on target: people in the Trump campaign did knowingly work with the Russian government or its agents to discredit the Clinton campaign, Trump’s campaign manager and his first national security adviser did have improper contact with Russian interests. What we are debating (worth reading the subhed) And the story included a two-sentence subhed, the second sentence of which was, “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.” Much of what the dossier contains, in fact, turned out not to be true-the “pee tape,” the Michael Cohen trip to Prague (although Christopher Steele, rather remarkably, still insists that part is true), other details.

” That’s an accurate summary of the dossier. The actual headline was “ These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia.

Such a story would likely have borne a headline like “Trump Sex Tape Said to Fuel Possible Russian Blackmail,” and its publication would have been a black mark on the record of any editor, especially as it now seems possible that this particular tale was the creation of a Democratic-funded disinformation effort against Trump.īut that wasn’t the headline on the BuzzFeed story. If it had been an enterprise story, the issue of whether to publish should have centered around whether the story was accurate. The Steele Dossier wasn’t a reported scoop-it was a leaked document. Now, with much of the dossier discredited, I still think BuzzFeed made the right call, and I want to explain why. When BuzzFeed decided to publish the Steele Dossier on Trump’s ostensible Russian connections almost five years ago, I was one of relatively few people in journalism who defended the decision.

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