When I saw the tweet below, from someone who repeatedly got the timing of the release of the Mueller report wrong and who repeated and spread Barr’s lies about no collusion no obstruction when the Mueller report was finally released, I thought I should do a little digging.
Many people who read this might conclude that the Steele dossier was completely wrong, or was so mistaken as to have major problems. First, the Ritz Carlton tape, or the pee pee tape as Stephen Colbert refers to it, is a very minor part of the dossier but it’s humor potential is a gift that just keeps giving. Second, keep in mind Steele was producing raw data for a political campaign and not an intelligence report for a government agency, two very different things.
So I decided to go look at what Dilanian was talking about.
In this section of the IG report, the discussion is about whether the Steele dossier was validated or not. Since Steele was not working for any government, and since the report covered things deep within the Russian mob structure, I’m not exactly sure what kind of validation the FBI should have looked at, or even what would be possible.
Strzok said that the validation report's lack of clarity was consistent with his past experience with VMU, and that VMU's work is "frequently ambiguous or perhaps not written with the level of precision and specificity and expertise that might be desired." He also stated that validation reports are "rarely helpful."
...
An important aspect of the FBI's assessment of Steele's election reporting involved evaluating Steele's source network, especially whether the sub-sources had access to reliable information… For example, the FBI determined it was plausible that at least some of the sub-sources had access to intelligence pertinent to events described in Steele's election reporting. Additionally, the FBI's evaluation of Steele's sub-sources generated some corroboration for the election reporting (primarily routine facts about dates, locations, and occupational positions that was mostly public source information). Further, by January 2017 the FBI was able to identify and arrange a meeting with the Primary Sub-source. 3
So after determining Steele’s sources could have had access to the information Steele reported, and after corroborating the basic facts of the dossier, here’s what the IG reported as a discrepancy and what Dilanian latched on to and tweeted his worrisome tweet about.
For example, the Primary Sub-source told the FBI that, while Report 80 stated that Trump's alleged sexual activities at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Moscow had been"confirmed" by a senior, western staff member at the hotel, the Primary Sub-source explained that he/she reported to Steele that Trump's alleged unorthodox sexual activity at the Ritz Carlton hotel was "rumor and speculation" and that he/she had not been able to confirm the story.
There you have it. Steele used the word confirmed, while his source said it was rumor and speculation. Can someone explain how you confirm that a pervert hired a couple of sex workers to pee on a bed while he watched, if nobody else was in the room? And then you have to ask, is this story plausible if the person involved is known to cheat on wives and has been named a co-conspirator in a bribery scheme to pay for the silence of a porn star he had an affair with?
So maybe Steele should not have used the word “confirmed”, but is Dilanian calling to question the Steele dossier over a bit of semantics? It sure seems so.
But I was curious why Steele used the word confirmed, so I took a look at the Dossier.
The Moscow Ritz Carlton episode involving TRUMP reported above was confirmed by Source E, [REDACTED BY BUZZFEED NEWS], who said that s/he and several of the staff were aware of it at the time and subsequently. S/he believed it had happened in 2013. Source E provided an introduction for a company ethnic Russian operative to Source F, a female staffer at the hotel when TRUMP had stayed there, who also confirmed the story. Speaking separately in June 2016, Source B (the former top level Russian intelligence officer) asserted that TRUMP’s unorthodox behavior in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished.
I guess you could make the argument that Source E and source F were not confirming that the event was true, but that they were confirming they had heard the story also. And of course source B, a top level Russian intelligence officer, asserted they had similar material on Trump. Now at this point I’m beginning to question whether the IG is scrounging the dossier to give Trump something to chew on and to save his job.
So was Dilanian’s characterization that the Steele dossier “does not emerge well” based on the IG report finding a semantic difference of a minor but salacious story in the dossier, while the IG report also said there was corroboration of the Steele dossier, a fair representation of both the IG report and the Steele dossier? Or was this pretty sloppy journalism that could easily play into the hands of the right wing propaganda machine and end up spreading a mischaracterization of an important part of Trump’s Russian conspiracy evidence? You get to decide.
RESIST!