Media Silent As Christopher Steele ‘Hero’ ‘Spymaster’ Narrative Crumbles

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier. That didn't stop corporate media.

It turns out Christopher Steele wasn’t 007.

For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. It wasn’t true.

Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth.

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history.

The media have a problem, then, given that they repeatedly led viewers and readers to believe Steele was a master spy. They can almost get away with ignoring the recent news that once again shows their previous reporting was catastrophically wrong. In fact, some media outlets did just that.