Christopher Steele, the discredited ex-British intelligence officer who fabricated the wild claims about then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election in the pay of Hillary Clinton’s team, now says journalists basically are stupid.
And he says that “disinformation” is actually true.
Steele’s “dossier,” the salacious, and false, claims about Trump that were used by his detractors during that election, was a series of memos he wrote, in the pay of the Democrat National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, that made those unsubstantiated claims.
Eventually, the DNC was fined $105,000 and the Clinton campaign $8,000 for their funding of those documents, which violated federal law.
It was Paul Bedard in his Washington Secrets column recently, in which he explained he obtained exclusive access to the details of agreements between the DNC, and Clinton campaign, and the Federal Election Commission.
“The election agency said that Clinton and the DNC violated strict rules on describing expenditures of payments funneled to the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm,” he reported.
The dossier was just part of the orchestrated campaign to damage Trump during the 2016 election. Evidence has now shown that Clinton proposed creating the illusion that Trump’s campaign was somehow tied to Russia in order to divert the public’s attention from her own email scandal percolating at the time. In fact, Barack Obama apparently was even briefed on that strategy.
Eventually, the series of wild allegations prompted Democrats to push for a special counsel, and Robert Mueller spent years “investigating” the claims, only to come up without evidence the Democrats demanded.
Now Steele, according to Washington Examiner, is trying to rehabilitate his reputation after earning a global status as a liar.
In a commentary, in which he promotes a book and tries to “salvage his credibility,” he said in Newsweek that disinformation can be “true information that is missing key context.”
“When people talk about disinformation, it’s a bit of a misnomer,” Steele wrote. “A lot of disinformation is true and factual, but it’s slanted, or it leaves things out, or emphasizes some things at the expense of others.”
Further, he expressed very low esteem for journalists, who willingly took his own disinformation in the 2016 campaign and moved it forward as if it was true.
“My fear — and I don’t wish to sound condescending about it — is that your average journalist, even your average investigative journalist, really doesn’t have the depth of knowledge and skill to deal with these things properly,” he charged.
Steele’s “memos” about Trump were unleashed on the world in 2017 by BuzzFeed, allegations that ultimately were debunked.
The report said, “In the months and years after the document was published, the Steele dossier’s credibility unraveled. Revelations surfaced that Trump’s opponent, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, paid Steele to perform research about Trump and compile the document.”
A spokesman for the current Trump campaign said, “Any new information by this foreign agent who peddled the debunked Steele dossier should be wholly dismissed, and any media outlet that entertains anything he has to say is just the continuation of election interference intended to meddle in the campaign.”
The facts are that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid more than $1 million to Fusion GPS, which in turn paid Steele for his creative writings.
They got in trouble because they had described the payments as being for “legal advice and services,” which they were not.
