New York Times podcast: Steele dossier 'profoundly flawed,' should never have had impact it did

The New York Times podcast "The Daily" broke down the history of the "profoundly flawed" Steele dossier on Monday, with host Michael Barbaro commenting the document should never have had the level of media and political impact it did.

It's the latest media reckoning with the dossier, the series of memos by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele alleging an extensive conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton, as well as salacious allegations of blackmail tapes, and Trump-Russia contacts going back more than a decade.

"It seems we can clearly see now that the Steele dossier should never have had the life and the impact that it did," Barbaro said. "It should never have been used in the wiretap warrant for Carter Page, should never have been read into the congressional record, or featured on prime time segments on cable news."

Reporter Michael Schmidt ran through the history of the dossier, noting it began circulating in the media in 2016 as a rumor mill buzzed about Trump-Russia connections while he went on to defeat Hillary Clinton. Then-FBI Director James Comey briefed President-elect Trump shortly before he took office on the 35-page intelligence file, including its allegation that Trump had once hired prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed in Moscow and there was video of it. 

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It was controversially published in its raw form by BuzzFeed News in 2017, used by the FBI to get a secret surveillance warrant on Trump aide Carter Page, and read into the congressional record by Russiagate proponent Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

The dossier was commissioned in 2016 by Fusion GPS, a research firm employed by Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. It investigated Donald Trump's campaign on behalf of Clinton while Elias was a partner at left-wing law firm Perkins Coie. Fellow Perkins attorney Michael Sussmann was indicted this year by Special Counsel John Durham for allegedly hiding his Clinton campaign affiliation from the FBI while pushing for an investigation into then-candidate Trump's ties to Russia in 2016.

The latest Durham indictment of Steele sub-source Igor Danchenko, a Russian-born analyst at the Brookings Institution, for lying to the FBI revealed one of his sources of information on Trump and Russia was Democratic spin doctor Charles Dolan. 

Dolan's involvement with some of the dossier's false claims went unmentioned on "The Daily" on Monday.

"At this point, we can say that the Steele dossier is a profoundly flawed document?" Barbaro asked.

"Correct. And now we can see inside the anatomy of how this document came to be, and it’s troubling," Schmidt said.

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Outlets that hyped the Steele dossier and claimed to have corroborated chunks of it have come in for sharp criticism. The Washington Post has since published several extensive corrections to stories about Steele's sourcing.

"The Danchenko indictment doubles as a critique of several media outlets that covered Steele’s reports in 2016 and after its publication by BuzzFeed in January 2017," the Washington Post's Erik Wemple wrote last month. "CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the McClatchy newspaper chain and various pundits showered credibility upon the dossier without corroboration — and found other topics to cover when a forceful debunking arrived in December 2019 via a report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz."

Horowitz noted that year that the limited information from the dossier that was corroborated by the FBI was generally "publicly available information." Several of its key claims were specifically discredited by him and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, such as Michael Cohen's phantom trip to Prague that would have, as MSNBC's Chris Hayes once put it, "pretty definitely establish extremely involved levels of collusion."

Schmidt recounted that in 2016, the Steele dossier helped some reporters find meaning in why Trump would do things like publicly ask Russia to "find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing."

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"What the report did was it provided, while reading it, immense clarity to this problem. It was unclear why Donald Trump was behaving this way … It was very odd," Schmidt said. "And in front of you is a document that says here’s the answer. It doesn’t necessarily prove it, but in a world where you’re trying to make sense of this abnormal presidential candidate, you look at the document, and you say, ‘Aha, I get it.’ And there was an appealing nature of that."

Schmidt is also a national security analyst at MSNBC, which heaped credibility on the dossier during the Trump years and at times touted that elements of it hadn't been disproven. Left-wing host Nicolle Wallace at one point remarked that it was a fact that "not one word" had been debunked and "a lot of it turned out to be right on the money."

Nevertheless, he accused both sides of the aisle of using the dossier for their own political ends.

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"What the Steele dossier does is it reflects the fevered pitch of the moment. The left was terrified about Donald Trump, they were terrified about what a Donald Trump presidency could do. So they grasped for anything that they could," he said, while he said the right used the Steele dossier's unraveling as a means of casting doubt on the entire Robert Mueller Russia probe. "It allowed them to provide a narrative to how Donald Trump was being unfairly tainted by this."