Rachel Maddow to Vanity Fair: 'Trying to turn the dossier into the Russia scandal is a revisionist history'

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MSNBC host Rachel Maddow sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair's Joe Pompeo, who wrote that the two got into a "back and forth" about Maddow's coverage of the Steele dossier. 

"Trying to turn the Russia scandal into the dossier, or trying to turn the dossier into the Russia scandal, is a revisionist history designed to intimidate people out of covering stories like that in the future," Maddow told Vanity Fair. "And to try to obscure the seriousness of what Russia did, and what the Trump campaign’s relationship was with what Russia did."

Pompeo said he told Maddow that her coverage of the dossier, which many on both sides believed to be problematic, gave her viewers a false hope the "Trump was about to get taken down."

"At this point in our conversation, Maddow did something very Maddow, reaching back into the past to make a point about the present," Pompeo wrote. The MSNBC host announced in April that she would only be hosting MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Monday nights and that she would be pursuing other projects as well. 

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow only hosts the network’s 9 p.m.  ET program on Monday evenings after scaling back her workload.  (Getty Images)

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Maddow pointed to Dan Rather, who aired a segment in 2004 that called former President George W. Bush's service in the National Guard into question using allegedly forged documents. Rather's career took a major hit after the segment aired, and after he was forced to step down from his anchor position at CBS News. However, Rather was a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC during Trump's presidency.

"There was a document that was involved. He was reporting on, like, how did George W. Bush avoid going to Vietnam? How was his National Guard service arranged? Why did he get this coveted spot in this group that wasn’t gonna be fighting? The story of George W. Bush getting a sweet gig in the National Guard so he didn’t have to go fight in Vietnam was true," Maddow told Pompeo. 

"Somebody giving Dan Rather a forged document, so he had a screwed-up news story about it, is fascinating, and it’s an interesting thing about CBS News. But it doesn’t mean that the National Guard thing about George W. Bush was not true! It just—it neutralized it. Like it made that go away. And the whole thing became a Dan Rather scandal. That’s what’s going on with the dossier," she continued. 

Pompeo noted criticism of Maddow from The Washington Post's Eric Wemple, who slammed her reporting on the dossier as "a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry."

MSNBC continues to take heat on the heels of Rachel Maddow announcing she would cut 80% of her on-air schedule to focus on other projects, leaving the progressive cable news outlet without a reliable replacement for its cash cow.  (Photo by Virginia Sherwood/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images) (Virginia Sherwood/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

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"If you’re looking for a whiff of controversy around Maddow’s journalistic record, this would be it," the Vanity Fair media correspondent wrote. 

Maddow routinely reported on the dossier and dedicated a lot of her air time to discussing whether former president Donald Trump colluded with Russia. 

John Durham charged Igor Danchenko, Christopher Steele's sub-source, with making false statements to the FBI in 2021, which called a lot of the past coverage of the dossier into question. 

ALEXANDRIA, VA - NOVEMBER 10: Russian analyst Igor Danchenko arrives at the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse before being arraigned on November 10, 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) ((Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images))

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After Danchenko was indicted, Maddow appeared to dismiss the revelations. 

She said Danchenko's indictment left the "unmistakable impression" that it is "designed to smear Christopher Steele's intelligence reports as things that were deliberately made up and concocted by rascally Democrats."