James Comey and Our Poisoned Politics Five years ago, the FBI boss was busy selling the bogus Steele dossier.James Freeman
This week marks the fifth anniversary of perhaps the greatest media scandal of our age. Outlets like CNN and BuzzFeed flogged a bogus dossier of salacious claims funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, even while admitting they didn’t know whether the dossier’s allegations against Donald Trump were true or false. It wasn’t necessarily that reporters had mistaken fake news for the real stuff—they simply didn’t care or acknowledge that they had an obligation to vet anti-Trump claims before disseminating them.
The pathetic media excuse for running with the story was that important people in the government were talking about it. And no one wanted to talk about it more than the FBI’s then-director, James Comey. He kept talking about it even after his department had failed to corroborate it, and even though the CIA viewed it as mere “Internet rumor.”
On this day five years ago, Mr. Comey emailed Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. As the dossier story was raging in the press, Mr. Comey mounted an unsuccessful effort to stop Mr. Clapper from publicly acknowledging that U.S. intelligence agencies had not deemed the dossier reliable and were not relying upon its claims, which had been compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
According to the Obama-appointed Justice Department inspector general who reported on the government abuses in this case in 2019, Mr. Comey’s Jan. 11, 2017 email to Mr. Clapper included the following:
I just had a chance to review the proposed talking points on this for today. Perhaps it is a nit, but I worry that it may not be best to say “The IC has not made any judgment that the information in the document is reliable.” I say that because we HAVE concluded that the source [Steele] is reliable and has a track record with us of reporting reliable information; we have some visibility into his source network, some of which we have determined to be sub-sources in a position to report on such things; and much of what he reports in the current document is consistent with and corroborative of other reporting…
In the long history of Beltway bureaucratic maneuvering, has a government memo ever included so much inaccuracy in so few words? Mr. Steele had already been fired by the FBI as a confidential source, and his story was falling apart. The day after the Comey email, the FBI received a U.S. intelligence report warning of a particular inaccuracy in the dossier and assessing that the material was “part of a Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations.”
As for sub-sources, the Obama-appointed Inspector General of the Justice Department Michael Horowitz reported that in that January of 2017 the FBI was conducting the first of a series of interviews with the Steele dossier’s primary subsource. These interviews and other investigative activity “revealed potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports,” according to the IG. For example, “the Primary Sub-source made statements during [his] January 2017 FBI interview that were inconsistent with multiple sections of the Steele reports” and the sub-source “made statements indicating that Steele misstated or exaggerated the Primary Sub-source’s statements in multiple sections of the reporting.”
As detailed further in a book co-authored by your humble correspondent, even more holes appeared in the dossier story. The inspector general described a March 2017 FBI interview:
According to [Washington Field Office] Agent 1, the Primary Sub-source said [he] made it clear to Steele that [he] had no proof to support the statements from [his] sub-sources and that “it was just talk.” WFO Agent 1 said that the Primary Sub-source explained that [his] information came from “word of mouth and hearsay;” “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers;” and that some of the information, such as allegations about Trump’s sexual activities, were statements [he] heard made in “jest.”
But there’s nothing funny about the damage these tall tales did to our politics and our institutions.
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