As Ed wrote yesterday in his VIP post, the original publisher of the Steele Dossier, Ben Smith, has expressed some regrets about having dropped the stinking pile of horse manure into the public realm. 

Most people don't know this, but Clinton campaign operatives had shopped the Steele Dossier around trying to get journalists to publish it without success. 

It's not that they didn't want to use the claims to bash Trump, but the claims were so ridiculous and unverified that they couldn't find a way to get it out there without embarrassing themselves as credulous fools. 

Any fool could see that it was ridiculous, even though the FBI pretended to believe claims made in the report in order to push forward their Crossfire Hurricane report. But at least they could do that without revealing the actual dossier, giving their investigation a gloss of respectability. 

Not so Buzzfeed. They wanted clicks and had no credibility to burn. 

Looking back, though, that “fringy” status of Buzzfeed just helped complete a complex end-run around the safeguards against fake news. Oppo researchers from Fusion-GPS tried to sell Steele’s reports to the Times, The New Yorker, ABC, and CNN. Those outlets passed, unable to verify the stuff. But the FBI, CIA, and NSA weren’t bound by journalistic ethics, and were able to stick Steele’s “blackmail” claim in an annex to an Intelligence Community Assessment in early January 2017. Jim Comey then presented that Annex with the “blackmail” material to President-elect Trump in an early January briefing, ostensibly to help make him aware it was out there. After that, news of the meeting was leaked, leading to a January 10, 2017 CNN report that Smith says helped force his hand.

It's hard to remember now that we have gone through multiple years of incredibly tedious and propagandistic "reporting," but publishing the report was controversial at first. Journalists worried that wading into the sewer might stain their reputation; soon enough they realized that people wanted to believe that Trump was dirty so they started giving each other prizes for telling lies. 

But at the time, many felt as Jake Tapper did. 

Smith talked about complaints he received from people like Jake Tapper (who worried the dossier’s publication made the Trump-Russia story “less credible”). “I’d expected that backlash, and at first welcomed it,” he wrote. “I thought we were on the right side of the decade-old conflict between the transparent new internet and a legacy media whose power came in part from the information they withheld. And, of course, I loved the traffic…”

Tapper--worried that the obvious lies in the Steele Dossier would reflect badly on the less obvious lies that the media wanted to focus on. It's not the lies that matter, but how many people you can fool. 

Matt Taibbi wrote a glorious rant about Smith's kinda-sorta mea culpa, calling bulls**t on Smith's expression of regret. It fits perfectly in the self-regarding rewriting of history that we see in the Pravda Media's "now it can be told" genre, in which reporters pretend that what they said when it mattered was never uttered. Far from being liars, they were truth-tellers who were sadly misled. 

In this podcast both Ezra Klein and Ben Smith pooh-poo the notion that they believed the Russia collusion hoax, but Taibbi calls BS:

At the time, however, they were so incapable of believing the election had been won organically that they gobbled up any soothing explanation and were reduced to praying for rescue by divine plot intervention. And looking back, that’s what Russiagate was, right? Not that we ever believed Russia won the election for him…”

About that: on July 13, 2017, the Center for International Studies published, “Ezra Klein: Collusion is Likely,” featuring the money quote: “I believe at this point collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign is likely. We know for a fact that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee files and released them in ways… designed to hurt Hillary Clinton… Given how razor-thin the final margin was for Trump, we know they might have literally decided the election.” A few days earlier, in Vox: “We know that foreign power conducted a large-scale and successful cyber-espionage effort against the Democratic Party… The election is tainted. The White House is tainted. Our foreign policy is tainted.”

Later that year, on October 24th, 2017, the Washington Post finally broke the story that the Steele dossier was paid Clinton campaign research. That should have been the end of the story, but not to Klein, who wrote in Vox days later: “[Russia] really did conduct social media operations designed help Trump. Both their targets and their timing were extremely sophisticated for a foreign government that has traditionally shown itself to have a poor understanding of American politics… At this point, it would be a truly remarkable coincidence if two entities that had so many ties to each other… and that were working so hard toward the same goal never found a way to coordinate.”

I suppose that Klein might not have actually believed that the Russia collusion story was real, but he certainly worked hard to sell the idea at the time. 

Either he was lying then or lying now, or lying to himself to assuage his conscience. 

The Steele Dossier affair gives us an insight into how the media works and the nefarious ties between political operatives, the intelligence community, the media, and lefties in positions of power to abuse the truth in order to get their way, and make money while doing it. 

It was all tidy: once Smith went public (and while his decision drew some fire, it was also backed by the Columbia Journalism Review) everyone had a justification for speculating about the unverifiable thing, which as Smith now notes, besieged that White House for a good long while. The smile as he speaks of “regrets” is so mischievously wry, it’s hard not to admire. He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s really a hell of a smile, a perfect nod to a brilliant maneuver. Sure, it helped blow up the credibility of a storied industry, but wasn’t it also worth it, just a little? No wonder people hate us…

Indeed. I certainly hate these guys. 

Not you, Matt, but the establishment media.