Reading the Steele report, I was struck by the way his sources employed the standard techniques of Russian propaganda and manipulation.
The report quotes “source C,” a senior financial official, as saying the Trump operation needed to be seen in the framework of Putin’s desire to return to 19th-century great-power politics rooted in national interest. This explanation of Putin’s motives is regularly put out by Kremlin propagandists who try to explain Russia’s behavior as something other than naked aggression. Its inclusion suggests a careful attempt by Steele’s Russian sources to make the report appear authoritative to a naïve Western audience.
The description of Trump’s using prostitutes to urinate on the bed in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow, where the Obamas slept, bears a striking resemblance to the work of the “novelists” in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) whose job it is to come up with stories to discredit individuals without much regard for plausibility. My entry in Wikipedia was recently changed to say that I was expelled from Russia in 2013 for running a brothel with underage girls. The style is eerily similar.
The report said that Putin was motivated by “fear and hatred of Hillary Clinton.” This again reflects the thrust of Russian propaganda, which tries to reduce policy difference to a conflict of personalities. Russian spokesmen said that tensions between the U.S. and Russia under Obama existed because Putin and Obama did not like each other. In the report, attributing Russian help for Trump to hatred of Clinton was a way of making this supposed help more plausible at a time when Clinton appeared certain to become president. It also distracted attention from the real goal of Russian activities, which was to undermine American institutions.
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