I heard about the report again over lunch in Brooklyn, when a peculiar character in Hillary Clinton’s orbit passed through town. David Brock had been an anti-Clinton journalist in the 1990s. Now he was Hillary’s fiercest ally, a genius at raising money for Democratic groups. He showed up at a café a couple of days before Christmas wearing a coat with a lavish fur collar, and stashed full shopping bags beside the table. Brock was consumed with the mission of stopping Trump, manic; he was headed, it turned out, for a heart attack that landed him in the hospital. He wanted to spread the word about a dossier of allegations involving Trump’s ties to Russia. Brock didn’t have the document, he said. But he knew The Washington Post did, and so did The New York Times. Politicians had it too, he told me, and spies; as far as I could figure out, so did everyone, except the reading public. And me.
That, I believed, made it exactly the sort of thing you should publish. The dossier would be a great story, a journalistic and traffic sensation.
[You just had to know Brock would figure into this tale. As far as “traffic sensation,” Smith is correct. It was a journalistic disaster, however, and it poisoned and derailed politics for two years, and maybe for decades to come. That may have been worth it if the document was accurate. As it is, publishing it is indefensible. — Ed]
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