House Report Claims DNI Clapper Engineered Dossier Release – By Eric Felten (weeklystandard.com) / April 27 2018
How that might have been the act that got us the special counsel investigation.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence majority report on its Russia probe is out—not counting the copious redactions imposed by intelligence agencies. Given what’s blacked out in the document, it’s a surprise that “the” and “but” were generally spared. Even so, some significant allegations survived the intelligence community’s bowdlerizers.
For example, it was quickly noted by scholars of the Steele dossier that the House document reveals (or, if one is dubious of the House Intel majority’s credibility, one can say “asserts” instead) that it was President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who helped engineer the public release of the dossier. That release may well be the essential act in producing the special counsel investigation that continues to hang over the Trump administration.
Here’s what makes the dossier release essential—and no, it isn’t that the release exposed credible evidence of collusion: After more than a year of investigations there is still no evidence (at least no evidence that has been made public) corroborating the dossier’s significant allegations against Trump. Rather, without the publication of the dossier, President Trump would not have pressed FBI director James Comey to prove the dossier’s allegations false. That pressure is central to the narrative that Trump fired Comey in an effort to obstruct the bureau’s Russia investigation. That narrative led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel; the question of whether the president attempted to obstruct justice is reportedly the main issue Mueller’s team is still investigating.
So how did the dossier get released? It’s important to remember that, for all of its treatment as some kind of “intelligence” report, the dossier was no sort of official intelligence at all. It was Clinton-funded opposition research. The tight wraps on the dossier came not from any government prohibition on its publication, but because the many media outlets in possession of the document were hesitant to make public claims that, for all their efforts, they had been unable to verify, confirm, or corroborate.
The origins of the dossier are by now well-known: Opposition research firm Fusion GPS hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile allegations of Trump misconduct involving Russia. From late spring 2016 through the election, Fusion GPS and Steele were paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with the money funneled through law firm Perkins Coie. During the waning weeks of the campaign, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson paraded Steele and his dossier before a select audience of major media, including such notables as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and CNN. Alas, the media were skittish and the Clinton campaign did not get the October surprise it had hoped for.
Before the election, Steele also managed to share his dossier with an alphabet soup of government agencies: He gave his materials to the Justice Department (in the person of Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie was paid by Fusion GPS to collaborate with Steele on the dossier); he gave them to the FBI (which used them to secure surveillance of Carter Page); he gave them to the State Department (in the person of his old friend Jonathan Winer).
After the election, Steele kept sharing. His claims made their way, in condensed form, into an official “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) presented by the intelligence community to both President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump. It was the fact of those briefings that provided the news hook media outlets needed to run the dossier story.
How did the media find out about the dossier being summarized in the ICA? The House committee majority reports that when it first asked Clapper, last July, about leaks of the ICA/dossier, Clapper “flatly denied ‘discuss[ing] the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists.’” In further interviews, the former DNI changed his story: “Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic.” Clapper talked to Tapper early in January 2017; January 10, 2017 CNN published a story co-bylined by Tapper revealing that there was a dossier of allegations against Trump that had been summarized by intelligence officials and presented to the president and president-elect.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD reached out to CNN about whether Clapper spoke with Tapper. A CNN spokesperson says “We do not comment on sourcing.” Clapper is now an official “national security analyst” for CNN.
On the heels of CNN’s reporting, BuzzFeed felt emboldened to go ahead and post the near-complete dossier.
The allegations worried Trump. As James Comey writes in his book, the new president kept coming back to the story that he had hired prostitutes to pee on a bed for him. In the Oval Office conversation that Comey claims included a demand for loyalty, he writes that Trump “brought up what he called the ‘golden showers thing,’” saying it “bothered him if there was ‘even a one percent chance’ his wife, Melania, thought it was true.” In their meetings, Trump repeatedly asked Comey that the FBI investigate the dossier to prove it untrue.
The president’s frustration with the FBI director seemed to grow out of Comey’s failure to put the dossier to rest. That can be seen, as many have seen it, as evidence that Trump was demanding a cover-up. Or it can be seen as evidence Trump was innocent of the allegations and overeager to have proof of that made public. Either way, the publication of the dossier lit the fuse.
But what of the bombshell allegations in the dossier—not the one about peeing prostitutes but the serious accusations that Trump conspired for years with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. The committee majority report’s “Finding #25” is the heart of matter. “When asked directly,” according to the report, “none of the interviewed witnesses provided evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.” If this holds true, then the entire Russia probe will prove to have been plenty of nothin’.
Democrats on the House Intel Committee say there is evidence of collusion to be found, but that Republicans have chosen not to look in earnest. They decry what they call “a lack of seriousness and interest in pursuing the truth.” The minority accuses Chairman Devin Nunes’ team of hobbling the investigation by “refusing to compel and enforce witness cooperation and answers to key questions.” If this proves to be true, House Republicans will have to answer for a shameful dereliction.
Making it unnecessarily difficult to judge which of these scenarios is to be believed are the aggressive and laughably inept redactions executed by the intelligence community’s Sharpie-pen brigade. (One is reminded of the maliciously comic way Yossarian approaches his job of censoring hospitalized soldiers’ mail in Catch 22.) For example, consider page 113 of the House Intel report: It begins with the sentence, “Former State Department official”—and then black marker redacts the name—“has stated publicly that, over a period of approximately two years, he provided over ‘100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department’…” This is downright silly. The interior quote in question comes from a Washington Post op-ed by former State Department official and longtime Steele pal Jonathan Winer. What possible sense does it make to redact Winer’s name from a report citing information that Winer has himself written ever-so-publicly in a newspaper?
When not redacting names that need no redacting, the sloppy censors fail to redact names they are trying to excise. Also on page 113, we are told that “[REDACTED] received from Clinton associate [REDACTED] information collected by an individual named [REDACTED] Shearer…” From Winer’s own Post op-ed, we know that the recipient of the information was Winer; we also know from the op-ed that the Clinton associate was the notorious Sidney Blumenthal. And as for the collector of the information, the op-ed tells us that was long-time Clinton hanger-on Cody Shearer. But we don’t need the op-ed to know that, because the official intelligence agency censor, having blacked out “Cody” (which comes at the end of a line in the document) fails to black out “Shearer” at the start of the next line of text.
Either the censors know their job is a joke, or they are simply negligent in executing their job. Neither speaks well of the intelligence community, especially when the controversy of the moment has come to turn so much on the credibility and transparency of federal intelligence agencies.
