Longish thread: the 2 main reasons the steele dossier is garbage

1) Steele desperately trying to get the thing to journalists (he contacted 17 reporters before 2016 election) should raise significant red flags if the document truly was based on reports from legit sources and informants whose lives would be endangered.

A true intel agent doesn't go around trying to leak his important work to the media.

2) This is the main reason: remarkably, it has gone unnoticed by everyone except Andrew McCarthy over at NR magazine.

Here is the million dollar reason: STEELE DID NOT HAVE FOREKNOWLEDGE THAT RUSSIA WAS BEHIND THE DNC HACKS. . The first time in the dossier that he mentions the hacks is only AFTER it became public and talked about in the news.

This is an integral development. Despite supposedly having legit sources (if he and the left are to be believed), he somehow did not find out about russia's main interference operation.

Here is andrew mccarthy

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On the matter of Russia’s culpability for hacking the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, Steele was just following the crowd. His vaunted Russian sources clearly gave him no foreknowledge about it, notwithstanding that he’d been poking around for Trump–Russia conspiracy evidence for well over a month by July 22, 2016, when publication of the DNC emails began.

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This opposition-research screed produced by the Clinton campaign did not, through Steele’s purportedly well-placed sources, foretell events. Rather, after events occurred, Steele wove them into the Democrats’ Trump-Russia conspiracy narrative.

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The dossier starts with a report dated June 20 (the infamous “pee tape” report), in which Steele claims that Russia has long been cultivating Trump, and that it has a “dossier” of “kompromat” (compromising information) related to Hillary Clinton that has been “collated by the Russian Intelligence Services for many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct.”

Notice: nothing about emails.

Remember: Assange’s June 12 interview occurred eight days before Steele’s first report, and it was widely reported in the British press. Yet, there is not even a hint in Steele’s report that Russia might have emails (whether from the DNC or from Clinton herself), much less that Russia passed emails along to WikiLeaks.

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Plainly, Steele uncovered neither the Russian hacking of DNC emails, nor that Russia used WikiLeaks to publish them. Steele had no foreknowledge even though, right up until the moment the emails were published, he was leaning heavily on what he and Simpson portrayed as Steele’s well-connected Russian sources. By the time Steele discussed the hacked emails in one of his faux “intelligence reports,” days had already passed since the Clinton campaign and the DNC began publicly blaming the Kremlin.

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Steele did not discover anything. He simply echoed the narrative that the Clinton campaign was already spouting, folding it into a document that he stamped “intelligence report.” The subsequent investigation by U.S. intelligence agencies, which concluded that Russia was behind the hacking, does not corroborate Steele. He was just repeating what lots of people were saying.

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Steele’s project was not intelligence-gathering. It was the crafting of a campaign narrative about a traitorous Trump–Russia espionage conspiracy, into which new developments were melded as they occurred. That’s why Steele and Simpson peddled the information to the media at the same time Steele was feeding it to the FBI and the Justice Department.

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