Final Stake in the Steele Dossier and Russiagate

Can pretty confidently say it didn't have any impact on the election because it wasn't made public until Jan 2017

 

He’s allowed his point of view. He stated it within the rules of the forum. It is coming from what appears to be a reputable source.

 

Actually it was initially reported a few days before the 2016 election.

But I would guess that it had about as much impact on the election as did any foreign misinformation campaigns on social media.

A veteran spy has given the FBI information alleging a Russian operation to cultivate Donald Trump

 

The dossier may not have come to light until after the election, but the allegations were leaked, and there was definitely a buzz about its contents.

E.g.--the mythical pee tape was sourced to the dossier, ex post facto.

 

Groundhog day all over again here.

Comey announced the re-opening of the Hilary email investigation 11 days before the election on Oct 28th.

Yes Mother Jones had an article, but far more prominent is the NY Times story about Trump and Russia was the NY Times on Oct 31st claiming the FBI found no links between Russia and Trump (later shown to be untrue)

Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia (Published 2016)

While we can never know the impact either way, on the one hand you have the FBI publicly announcing an investigation into Hillary and on the other you have the FBI downplaying the investigation into Trump through the NY Times. You can call it subjective but it's pretty obvious to me who the FBI hurt more. Did any of it impact the election results? Impossible to say.

 

It also seems relevant to mention since this was originally a bash the media thread that the NY Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Yahoo! News, and CNN were all briefed on the Dossier in Sept 2016 per the Senate investigation:
(https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CFH Timeline w Updates 20201203 (FINAL).pdf):

Sept. 21, 2016: At the direction of Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele briefs the N.Y. Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Yahoo! News, and CNN.

And then the NY Times, Washington Post, and Slate were briefed again in late October 2016:

Late October 2016: Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussman shares information with reporters from the N.Y. Times (Eric Lichtblau), Washington Post (Ellen Nakashima), and Slate (Franklin Foer), and this information was later reported in news articles in late October and early November 2016.

The mainstream press was briefed twice and yet they declined to report on the Dossier before the election. Seems out of character for the corrupt media that's solely out to get Trump, no?

 

So, the MSM didn’t want Hillary as potus? That’s interesting ….. the feds and MSM may have colluded to help Trump.

 

No, actually it just showed some degree of professional ethics. They (along with the idiot, Comey) may have unwittingly helped Trump in those final weeks in how those stories were handled. The media certainly was “out to get” Trump both before and after the election. Guy oozes corruption, so the media was actually correct to pursue all of that.

The Mueller report and Senate intel report actually backed up the vast majority of WaPo and NYT reporting. Of course as most of the reporting was leaks and anonymous tips, it was not going to be as perfect as hard documents, and how could it be? Even the documents finally released by Mueller and Senate intel are heavily redacted. Media reporting around the time of the election was leaked bits and pieces of these investigative threads. But most of it proved out, which is not all of that surprising as the “sources” were almost certainly FBI director and higher ups in DOJ. While certain stories may have had issues, to try and frame the big picture as wholly inaccurate or the investigation itself as “a hoax” is a bit ludicrous. Other than a hardcore Trump operative pushing a narrative, only a person who didn’t actually read the Mueller Report and Senate Intel report could possibly suggest this “hoax” narrative.

 

Your post seems to be implying that it was only Buzzfeed. You are either being erroneous or disengenuous. The entire media machine was reporting this full throttle for hours before the statement was released. Nice try but you aren’t going to reshape that story. The case I referenced here is only one of the hundreds of examples of exactly what the Columbia paper was referring to. You can parse words all you want but you can’t slither away from what the report is saying.

 

It was Buzzfeed. Yes, some other members of the media brought up the report, but it was Buzzfeed's report and I don't believe another media outlet reported it as anything other than that Buzzfeed had reported it, which would be accurate.

It is interesting when called out for inaccuracy, you go to the defense of "parsing words" to deflect from your own accuracy issues but call out others for inaccuracy without any specificity whatsoever. Basically, you are engaging in truthiness, it feels right to you and you would prefer the general tenor of this article, so it doesn't matter whether a claim is accurate or not.

 

Okay, back to my original question, how did the actions of a foreign entity (government) posting misinformation on social media impact the 2016 election? There appears to be no evidence such activity caused any US voter to (1) not vote or (2) change their vote from one major party candidate to the other. I suspect anyone active on social media prior to the 2016 election was exposed to far more communications (including misinformation) from candidates, entities supporting each of the candidates, and the MSM, itself. Seemingly, the federal government (ie DOJ/FBI) and the MSM had a far greater impact on the election than any foreign entity. Now, we should ask ourselves .... was the MSM and DOJ impact a good thing for the US?

Lots of scrutiny of foreign entities ..... when the worst enemy of the American voter may be misinformation and subjectivity of the MSM, the DOJ/FBI, and the political campaigns themselves.

 

As I recall, the media that did follow Buzzfeed and put it “out there” pretty explicitly stated it was not verified and was essentially to be taken with a grain of salt. The Steele dossier was never suggested by anyone to be 100% true. This is why most media held the dossier itself back until after the election, and when Buzzfeed put it out the rest of the media always had a disclaimer “not independently verified”.

Of course the dossier, as one would expect based on its nature as a compilation of “dirt”, contained many items that were generally “on the mark” but had specific details that were inaccurate or unverifiable.

 

You won't be able to causally state that as we don't have access to a world in which Russia didn't do those things and those same two candidates ran under similar (or preferably identical) conditions by which to compare. You can't even run an A-B test or utilize variance in the treatment (which, in this case, is accessing Russian activity to promote Trump's candidacy) to utilize some sort of causal inference method.

There is obviously an issue of attribution here. Let's take a step outside of politics and think about the impact of promotional activity on people. Let's say that I go to the grocery store and ask the next 1,000 people I see buy Cheerios whether they did this because of a TV commercial for Cherrios. I'd expect an extremely small percentage of people would attribute their behavior to that promotional activity. And yet, there is strong data to suggest that advertising influences the sales of products, with a variety of identification strategies recently used. How do we square those facts? Mostly by pointing out that much of the impact of influence occurs at a less than conscious level, making it hard to attribute the success of a promotion at a single consumer level.

As such, you are asking a fundamentally un-observable question. Could it have impacted the vote? Quite possibly. Will we ever know for sure? No. Does that mean it should be ignored? Also no.

 

And you missed the substance of the issue ….. disinformation and subsequent misinformation by domestic entities not aligned with a foreign government ….. ie MSM, DOJ, and political campaigns …. potentially and likely have a far greater impact on an election than any foreign entity.

Nowhere have I asserted foreign disinformation activities should be ignored. However, I believe many are intentionally overstating the impact of such activities without any factual basis and purely for political purposes

 

One issue is that you are implying a common cause in those entities, which have very distinct goals and motives. For example, you imply that "the MSM" is an entity, when, in reality, media properties are owned by a series of competing for-profit corporations.

The second issue is that there is no substantial evidence of "disinformation" put into the public prior to the election by the DOJ. At best, you could point to the Hillary investigation re-opening, which came out of the office whose leader has now been indicted for collusion with Russians, but the investigation was re-opened for that week, so it is difficult to call that disinformation.

Third, political campaigns are motivated entities with the goal of electing their candidate. They are given fairly wide latitude to do so by the First Amendment, which includes the right to lie as long as you avoid defamation/slander. The idea is supposed to be that people are supposed to be aware of this fact and take what the campaigns say with a grain of salt due to the obvious motivation.

You are seeming to try to diminish the impact of foreign disinformation with these posts, questioning their impact while not doing the same to your own claims or questioning why that should even matter (i.e., if the Russian disinformation had a tiny effect, but that effect swung a close election, would the fact that the effect was smaller than other marketing communications matter?).

 

It is important to remember that trump’s campaign manager, Manafort worked for the Oligarch Deripaska previous to trump. Russia tried to meddle in the Ukraine election and got caught at it. Manafort owed Deripaska a considerable sum of money and Manafort wanted to know if his working for trump would clear the debt. McGonical the NY FBI counterintelligence agent investigating the trump campaign was just arrested for taking money from Deripaska.
The Russian interest in our elections is pervasive and ongoing

 

I distinctly recall Comey expressly acting well beyond his authority to expressly exonerate Hillary, while the Intel community sat silently by and let the stink of impending investigation linger over Trump (before altogether losing their collective shit for the next four years trying to implement their insurance policy).

 

I’m unable to diminish the impact of foreign entity disinformation on a US election when there is no substantive evidence this disinformation had any impact on an election. But clearly, many domestic entities (many of which should not) promulgate disinformation and distribute misinformation in an effort to influence elections and quite likely have far greater impact than any foreign entity active on social media.

 

He did. Then he un-exonerated Clinton mere weeks before the election. But the “exoneration” was not the origin point of Comey stepping out of line. According to DOJ policy Comey never should have acknowledged an investigation into Clinton in the first place. He was correct to not acknowledge any investigation into Trump one way or the other (barring the creation of a special council). That is DoJ policy, it’s not DoJ prerogative to tamp down media speculation.

Comey

1. (a) acknowledged an investigation into Clinton (inappropriate).
   
   
2. exonerated her before the media(inappropriate, but necessary after #1).
   
   
3. Then unbelievably, weeks before the election he announced the investigation was re-opened (my memory eludes me, but I believe it was Wieners’s laptop that led to this).

Obama technically should have fired him when he stepped out of line, but likely didn’t want to create an appearance of impropriety of interfering with the investigation into Clinton. “Appearance of impropriety”, something Trump had no qualms with.

 

By those standards, there is no substantive evidence that it didn't solely decide the election (it likely didn't, but there is no substantive evidence to suggest that it didn't). Again, I explain, in detail, the issue with attribution.

Yeah, this is the handwaving to avoid an uncomfortable truth: that a hostile foreign government attempted to influence the election in favor of your preferred candidate, who then won, because they viewed him as useful to their interests.

Conflating your perspectives of bias of a variety of competing media outlets with an intentional campaign by which to influence the election by a foreign government as if they are similar acts is obviously fallacious.