If we bend and twist credulity, and assume Christopher Steele did extract highly secret info about a Russian plot to hand the election to Trump and then control Trump as a Russian asset -- if we assume all that to be true, well, we have just uncovered a MAJOR FRACTURE in the Russian intelligence establishment.
We have uncovered a volatile rebellion in the Russian ranks, a rebellion against Putin himself. This rebellion is so relentless, the Russian instigators are willing to risk life and limb to forward it.
Their hostility toward Putin is so great, they've picked this operation -- Russia influencing the US election on behalf of Trump -- to torpedo the president of Russia.
If you were Putin, what could you do? The answer is obvious, and what you could do would be quite effective:
"All right, men, I've brought you here because I trust you, and I'd better be right in that trust. I want you to collect every shred of information that exists on this British spy, Steele, going all the way back to when he was first stationed in Moscow. I want to know everyone he knew, everyone he had coffee and drinks and lunches and dinner with -- every single Russian. I want you to unearth every detail, and find out who he tapped a year ago, when he put together this Trump dossier. Give me names. Don't fail."
Of course, these Russians who supposedly handed over key information to Steele already knew, at the time, that this would happen. They would be hounded and most likely exposed. But...they didn't care. They were willing to go to the wall.
OR...Steele never accumulated all the information in the Trump dossier. He made unwarranted leaps of inference. He inflated information. He invented key facts. He wanted to satisfy his employers, GPS Fusion, Hillary Clinton, and the DNC. They wanted dirt on Trump, and he gave them dirt.
For example, Steele claims, in the Trump dossier, that he discovered Russians hacked the DNC servers, extracted thousands of emails, and passed them on WikiLeaks. The implication is, Russian operatives told Steele about the plot.
As we know, there has been a great deal of discussion around this point. Was there a hack of DNC emails, or was it a leak from inside the DNC? Without trying to draw a final conclusion from myriad technical and political analysis, I'll point to a statement, published in The Nation, by several analysts from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS):
"For more than a year, we have been pointing out that any data acquired by a hack would have had to come across the Internet. The blanket coverage of the Internet by the NSA, its UK counterpart GCHQ, and others would be able to produce copies of that data and show where the data originated and where it went. But US intelligence has produced no evidence that hacking by Russia led to it acquiring the DNC e-mails and passing them on to WikiLeaks."
That's a cogent point. If Steele really did extract a confession from Russian intelligence officials pointing to a Russian hack of the DNC emails, why doesn't the NSA or GCHQ confirm it and show us the evidence?
All in all, Steele has built a Trump dossier based on his highly questionable access to Russian intelligence professionals. If at this point, he cares about convincing us he's on the level, he'll have to do a lot of talking. At a recent photo op, he declined to comment on anything more than how happy he was to get back to work for his current private-sector company, Chawton Holdings. Otherwise, he was a silent bland egg.
That isn't going to cut it.
We're left with a fantastical story about his penetration of Russian higher-ups. Daniel Craig could play the Steele role in a Netflix series, and a bunch of good Russian actors who've been hanging around since the early James Bond movies, hoping for work, could step in, but beyond that, Steele has nothing to offer.
I'm working on the Netflix script. Here are the first few lines:
Steele: Hi, Ivan, remember me?
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