On Wednesday, President Trump held a lengthy back-and-forth with reporters, where he blasted the media and the Democrats over a new report alleging that the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign funded the infamous Steele Dossier, which contained many unverified allegations connecting Trump with Russia.
Trump stated, “The whole Russia thing … this was the Democrats coming up with an excuse for losing the election. They lost it and they lost it very badly. And they didn’t know what to say, so they made up the whole Russia hoax.” So far, so good — although we must note that Donald Trump Jr. explicitly took a meeting with a supposedly Russian-government-connected lawyer promising Hilary Clinton opposition research, and that Cambridge Analytica’s Alexander Nixwrote to Julian Assange looking to coordinate release regarding Clinton’s missing emails. Nonetheless, there is no evidence of actual collusion to this point.
Trump continued, “Now it’s turning out that the hoax is turned around, and you look at what’s opened with Russia and the uranium deal and the fake dossier, and it’s all turned around.”
Trump isn’t wrong here, either, at least with regard to the uranium deal — we now know that the FBI and DOJ were aware that the Russians were participating in corruption as they gave the Clinton Foundation cash at the same time the State Department approved the sale of 20% of American uranium to Rosatom, the Russian atomic agency. Trump rightly railed against the uranium corruption: “I think the uranium sale to Russia and the way it was done so underhanded with tremendous amounts of money being passed, I think that’s Watergate modern age.”
But Trump has no facts to support the notion that the Steele dossier involved collusion with Russia.
In order to substantiate that claim, we’d need to know two things: first, that the Russians were using spy Christopher Steele as a thoroughfare for misinformation about Trump, and second, that the DNC and Hillary campaign knew it and paid for the report specifically for that reason. That’s a heavy lift, and there’s no evidence for either contention at this point.
There should be ample suspicion, however, that the FBI used the DNC-funded Steele dossier as an excuse to open FISA-approved wiretaps on Trump associates. If the FBI knew that the Steele dossier wasn’t credible — or if they suspected that it had been funded as opposition research, and therefore should have been taken with a grain of salt — and then used it anyway, that would be scandalous.
Hillary Clinton’s team isn’t helping itself — Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon stated, “I personally wasn’t aware of this [dossier] during the campaign,” adding that if he had been aware, “I would have had no problem passing it along and urging reporters to look into it.”