The Steele Dossier Redux

Here we go again!

Under a three-reporter (including notable RussiaGater Luke Harding) byline, the Guardian today published a story, purportedly based on leaked Kremlin documents, claiming that Vladimir Putin himself authorized “a secret spy agency operation to support a ‘mentally unstable’ Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election.”

Apparently, during a Jan. 22, 2016, closed-session Russian national security council meeting, Putin ordered his “spy agencies” to “find practical ways to support Trump.” A report allegedly prepared by “Putin’s expert department” recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.

The Guardian claims that this “report”—presumably the basis of the “leaked” documents—appears to be “genuine.” How does it know? Well, that was the the finding of the “independent experts” to whom the paper had showed the documents. No prizes for guessing the identity of these “independent experts.” No one other the Guardian and its “experts” has seen this material.

The fraudulence of these documents is apparent from the beginning. Consider this: The Russians, the Guardian reports, are said to have made a “psychological assessment of Trump,” and had determined him to be “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.”

However, this is does not remotely sound like a Russian assessment of Trump. It does not in any way resemble what Russian leaders or Russian media have said about Trump. Both Putin and Lavrov have addressed the subject of Trump at length on numerous occasions. Trump, in their view, is a very talented, clever individual who sought to move the United States away from Cold War dogmas when it came to relations with Russia and to the U.S.’s role in the world but who, ultimately, was done in by powerful domestic forces that he was unable or unwilling to bring under control. You can agree or disagree with this assessment. However, never once, have Russians belittled or dismissed him.

The description of Trump as “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex” is one that is likely to come out of the mouths of the hosts and guests of CNN and MSNBC. It also happens to be a view of Trump held by much of the U.K. foreign policymaking elite and security services top brass. Recall Kim Darroch, the former U.K. ambassador to Washington, who was forced to resign his post following publication of cables in which he described Trump as “inept,” “insecure” and “incompetent.”

Here we come then to the likely origin of this supposed Kremlin “leak.” The people behind it are almost certainly the same cast of characters that gave us the debunked, absurd Steele Dossier. Remember Christopher Steele had been a senior MI6 officer who, though retired when he compiled his infamous dossier, was working in plain view of MI6, which was very well aware of his dossier from the summer of 2016 on.

The Guardian story even hearkens back to the centerpiece of the Steele Dossier: the famous “kompromat.” The Russians were supposed to have collected secret, damaging material on Trump that they could hold over him in order to get him to do their bidding. Here is today’s report:

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected... from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory.”

Apparently “certain events” were said to have taken place during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Note what the Guardian slyly wants to do here. It wants to suggest that maybe there was some truth to the Steele Dossier after all, while carefully avoiding any explicit reference to the notorious “events” that the Steele Dossier had described so vividly and that made it such a sensation: the so-called pee tape.

According to the dossier, germaphobe Trump—a man who had spend his life in the hotel business and who was thus very knowledgeable about CCTVs and secret cameras in hotel rooms—had supposedly paid Russian prostitutes to pee on him. The story was ludicrous from the start, and it was eventually shown to have been been made up out of whole cloth.

There remains an intriguing question: Why would Russia want Donald Trump to win? In 2016 and in the years immediately following, the RussiaGate purveyors told us that the Russians favored Trump because Trump would pursue policies favorable to Russia: withdrawal from NATO, withdrawal from Syria, “abandonment” of Ukraine. Once none of these horrific outcomes materialized, the RussiaGate story changed. Apparently, the Russians supported Trump because he would sow chaos, and the Russians supposedly love chaos. No evidence has ever been produced to substantiate the claim that the Russians like chaos. To the contrary: Russia is a stickler for stability. It doesn’t matter who is running a country as long as it’s facilitating a steady commercial, diplomatic interaction with the rest of the world.

It is no surprise therefore to find today’s Guardian story, based though it purportedly is on a document prepared in January 2016, claiming that the Russians favored a Trump victory because it would “definitely lead to the destabilization of the U.S.’s sociopolitical system.” This statement alone proves that this document had to have been written long after 2016. Back in 2016, we had been asked to believe that, because the Russians had something on Trump, he was helping the Russians to secure their foreign policy goals. Remember the tedious, discredited story that Trump softened the GOP platform on Ukraine? Once Trump began to pursue a policy on Ukraine that was more overtly anti-Russian than that of his predecessor, that story had to change. The new story was that the Russians wanted Trump to win, not because they had any specific policy goals in mind but because they simply wanted to sow chaos for the sake of chaos. And that is exactly the story line the Guardian’s new documents push.

Revealingly, the Guardian admits that the documents make no mention of Hillary Clinton. That is definitely very strange. You would have thought that in 2016 the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been very much on the minds of the leaders of the Kremlin. But no! Apparently, Hillary Clinton who everybody expected to win the presidential election interested the Russians not in the slightest. Their focus was exclusively on Trump, who everybody expected to lose by a landslide. This again is very clear evidence that this material was compiled long after 2016.

Who’s behind the “Kremlin leak”? Who compiled this material? It is not hard to figure out. Without a doubt it is the same characters who masterminded the RussiaGate hoax: the CIA, the NSA, GCHQ, MI6, the FBI. They are under no illusion that Trump won't run in 2024. So they are getting their “RussiaGate: The Sequel” story ready to go as early as possible. The material is tiresomely familiar, but the intelligence services have never been known to make drastic changes to their basic script.