The Steele Dossier Set the Stage for a Mueller Letdown
The seeds of the disappointment that many adversaries of Donald Trump felt this week, when Attorney General William Barr published his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, were sown in January 2017, with the publication of what would become known as the Steele dossier.
Less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, CNN reported on the existence of a memo summarizing intelligence reports about Trump and Russia, compiled by a former British-intelligence operative named Christopher Steele for the research firm Fusion GPS. And a few hours later, BuzzFeed published the document, a collection of unverified intelligence that ran the gamut from troubling to salacious, in full.
The editor in chief Ben Smith told me Thursday that he doesn’t regret the decision to publish it in
