House Report Claims DNI Clapper Engineered Dossier Release

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The Weekly Standard

How that might have been the act that got us the special counsel investigation.

Eric Felten

April 27 2018

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence majority report on its Russia probe is out—not counting the copious redactions imposed by intelligence agencies. Given what’s blacked out in the document, it’s a surprise that “the” and “but” were generally spared. Even so, some significant allegations survived the intelligence community’s bowdlerizers.

For example, it was quickly noted by scholars of the Steele dossier that the House document reveals (or, if one is dubious of the House Intel majority’s credibility, one can say “asserts” instead) that it was President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who helped engineer the public release of the dossier. That release may well be the essential act in producing the special counsel investigation that continues to hang over the Trump administration.

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So how did the dossier get released? It’s important to remember that, for all of its treatment as some kind of “intelligence” report, the dossier was no sort of official intelligence at all. It was Clinton-funded opposition research. The tight wraps on the dossier came not from any government prohibition on its publication, but because the many media outlets in possession of the document were hesitant to make public claims that, for all their efforts, they had been unable to verify, confirm, or corroborate.

The origins of the dossier are by now well-known: Opposition research firm Fusion GPS hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile allegations of Trump misconduct involving Russia. From late spring 2016 through the election, Fusion GPS and Steele were paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with the money funneled through law firm Perkins Coie. During the waning weeks of the campaign, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson paraded Steele and his dossier before a select audience of major media, including such notables as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and CNN. Alas, the media were skittish and the Clinton campaign did not get the October surprise it had hoped for.

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H/T Power Line

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