Does the media actually want to know the truth?

 

The controversy surrounding the “Steele Dossier,” which apparently is now “central” to the John Durham taxpayer waste of an investigation, reminds me of the controversy surrounding CBS News and its reporting about George W. Bush’s record in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968-1974, which cost Dan Rather his job. In a September, 2004 60 Minutes II show—while John Kerry was under attack for blatantly false accusations about his Vietnam War record—Rather reported that the deceased superior of Bush at the time, a Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, had composed memos in which he charged that he was pressured to alter or cover-up Bush’s poor service record by his own superiors.

The memos came under fire not because they told a false story; Killian’s secretary, Marian Knox, verified that in substance this was Killian’s true beliefs. But Knox claimed that she did not believe the specific memos had been typed by herself, although she did admit that she had typed out memos that said essentially the same thing, which of course would call into question her memory after more than three decades.

A decade later, as Paul Rosenberg observed in Salon as had other commentators, the essential facts of the case were not in question: Bush’s record in the National Guard failed to pass the smell test, that had the his superiors followed regulations, Bush would have been required to report to service in Vietnam; it was clear from the evidence that Bush was given preferential treatment to avoid both his required service in the Guard, but that his failures were not just overlooked by his superiors, but were purposely papered-over with false service reports.

While CNN and others was busy attacking Al Gore in 2000 about his “claim” of being the “inventor” of the Internet, Rosenberg noted that the cable news media was surprisingly uninterested in reports such as that of the Boston Globe in 2000, which found a one-year service gap in Bush’s six year enlistment in the Guard. Walter Robinson, who wrote the original story, followed up in 2004:

Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service—first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School—Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty. He didn’t meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. The 1973 document has been overlooked in news media accounts. The 1968 document has received scant notice.

Rosenberg noted that in 1972 Bush attempted to “transfer to a non-flying unit—a back door way of breaking his signed service agreement approved by his Texas superiors, but rejected at the federal level. He then failed to take a mandatory flight physical and was suspended from flying, stopped attending drills for at least six months, and was not observed by his superior officers for a full year (he never took another physical again, and was, apparently, never disciplined for it). A hurried spate of training unlawfully packed into a brief two-month period was then followed by his discharge from the Texas Air National Guard, but he never fulfilled his obligation to finish his service at a unit in Massachusetts when he returned to New England to get an MBA at Harvard Business School.”

There is much more to this story, but the essentials is that Bush joined the Texas Air National Guard to avoid service in Vietnam, and seemed to take his service obligations with all the seriousness you would expect from a pampered, privileged member of the “elite” who expected “daddy”—Prescott Bush—to take care of any “discrepancies” in his son’s service record. Even after his father passed away, Bush’s superiors apparently felt he was too “privileged” to be force to complete his service obligations—technically, he was AWOL during the periods in question—or to exact the same military punishments they would on any other service member.

Yet all that is remembered or given any “credence” was the allegedly “fake” Killian memos. Today, there is no “consensus” that the memos are in fact “fake,” and their general substance are clearly factual. And now we have CNN again reporting that in the Durham investigation some players are facing a “reckoning” over their role in putting together the Steele Dossier, which we should recall was not itself used as justification to begin the Russia investigation—meaning the Durham probe’s interest in this means they have reached a dead end in finding any more “culprits” in the FISA case, and is now off on a fishing expedition to find something more to justify itself.

So what exactly is in the Steele Dossier, whose central claim was that Trump campaign officials “cooperated” with the Russians to insure his election? It has been regarded as a “joke” in most quarters, and given little credence by most news outlets. Its sources have been called second and third hand, and “rumor.” The dossier was originally compiled by Fusion GPS for anti-Trump Republicans, and then passed on to the Democrats after Trump was nominated. Fusion, with information gathered by former intelligence agent Christopher Steele—who had a reputation for being a credible source of information with two decades of experience with Russia—was reportedly “alarmed” by what had been found and continued to employ Steele to gather information when it received funding from Democratic sources.

It is easy to pick apart the details of the Steele Dossier; what isn’t so easy is to pick apart its substance. Much of its “raw data” turned out to be true; while the Mueller Report only mentioned the Steele Dossier once, to disclaim its information in regard to Michael Cohen, the fact is that it backed many of the charges that originated in the dossier.

Among them was that Paul Manafort sought the “cooperation” of Russian interests in the Ukraine, to serve as “go-betweens” for the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Whether there was a “conspiracy” to do so or not seems irrelevant. The Mueller Report did conclude that there were a “myriad” of “secret contacts” between at least individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russians to help Trump win. As even CNN reported at the time, the Mueller Report’s collection of Manafort’s communications with Russian operatives to damage Hillary Clinton were “remarkably consistent with the raw intelligence in the Steele Dossier.”

The Steele Dossier also correctly revealed the payouts to Manafort by the pro-Russia Ukrainian businessman and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska in order to influence the election and policy toward Russia. Manafort had also worked with pro-Russia former president of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, before the latter was forced to flee to Russia before he could follow up on an "untraceable" $12 million payout to Manafort for his “services”; a "black ledger"that was discovered appeared to show that Manafort did in fact receive some of that secret money.

In regard to the Steele Dossier’s claim about Russian hacking of DNC servers, again it proved to be mostly true. The Mueller Report confirmed its essential findings that the Kremlin and Russian intelligence was behind the hacking, as well as supporting the WikiLeaks dumps, and that Trump was supportive of continuing leaks behind the scenes. In fact, it was reported that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange conspired with Russian hackers in the timing of the dumps to embarrass the Democrats. In 2017, Trump sent pro-Russia Rep. Dana Rohrabacker to offer Assange a pardon if he agreed to cover up Russian involvement in the leaks.

Roger Stone had at least some first-hand knowledge of the leaks before they were even leaked, suggesting that there was “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks—and thus with the Russians. It should be noted, however, that the Mueller Report was remarkably coy about the infamous Trump Tower meeting attended by Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, brushing aside the illegality of the intention to gain information from a foreign agent to disrupt the election.

Allegations against Carter Page in the Steele Dossier was problematic, but only because of the perpetrator, Page, was less than forthcoming about his contacts with Kremlin and Russian business figures like Putin’s right hand man, Igor Sechin. Page was fanatically pro-Russia and pro-Putin, and was rightly suspected of being open to espionage by the Russians. Although he was “hired” to provide information to the CIA in regard to his Russia contacts, this came to nothing. When Page’s Russia-love became known to Trump, he suggested that he would be a good foreign policy “advisor”—meaning Page would say whatever Trump wanted to hear about Russia. Page was apparently initially seen by the Russians as a conduit to Trump, but he soon revealed himself to be an incompetent bungler, and was cast aside by Trump when he was viewed as an embarrassment and no longer useful.

The so-called “golden shower” incident in the Presidential Suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013 was a claim open to doubt if not ridicule. Steele claimed to have received this information from seven sources, although Steele himself suggested he was only “50-50” about this actually happening. Did Trump hate Barack Obama enough to have prostitutes “pee” on the bed he slept on? Knowing how vindictive and petty-minded Trump is, it is somehow far from fanciful; after all, he was the principle supporter of the “birther” hoax.

The hotel itself was “staffed” by intelligence agents and sex workers, and the rooms all had secret recording devices. Trump apparently was “concerned” about a possible tape of him with three prostitutes in an elevator at the time. An alleged tape of a “pee” incident in the hotel room does show such occurring, but it is regarded as “fake” because it is not clear that Trump is present, or that it was recorded during the time Trump was at the hotel.

Nevertheless, the belief that Russia had “compromising” information on Trump led many to suspect that it was the reason that Trump caved in to Vladimir Putin’s obvious lie that Russia had not been engaged in widespread election interference at the Helsinki conference in 2018. Putin is a professional liar, so his denials mean nothing. However, a 2020 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report stated that it could not prove that the Russian did have “compromising” information on Trump, although it could not be disproven either, given Trump’s apparent preference for Slavic women, Russian or otherwise, and his disturbing, suspect behavior at the Helsinki conference.

Also problematic was the allegation that Trump fixer Michael Cohen was in Prague to payoff hackers and cover-up evidence of Trump campaign officials colluding with the Russians. The Mueller Report basically took Cohen’s word that he was not there, although it is interesting to note if he was there, those would be the kind of things he was tasked by Trump to do. If there was no proof that Cohen was in Prague for that purpose, Steele has insisted that while Cohen may not have been in Prague, he was certain Cohen was somewhere in Europe at the time.  And would Cohen really want to admit to something like this? This went far beyond his usual tasks of paying off porn stars and Playboy models.

The recent reporting of CNN’s Marshall Cohen appears to be after the “big story,” but it seems to be more focused on the involvement of Democratic operatives in funding the Steele Dossier rather than examining whether it contained actual truth. The fascination with the “credibility” of the sources has obscured the general truth of the information they gave. In an interview with ABC News recently, Steele vehemently defended his dossier; while much of it admittedly contained “raw,” unverified data, in fact very little of it has been proven to be entirely false, and most it to be mostly correct. Steele blamed much of the criticism on the dossier on the lack of experience or knowledge of the nuances Russian society or politics by the FBI and news reporters. He admitted that some of the information he found “hasn’t stood up,” but the basic tenor of the dossier has.

Critics of the Steele Dossier should remember how the media handled the Bush case, and how wrong they were to dismiss the allegations about Bush simply because of questions about the Killian memo—when everything in it was essentially true. As Rosenberg pointed out, the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee did not cave in to criticism when Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were accused of a tiny “fib” concerning a grand jury inquiring if H.R. Haldeman was in control of Richard Nixon’s slush fund. They hadn’t in fact asked that question, but the undeniable truth was that in fact it was true that Haldeman was guilty. Bradlee stood his ground and did not fire Bernstein and Woodward, and their reporting on Watergate was allowed to continue to its conclusion—the resignation of a president.

Today, the media—and cable news in particular—doesn’t seem to have the same backbone to pursue the truth to the end—or even have the capacity to do so. The media just seems to be fearful of their corporate sponsors and the extremist right to find out the truth—and that includes not recognizing that the purpose of the Durham investigation is not to uncover the truth—but to conceal it.