![]() authorities. The Kremlin also feared that the U.S. According to the report, Trump campaign operative Carter Page is also said to have played a role in shuttling information to Moscow, while Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, reportedly took over efforts after Manafort left the campaign, allegedly providing cash payments for Russian hackers. In one account, Putin and his aides expressed concern over kickbacks of cash to Manafort from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, which they feared might be discoverable by U.S. They allege that former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort managed the plot to exploit political information on Hillary Clinton in return for information on Russian oligarchs outside Russia, and an agreement to “sideline” Ukraine as a campaign issue. Subsequent reports provide additional detail about the possible conspiracy, which includes information about cyberattacks against the U.S. The first two-and-a-half page report was dated June 20, 2016, and entitled “Company Intelligence Report 2016/080.” It starts with several summary bullets and continues with additional detail attributed to sources A through E and G (there may be a source F but part of the report is blacked out). The report makes a number of explosive claims, all of which at the time of the report were unknown to the public. Let me illustrate what the reports contain by unpacking the first and most notorious of the 17 Orbis reports, and then move to some of the other ones. ![]() presidential candidate Donald Trump.” Thus, the reports are not an attempt to connect the dots, but instead an effort to uncover new and potentially relevant dots in the first place. Steele’s product is not a report delivered with a bow at the end of an investigation. Instead, it is a series of contemporaneous raw reports that do not have the benefit of hindsight. Among the unnamed sources are “a senior Russian foreign ministry official,” “a former top-level intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,” and “a close associate of Republican U.S. And this form of reporting is often a critical product in putting together more final intelligence assessments. When disseminating a raw intelligence report, an intelligence agency is not vouching for the accuracy of the information provided by the report’s sources and/or subsources. Rather it is claiming that it has made strenuous efforts to validate that it is reporting accurately what the sources/subsources claim has happened. The onus for sorting out the veracity and for putting the reporting in context against other reporting-which may confirm or disconfirm the reporting-rests with the intelligence community’s professional analytic cadre. In the case of the dossier, Orbis was not saying that everything that it reported was accurate, but that it had made a good-faith effort to pass along faithfully what its identified insiders said was accurate. This is routine in the intelligence business. I spent almost 30 years producing what CIA calls “raw reporting” from human agents. At heart, this is what Orbis did. They were not producing finished analysis, but were passing on to a client distilled reporting that they had obtained in response to specific questions. So how should we unpack the Steele dossier from an intelligence perspective? News editors affixed the terms “unverified” and “unsubstantiated” to all discussion of the issue. Political supporters of President Trump simply tagged it as “fake news.” Riding that wave, legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward characterized the report as “garbage.” Trump himself publicly refuted the story, while Trump associates denied reported details about their engagement with Russian officials. A lot of ink and pixels were also spent on the question whether it was appropriate for the media to publish the dossier.Īlmost immediately after the dossier was leaked, media outlets and commentators pointed out that the material was unproven. The greatest attention was paid to the first report, which conveyed salacious claims about Trump consorting with prostitutes in Moscow in 2013. intelligence officials about Russia’s active efforts to undermine the 2016 election. Taken together, the series of reports painted a picture of active collusion between the Kremlin and key Trump campaign officials based on years of Russian intelligence work against Trump and some of his associates. This seemed to complement general statements from U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |