Russia ‘Dossier’ Based on 10-Year-Old Wall Street Journal

 

Lee Smith of Tablet magazine has traced the origins of the Russia “dossier” — the Democrat-funded opposition research project that may have laid the foundations for the ongoing Russia investigation — to several Wall Street Journal articles that appeared in print a decade ago.

Smith’s article, “Did President Obama Read the ‘Steele Dossier’ in the White House Last August?”, suggests that the information compiled by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, with funding from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, could have been repackaged as genuine U.S. government intelligence and presented to President Barack Obama on that basis as his administration began investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Smith recounts how the “dossier” likely prompted the surveillance and investigation of aides to Donald Trump by the Obama administration, and efforts to delegitimize the incoming administration.
He notes:

[I]f a sitting president used the instruments of state, including the intelligence community, to disseminate and legitimize a piece of paid opposition research in order to first obtain warrants to spy on the other party’s campaign, and then to de-legitimize the results of an election once the other party’s candidate won, we’re looking at a scandal that dwarfs Watergate—a story not about a bad man in the White House, but about the subversion of key security institutions that are charged with protecting core elements of our democratic process while operating largely in the shadows.

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