...The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele remains a subject of fascination"or, depending on your perspective, scorn. Indeed, it was much discussed during former FBI Director Jim Comey's testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 7. Published almost two years ago by BuzzFeed News in January 2017, the document received significant public attention, first for its lurid details regarding Donald Trump's pre-presidential alleged sexual escapades in Russia and later for its role in forming part of the basis for the government's application for a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page.
Our interest in revisiting the compilation that has come to be called the "Steele Dossier" concerns neither of those topics, at least not directly. Rather, we returned to the document because we wondered whether information made public as a result of the Mueller investigation"and the passage of two years"has tended to buttress or diminish the crux of Steele's original reporting....
The dossier is actually a series of reports"16 in all"that total 35 pages. Written in 2016, the dossier is a collection of raw intelligence. Steele neither evaluated nor synthesized the intelligence. He neither made nor rendered bottom-line judgments. The dossier is, quite simply and by design, raw reporting, not a finished intelligence product.
In that sense, the dossier is similar to an FBI 302 form or a DEA 6 form. Both of those forms are used by special agents of the FBI and DEA, respectively, to record what they are told by witnesses during investigations. The substance of these memoranda can be true or false, but the recording of information is (or should be) accurate. In that sense, notes taken by a special agent have much in common with the notes that a journalist might take while covering a story"the substance of those notes could be true or false, depending on what the source tells the journalist, but the transcription should be accurate.
With that in mind, we thought it would be worthwhile to look back at the dossier and to assess, to the extent possible, how the substance of Steele's reporting holds up over time. In this effort, we considered only information in the public domain from trustworthy and official government sources, including documents released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office in connection with the criminal cases brought against Paul Manafort, the 12 Russian intelligence officers, the Internet Research Agency trolling operation and associated entities, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. We also considered the draft statement of offense released by author Jerome Corsi, a memorandum released by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff related to the Carter Page FISA applications and admissions directly from certain speakers.
These materials buttress some of Steele's reporting, both specifically and thematically. The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven....
[emphasis mine]
Note that "none of it has been disproven" does not mean "all of it has been proven."
