Over the weekend, the New York Times published a piece that effectively confirmed what many the president's defenders have been arguing for quite some time - namely, that the infamous dossier was full of false or unsupportable claims about then-candidate Trump.
Russian intelligence had used bribery and blackmail to try to turn Donald J. Trump into a source and ally, it said, and the Kremlin was running some Trump campaign aides practically as agents.
The release on Thursday of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months - that while many Trump aides had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove.
Now the dossier - financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele - is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries.
The Justice Department's inspector general is considering whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly relied on the dossier in applying to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a Trump adviser.
The Times story goes on to describe the supposed 'intelligence' contained in the explosive anti-Trump file as "Rumors and hearsay" relayed through a "High stakes game of telephone." It notes how many partisans on social media and various media outlets fixated on the dossier's contents "Almost daily over the past two years," with many critics of the president swallowing whole the picture it painted of a man thoroughly compromised by the Russian government.
Other dossier assertions remain neither proved nor disproved.... We also now know that another core claim of the dossier - that Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to meet with a Russian asset - is false.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2019/04/22/nyt-steele-dossier-may-have-contained-antitrump-disinformation-fed-to-democrats-bythe-russians-n2545117
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