The Misinformation in the Steele Dossier Was Likely a Russian Operation to Help . . . Donald Trump? Yes, Donald Trump.

A piping hot take, you say? No, it's the only take that makes sense.

Above: one of the greatest victims of all history, like we have never seen before. And yet, the beneficiary of Russian disinformation. Photo via Gage Skidmore.

Many facts “revealed” by the recent John Durham report were things we already knew, but which Trump superfans greeted like New Information of Government Corruption. Among these allegedly new but actually old facts is the capital-R Revelation that the Steele dossier contained misinformation about Donald Trump.

Here’s what nobody is telling you, but I will tell you: the misinformation in the Steele dossier was almost certainly a Russian operation, not to hurt Donald Trump, but to help him.

You heard me right: to help him.

You could have guessed that from the headline, of course.

Is this just a crazed hot take from a functionary of the #Resistance (that would be me, according to the Trump superfans) . . . or is there a logical argument to support it?

The answer is very much the latter. But to understand why, you’ll have to come with me on a bit of a journey.

The Russians Wanted Trump, Not Hillary Clinton, to be President

First, let’s clear away some of the underbrush. Vladimir Putin did not want Hillary Clinton to be President in 2016. He wanted Donald Trump to be president. This part of the argument should be easy, simple, and straightforward. But in the wake of the Durham report, some people have been trying to make it seem complicated. So let’s uncomplicate it.

There has long been a strain of argument among anti-anti-Trumpers that ACKSHUALLY Trump was really really tough on Russia! And in truth, there is something to the argument that in terms of policy. There were indeed some anti-Russia policies pursued by Trump’s administration . . . likely without his knowledge, because we all know Donald Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about policy.

In National Review, Noah Rothman—someone I like a lot, I should note—was the latest to promote the narrative that Trump was tough on Russia. Again, however, as I quote Rothman making this case, note how he distinguishes between the policy of the Trump administration as contrasted with the often very odd and glaringly obvious friendliness shown by Trump himself to Putin:

Within the administration’s first year, the Trump White House had established for itself a record of toughness on Russia that rivaled those of all his post-Soviet predecessors. Predictions to the contrary notwithstanding, the administration not only maintained existing sanctions against Russia but strengthened them, and it imposed similarly tough economic restrictions on Russian allies such as Iran. Trump ordered airstrikes on the regime run by Putin’s satrap in Damascus. The White House closed Russian consulates and annexes in the United States and applied Magnitsky Act sanctions to Kremlin surrogates such as Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, taking steps that the Obama White House had refused to take (and that Kremlin cutout Natalia Veselnitskaya had lobbied the Trump family against taking in 2016). And the Trump White House at long last provided Kyiv with lethal armaments, augmenting its efforts to deny Russian forces and the Kremlin’s proxies the further conquest of Ukrainian territory.

Yes, the conventional Republicans who executed these policies were figures Trump himself later turned against. Yes, Trump himself maintained a bizarre double standard in his stances toward Russia’s leadership, to whom he still defers with puzzling regularity. But the former president’s record on Russia before Mueller’s investigation never substantiated the notion that he was somehow in hock to the Kremlin. Whatever Moscow was supposed to get out of the Trump administration, it couldn’t have been thrilled with the return on investment.

Oh, I think they were pretty thrilled all right. Let’s took at each of Rothman’s points in the quote above:

• Sanctions: Rothman says Trump initially “not only maintained existing sanctions against Russia but strengthened them.” But several media outlets reported in January 2018 that Trump had inexplicably refused to impose a later set of sanctions on Russia, baffling those in Congress who had voted for the sanctions. As The Independent reported: “The Trump administration has announced it will not impose additional sanctions on Russia, despite Congress passing a law allowing the President to do so. . . . Mr. Trump, who wanted warmer ties with Moscow and had opposed the legislation as it worked its way through Congress, signed it reluctantly in August, branding the bill ‘seriously flawed’.” So tough!

• Syria: Rothman tells us “Trump ordered airstrikes on the regime run by Putin’s satrap in Damascus.” Yes, we all know the story about how Trump suddenly swung from skepticism about military involvement in Syria to ordering air strikes after he saw a video of children dying from a sarin gas attack. But . . . has Rothman really forgotten how Trump later precipitiously yanked our troops from Syria after a phone call with Turkish president Erdogan? Yeah, I don’t think Trump’s policy on Syria is something Russia regrets. So tough!

• Magnitsky Act: It’s quite true that the Trump administration imposed Magnitsky Act sanctions. I’d bet my house that Trump has no idea what the Magnitsky Act is. When his yutz of a son and son-in-law met with Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower, she talked about adoptions, which everyone paying attention knew was code for the Magnitsky Act. Trump didn’t know. As for his knowledge of Bill Browder, the force behind the Magnitsky Act, Putin nearly talked Trump into handing Browder over to the Russians! When I interviewed Browder for The Dispatch, I made reference to an episode in which Trump had appeared receptive to an offer from Putin to provide interviews with Russian intelligence officers, in return for the United States handing Browder over to Russia’s goons—which almost certainly would have resulted in Browder spending the rest of his (likely short) life in Russian custody. Here is what Browder had to say:

  Vladimir Putin has wanted to have you arrested for some time now. How did you feel when you learned in 2018 that Putin had personally asked Donald Trump to hand you over in return for allowing Robert Mueller to question some Russian intelligence officers—a suggestion that Trump called an “incredible offer”? And how did you feel this week watching video of Trump praising Putin as a genius for his invasion of Ukraine?

  Well, I was actually more worried about—back in 2018, I knew that Vladimir Putin was after me because he’s been chasing me all over the world.

  Of course.

  But at that moment in time, I felt like maybe I was even going to be at risk being in America. And so, if Trump had been re-elected, I probably wouldn’t have felt safe coming back to America. So, it’s pretty horrifying to think that he could run for president again and could win, in which case my personal safety would be at risk if I visited the United States.

  Bill Browder is going to loom large in my analysis below. But the idea that Trump, as opposed to his administration, was tough on the Magnitsky Act, is a joke. So tough!

• Aid to Ukraine: Yes, Trump went further than Obama did on aid to Ukraine. Good for him! Uh . . . and then do we remember what he tried to do with that aid? Remember the whole impeachment thing, where he tried to use that aid as leverage against Ukraine’s President Zelensky in an extortion plot centered on Trump’s obsession with the blatant Russian propaganda that Ukraine was the one who really interfered with the 2016 election? So tough!

I responded to Rothman about his article on Twitter, and here’s what I had to say:

There is what you mentioned, but Trump also carried Putin's water on election interference, was silent on the Skripal and Navalny poisonings, said Crimea is Russian, had top people meet with a Kremlin-connected woman at Trump Tower, asked Russia to find Hillary's emails, hired Manafort as campaign manager, lied about Trump Tower Moscow, tried to get Russia back into the G7, consistently repeated Russian propaganda about Ukrainian interference with our elections, had Flynn conduct back-channel discussions on sanctions, gave top-secret info to Russian officials and bragged to them about firing Comey, repeatedly suggested we should get out of NATO, repeated propaganda about the Soviets invading Afghanistan to fight terrorists, repeatedly said there is no proof Putin kills journalists, eased sanctions on Deripaska, congratulated Putin on a fraudulent election victory, abruptly pulled out of Syria . . . and I could go on.

I could indeed. Rothman responded that there is “[l]ots of tension, much of it rhetorical, but some of it in policy” involved in the analysis of Trump’s attitude towards Russia. I’d say abruptly pulling out of Syria is a pretty big policy move. As for the “rhetorical” support that Trump has offered Putin, like repeatedly threatening to exit NATO, defending Putin as not responsible for all the murders Putin is obviously responsible for, and on and on and on . . . let’s not pretend that the rhetoric offered by an American president regarding Putin is unimportant. A president’s words are critically important—and when you side with Vladimir Putin over your own intelligence agencies on the issue of whether Russia interfered with our elections, you are not a person Vladimir Putin regrets helping put in office.

To his credit, Rothman repeatedly acknowledges in his piece that Trump didn’t just feed the narrative that he is pro-Putin, he overstuffed that narrative like a Frenchman inflicting gavage on a goose so he can serve Macron a meal of foie gras. (That’s my characterization, not his. But he agrees Trump fed the narrative, is what I’m saying.) As Rothman says: “The circumstantial evidence of Trump’s preference for Russian narratives — evidence Trump himself willingly provided at every available opportunity — was enough to give neutral observers pause in advance of the investigations into his conduct.”

Rothman thinks the counterevidence of Trump’s “tough on Russia” policies is also compelling, but let’s get real. Putin wanted Trump to be president in 2016, Putin wanted Trump to be president in 2020, and Putin wants Trump to be president again in 2024. Especially in 2024—because Putin knows that a) the “adults in the room” who sometimes surrounded Trump in his first term will all be gone, and b) Trump is probably the only person who can save Putin from an ignominious defeat in Ukraine.

It Seems Clear that the Steele Dossier Contained Russian Disinformation

I assume I have convinced you that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump in office and not Hillary Clinton. And yet, it certainly seems like the Russians were neck-deep in feeding garbage about Trump to Hillary Clinton. In light of everything we discussed in the previous section, it seems odd, doesn’t it? But Durham’s report seems to make it clear that the Steele dossier was a product of people deeply connected with the Russian government in general, and Russian intelligence in particular.

I thought that in this section of the newsletter, I would quote from and summarize a piece about the Durham report revelations from Jerry Dunleavy at the Washington Examiner. I pick Dunleavy because he is both open to the pro-Trump position when it comes to the Russia investigation, but is also smart and does very well hewing to the facts. I said I like Rothman, and I also like Dunleavy. So if you’re looking to be fair to the pro-Trump position, but you want your analysis to be rooted in fact, Dunleavy is a good source to use.

Fair warning: some detail here is necessary. Like me, you may have had the experience where, any time you read about the Steele dossier in right-wing media, you see endless references to “Fusion GPS” and “Glenn Simpson” and so forth . . . and I know that can be off-putting. It gets very intricate, and especially when you suspect that you might be fed a load of bullshit, I can understand if your eyes glaze over when you read such stuff.

I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to dive into some of those details. But it will be worth it. I promise you.

Let’s start with Dunleavy’s story about possible Russian disinformation in the Steele dossier. The linked article appeared in the Washington Examiner, and was sent to me by a reader who thinks the Durham report was explosive. Dunleavy opens the piece in this way:

Special Counsel John Durham’s new report warned Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier may have been infected by “Russian disinformation” before the FBI relied upon it.

While Durham's yearslong investigation provided substantial evidence that many of the biggest Trump-Russia collusion claims could be traced back to the Clinton campaign and Democratic operatives, his new report also repeatedly raised the possibility that the dossier at the heart of the collusion claims contained Russian disinformation.

“Russian intelligence knew of Steele's election investigation for the Clinton campaign by no later than early July 2016,” Durham’s new report concluded. “Thus … Steele's sources may have been compromised by the Russians at a time prior to the creation of the Steele Reports and throughout the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

Durham warned that “the Russians were cognizant of Steele's election-related reporting.”

Again: it seems odd that the Russians would be helping Hillary with garbage about Trump, doesn’t it? Later, we’ll discuss why that might be. For now, let’s continue with Dunleavy:

Steele was working for Vladimir Putin-linked oligarch Oleg Deripaska before, during, and after his time targeting Trump (who was then a candidate), and the former MI6 agent was hired to put the dossier together by an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, which was simultaneously working for Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya who attended the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that was billed as a chance to offer dirt on the Clinton campaign. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, through Marc Elias, hired Fusion in 2016.

So there definitely seem to be links between the Russian government and the information in the Steele dossier. As one reads Dunleavy’s account further, the links only get stronger. Dunleavy explains that Steele’s main source was a fellow named Igor Danchenko, who, as it turns out, was suspected by the FBI in 2009 of being a Russian agent—a fact revealed to the public in September 2020. According to Lindsey Graham, Danchenko “was in contact with known Russian intelligence officers” and was possibly seeking classified information from the Obama administration.

Amazingly, according to Durham’s report, the FBI used Danchenko in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation as a “paid confidential human source,” without ever having resolved the question of whether Danchenko had ties to Russian intelligence. Thus, Durham concluded:

[I]n not resolving Danchenko's status vis-a-vis the Russian intelligence services, it appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Danchenko was providing to Steele — which, again, according to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information in the Steele Dossier reports — was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation.

That’s damned sloppy.

Deepening the concern that the Steele dossier contained Russian disinformation was the fact that Steele himself had worked for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska between 2012 and 2017. Dunleavy notes that in 2020, a Senate Intelligence Committee report “found ‘indications that Deripaska had early knowledge of Steele's work,’ and the report said Steele’s relationship with Deripaska ‘provided a potential direct channel for Russian influence on the dossier.’” Since that same report found that “the Russian government coordinates with and directs Deripaska on many of his influence operations," this appears to be yet another indication that Russian intelligence knew of Steele’s work and may have provided disinformation on Trump.

Fusion GPS, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Bill Browder, and Glenn Simpson

The tale gets even more interesting when Dunleavy brings Bill Browder and Natalia Veselnitskaya into the story—and more interesting still when we hear about one Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS.

You remember Natalia Veselnitskaya, don’t you? Of course you do! She’s the Kremlin-connected lawyer who lured Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort into a meeting at Trump Tower before the 2016 campaign, with a promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton, ostensibly straight from a prosecutor at the Kremlin. Said Don. Jr. to an intermediary setting up the meeting: “If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer.” If you’d like to read more about Veselnitskaya or her background, I wrote a detailed six-part series on my blog in 2017 explaining the whole Magnistky/Browder/Trump Tower meeting saga and her role in it. It explains in detail why, exactly, Veselnitskaya was talking about “adoptions” at the meeting . . . and how the issue of “adoptions” was Putin’s code for achieving what was then his greatest policy goal: undoing the Magnitsky Act sanctions brought about by the activism of Bill Browder.

Dunleavy notes Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Kremlin, and observes that she hired the BakerHostetler law firm in a case involving Prevezon Holdings. BakerHostetler in turn hired Fusion GPS. As Dunleavy explains: “Businessman Bill Browder had alleged Fusion acted as an agent for Russian interests when it helped go after him as Putin tried to combat the Magnitsky Act.”

Glenn Simpson Does the Kremlin’s Work in Attacking Bill Browder

Browder tells the story in his book Freezing Order, which I highly recommend (along with Browder’s thrilling Red Notice). His tale is really too complex even to summarize here, but I’ll do my best to summarize the relevant details.

As readers of Red Notice know, Browder’s lawyer Sergei Magnitsky had uncovered a giant tax fraud perpetrated by Russian government officials. After the release of the Panama Papers, investigators were able to trace offshore bank accounts and loans to implicate Putin himself as a beneficiary of the fraud, through his ally, an improbably wealthy cellist named Sergei Roldugin.

Browder had previously retained BakerHostetler, and specifically a lawyer named “John Moscow” (I’m not making up that name!) in connection with pursuing a case related to the Magnitsky fraud. Browder says in Freezing Order: “He [Moscow] knew our security details. He knew every member of our team—hell, he’d even been on a conference call that had included my wife!” Now, when the U.S. government brought a case against Prevezon Holdings, alleging that it had benefited from the fraud uncovered by Magnitsky, Prevezon hired . . . BakerHostetler and John Moscow! Now the bad guys Browder had been chasing had hired a lawyer who knew all the details of Browder’s personal information and security concerns. All of a sudden, unidentified men started showing up at Browder’s home—a real threat for someone who is such an enemy to Vladimir Putin, who has shown his ability to reach into foreign countries to lay his hands on people whom he wants dead. A significant part of Freezing Order deals with Browder’s efforts to have BakerHostetler disqualified from representing Prevezon, and the inability of a doddering old federal judge to understand the obvious conflict-of-interest issue.

BakerHostetler got to work trying to serve Browder with subpoenas that would force him to disclose, as Browder put it in Freezing Order, “eight years of my personal security details; copies of my passports and visas for the past 20 years; all of my communications with Interpol and the European Union; and all sorts of personal information about my colleagues Vadim and Ivan.” Browder explains the significance of these subpoenas:

If we handed all of this over to BakerHostetler, our Russian adversaries were sure to get ahold of it, enabling them to plan any number of sinister moves against us. With all the dead bodies racking up, this was genuinely terrifying. To me these subpoenas looked more like a Russian intelligence gathering operation than anything having to do with a US court case.

Keep that in mind for the next couple of paragraphs: anyone helping serve this subpoena was serving the interests of the Russian government in obtaining intelligence on Browder.

We’re about to get to Glenn Simpson. That’s a hint.

Meanwhile, Veselnitskaya paid for a U.S. screening of a propaganda film by a dupe named Andrei Nekrasov claiming that Magnitsky himself was actually a co-conspirator in the fraud. This is a classic Putin move, reminiscent of the tactics of the Scientologists (or Brett Kimberlin, if you’re familiar with him); namely, you accuse the other guy of what you did yourself. Somehow, the film, despite being demonstrable garbage, got a favorable review in the New York Times. How did it happen?

Glenn Simpson.

Browder started calling his journalistic contacts to find out why the New York Times would be promoting a garbage pro-Kremlin propaganda film. In a conversation with a London reporter, he found out why. “It’s Glenn Simpson,” said the journalist. Simpson was a former Wall Street Journal reporter. Browder replied that he had thought Simpson was “one of the good guys.” The journalist said maybe he had been at one point, but “now he does opposition research for anyone willing to pay.” The journalist then dropped a bomb on Browder, letting him know that Simpson had been “bragging for weeks that he tracked you down in Aspen to serve you with that subpoena.”

In a flash, Browder had learned that Simpson had not only worked behind the scenes to promote a ridiculous pro-Putin propaganda film that provided a revisionist history of the Magnitsky fraud, but Simpson had also participated in serving a subpoena designed to put sensitive information about Browder in the hands of top Russian officials.

Browder later learned that Simpson had been vigorously performing the role of gatekeeper to block a story Browder had been trying to publicize about violations of FARA: the Foreign Agent Registration Act, on the part of folks like John Moscow and Simpson. These people were involved in a clear disinformation campaign on behalf of Russia. And yet none of them had registered as foreign agents. Browder tried to get journalists to bite on the story, but none would. Browder went back to his London journalistic contact, who explained that “[y]our problem’s Glenn again . . . Bill, how do you not know this?” The contact explained that Simpson had made himself a “central node of information-trading on Russia and Trump” and no news organization was going to touch him as a result.

Dunleavy’s article corroborates the ties between Simpson, Veselnitskaya, Prevezon, and the Russians. He notes that “Prevezon was owned by Denis Katsyv, whose father, Pyotr Katsyv, is a Putin ally.” He notes that the Senate report discussed “assessed that Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin, who accompanied her, both ‘have significant connections to the Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.’” He also dryly notes:

Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson denied any foreknowledge of the Trump Tower meeting despite seeing Veselnitskaya the day before, the day of, and the day after.

OK, so we can see that Glenn Simpson, the fellow behind the Steele dossier, had very close ties to the Russian government, through Prevezon and Veselnitskaya, as well as his work undermining Browder’s tale of a $230 million dollar fraud that benefited Vladimir Putin.

So If Putin Hated Hillary, How Do We Explain the Fact that the Russian Government Fed Obviously Bogus Information on Donald Trump to Steele? Once Again, the Answer Lies in the Involvement of Glenn Simpson

Let’s take these pieces of evidence one by one, and look at how it all adds up. We have a Russian government that wants Trump in power. Yet that same Russian government is feeding obviously false information about Trump to Hillary Clinton. Surely this information would be easily debunked at some point.

And indeed it has been! And today, Trump looks like a victim of Russian disinformation.

Can you figure out what is going on? Because it’s going on right now, you know.

If my hints have not been heavy enough, I think it’s time to give the microphone fully to Browder, who discusses the day Buzzfeed published the contents of the Steele dossier. Browder was initially ecstatic. After all, “[t]he dossier had everything—sex, money, spies, conspiracy.” What better vehicle for taking down Trump could there be?

I think it’s time for a long quote from Browder’s Freezing Order. I hope this piques your interest enough to buy and read the book. Here’s what he says. This is what this whole post has been leading towards, so please pay close attention. The italics in this quoted passage are Browder’s, while the bold emphasis is mine:

[T]he next day, after dropping my daughter Jessica at a birthday party in Hampstead, I got a call from the British journalist who’d first told me about Glenn Simpson.

I smiled. “The dossier is the greatest thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s interesting, if true,” he said.

“You think it’s not true?” I asked.

“I have my doubts. You know who stands behind it, don’t you?”

“Chris Steele,” I said, referring to the former British MI6 officer who’d been identified as the author.

“No. I mean who stands behind him. It’s Glenn Simpson.”

“Glenn Simpson!” I stopped cold. “Are you fucking kidding?”

“I’m not.”

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. If Simpson was involved, then I had to assume that the dossier was compromised. Simpson had gladly spread the Russian government’s spin about me and Sergei [Magnitsky] in exchange for money in the anti-Magnitsky campaign. What would prevent him from doing something similar regarding Trump in exchange for a whole lot more money?

Nothing.

But what made the whole thing even more damning was that Simpson had been handling the dossier at the exact same time he was working for Veselnitskaya and the Russians.

Browder goes on to observe that, as I noted at the beginning of this post, Putin obviously wanted Trump to be president, and not Hillary Clinton. He concludes that “the easiest way for the Russians to diminish the potency of this dossier would be to deliberately insert disinformation into it.”

As Peter Grier explained at the Christian Science Monitor in April 2019:

It’s also possible the dossier is shot through with purposeful misinformation disseminated by Russian agents. Mixing the true with the false is a classic Kremlin disinformation tool. It keeps foes off balance and guessing. It confuses and divides.

I think Browder has it almost right here, but not quite. I do entirely subscribe to Browder’s theory that the Russians planted disinformation in the dossier deliberately, and I believe it was done in an effort to aid Trump. But I’m not sure that this was necessarily done to discredit other parts of the Steele dossier, specifically. After all, my impression is that the dossier itself, while it has not been proven to be entirely false, has little in it that is both revelatory and known to be true. The true parts of it are mostly public information. I suspect the Russians had a more general intent to discredit any information that might eventually emerge from Steele or anyone else about connections between the Kremlin and Trump. Keep in mind: at the time they fed the disinformation to Steele, the Russians were still actively in the process of cultivating Trump throughout the campaign and beyond. (More about this below, in the portion for paid subscribers.) The Russian didn’t know what, if any, damaging stories might eventually become public about Trump’s connections to the Russians. At the time they were feeding the garbage to Steele, all they really knew is that they were trying to get to Trump . . . and that it never hurts to spread disinformation, to confuse the enemy and undercut the truth.

After reading Browder’s compelling account of Glenn Simpson’s pro-Kremlin antics in Freezing Order, I am convinced that this theory is not only a possibility; it is the most likely scenario. The Russians deliberately planted disinformation in the dossier . . . false information connecting Trump and the Russians, so they could later show that information to be false, and discredit the entire narrative that Trump was in bed with the Kremlin.

And look how well it’s working. For the past couple of weeks, all pro-Trump Republicans can talk about is how poor Donald Trump was victimized by all these false stories about him.

If you’re going around repeating that narrative, I believe you are spreading Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. You may be well-intentioned, but you’re a useful idiot for Putin.

No offense. It looks good on you though.

I like to provide free subscribers with a reasonably self-contained newsletter, but provide paid subscribers with something more. I think what I have just presented stands on its own—all 5,000 words of it. Today, the “something more”—about another 4,000 words worth—is an analysis of the major takeaways of the Durham report. It will shine a light on how those findings interface with the theory I just presented, and what they mean for the crowd who thinks that the report revealed some earth-shakingly unfair plot against the perpetually aggrieved Donald Trump.

The Findings of the Durham Report as a Whole Are Consistent with a Conclusion that the Russians Were Trying to Help Trump

This post has principally been about whether the Russians are responsible for disinformation in the Steele dossier (yes) and why the Russians would do that (to protect Trump, by spreading false negative stories about him that could be later shown to be false, thus inoculating him against the damage from true stories). But given the prominence of the Durham report in recent news reporting and in right-wing propaganda, I think it’s worth taking some time to discuss the major takeaways of the Durham report, and whether those takeaways are consistent with the story I have been telling here.

Ever since the Durham report was published, I have had a slew of “conservatives” telling me that the Durham report proves that Trump has been a Victim of Government Corruption. So let me begin with an attempt to fairly summarize what seem to me to be the major takeaways of the Durham report.