Two Grifters and a Dossier

Do you know what it’s like to be scammed? Well, neither do I. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the experience. So, here are my thoughts on the most recent scam I’ve heard of: A few months ago, I received an email from a man named “John Smith” who claimed to be a journalist, but in reality was a scammer.

In a world where grifters can steal the identities of the rich and famous, it is no surprise that scammers are now reaching out to the general public for their weekly bread. One man was caught running a scam after he pretended to be a lawyer, while another man was caught after he posed as a government official. Now, in the aftermath of the cash-for-vote scandal, we have another story of a scammer who posed as a senior government official.

The global economy is highly dependent on the valuation of currency. From a purely financial perspective, this is a good thing. Money makes the world go round, and the more money floating around, the better for borrowers and lenders, as well as for investors who can make money by investing in the currencies that are the most liquid and volatile. However, the only thing the world’s governments and central banks value more than money is the power that comes from controlling it

Two Grifters and a Dossier

Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele arrives at his trial for libel in London, 24. July 2020.

Photo:

Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

How many people ordered

Barry Myers.

In the new book Scared, I did not address his complaint about corporate spies selling information to journalists. Journalists still have to do their own jobs well.

I wanted to know what he found out about the origin of the Steele file. Sir, I want to thank you for your support. Meyer, a retired New York Times reporter, is not ripping the lid off, but he makes it hard not to notice that an essential and indispensable part of the European Union’s education and training strategy.

Christopher Steele

Method and

Glenn Simpson

Method – it was shameless, shameless to pretend to be Mr. Steele’s sources.

He had no significant sources; the idea that he was using a network built up during his years as a British agent, or that he was actively developing and evaluating new sources, seems totally wrong. It’s time to say that you’re asking anyone with a Russian last name to say something bad about

Donald Trump

and Russia is not the same as developing intelligence. It would be better for Mr Steele’s reputation if he could claim today to be the victim of Kremlin disinformation. At least he could see that it would take a large and capable national intelligence agency to make a fool of him or worse.

Mr Meyer thinks that it is the nefarious sector of corporate intelligence that Mr Simpson represents; I, on the other hand, thought from the start that it was those scammers and wannabes who constantly approach journalists and claim to have secret knowledge and high-level contacts.

Whatever he was doing ten years ago, Mr. Steele has become exactly that.

Steele and Simpson didn’t find the press idiots they were looking for until after the 2016 election; it wasn’t until BuzzFeed published the dossier a few weeks later that professional skepticism went out the window. It’s also no surprise to anyone that the press is now in an uproar to debunk Steele’s charade. Lord. Simpson and his media spotters continue to say that even if Steele’s raw information was wrong, he was right about the most important thing – Russian interference in the election in favor of Trump. It’s hard to overstate how questionable this is. Earlier, I quoted my own letter to my colleagues, sent a few weeks after Trump took the escalator in 2015, in which I said it looked like Putin’s trolls were getting into gear. Putin’s regime likes to use the Internet to create problems – we knew that already. Otherwise, Mr. Steele’s fables won’t sell so fast.

Another false sheet of smugness from the media is the false alternative: If you doubt Mr. Steele, then you are a Trump supporter. The cable channels will tell you they won’t work on such a fragile intellectual base. Don’t believe them.

In M. Mayer’s book,

Natalia Veselnitskaya,

a Russian lawyer who worked with Mr. Simpson and later visited Trump Tower, rightly scoffs at the idea that the talented Mr. Steele, who had no relevant contacts, uncovered a conspiracy between Trump and Putin that eluded all Western intelligence agencies. When U.S. resources were finally deployed, the Justice Department’s Inspector General determined that Steele’s allegations were largely false, unverifiable, or derived from publicly available information. SYNC AND CORRECTIONS BY N17T01

Peter Strzok,

who tracked down Mr. Steele’s main sub-source, confirmed that Mr. Steele was unable to assess the reliability of the rumors he was reporting.

I could go on. If Mr Steele had had real contacts, he would not have relied on a peripatetic junior analyst and emigrant from Washington (of whom Mr Steele falsely claimed to be a Russian) whose sources were drinking buddies and a girlfriend in Cyprus; Mr Simpson would not be desperately bragging and blowing up the game

Sergei Millian,

a US-based real estate broker with modest ties to Mr Trump, in what Mr Meyer portrays as an attempt to make it clear to his friends in the media that Mr Steele had real sources.

The real story is revealed in Mr. Meyer’s book. Sir, I want to thank you for your support. Steele sold a degraded image of himself as a former intelligence officer. He hasn’t done any real work. Mr. Simpson did not rely on his experience as an investigative journalist. They were two empty shells selling a collection of lazy lies to intellectually lazy journalists. Now Messrs. Steele and Simpson will spend the rest of their lives lying to themselves that they didn’t get the job done, that they sold the last shreds of their reputation for a check whose amount will surprise no reader of this newspaper.

At this point, Mayer describes a crucial consequence – Simpson’s creation, shortly after the dossier was released in early 2017, of a dark money operation, the Democratic Integrity Project, allegedly funded by…

Rob Reiner,

George Soros

and several liberal groups will be sending millions to Mr. Steele and Mr. Simpson next year. I think the likely goal was to keep them in the pool. The amount of money they received from Hillary and the Democratic campaign to create the dossier was minuscule compared to the personal interests of the two men now that the dossier has blown up in their faces. They could not have been seduced by the money that a conservative magazine or publisher could make by revealing the sordid truth about the Steele case, a revenge that would have been quite feasible for any of them.

Potomac Watch (12/12/19): Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham attacks the Clinton or Steele dossier after the release of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report. Image: Reuters/Erin Scott.

Appeared in print on 26. May 2021.