Barry Meier, a former New York Times journalist, ripped the old Gray Lady and other media outlets for their politically biased coverage of the completely debunked Steele Dossier.
Author of the book “Spooked,” in which Meier got into the business of private spies, talked with New York Magazine’s Intelligencer about the phony document supposedly written by the Trump-hating former British spy Christopher Steele that was used by the rogue agents of the Obama DOJ to be the object to obtain a FISA warrant against onetime Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page so that the Democrats could push the idea that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, an idea that came from Trump opponent Hillary Clinton in an effort to get her illegal private email server off the front page of newspapers.
“I think I see the public as a much bigger victim,” Meier said about the repercussions of the Steele dossier. “I mean, I would not have devoted as much time to the dossier as I did unless I thought there was a larger social, public ramification to it. And to me, what the dossier came to represent was how the work of these private operatives is subsumed into a hyper-partisan media and becomes this narrative that half of the public believes and half of the public doesn’t believe.”
Meier went on to say that the point of his book wasn’t to ridicule journalists for being hoodwinked by the phony Steele dossier, and after noting the reporters who got the entire thing wrong aren’t admitting they made the mistake and caused a lot of real damage to a lot of people, but instead talked about how reporters “need to reassess how we engage with hired spies and private operatives.”
“I mean, [the reporting done on the Steele-dossier] was a travesty. It is our job, and it’s always been our job as journalists to scrutinize information. And that didn’t happen here,” Meier said. “People jumped onto this train for a variety of reasons, be it political, professional, emotional, or what have you, and it ran straight into a wall.”
I believe the press had a vested interest in getting rid of Trump, because he single-handedly killed thirty years of prep work the Marxists in America did to pull off what they are doing right now; destroying America from within. They saw Barack Obama as the man who prepared the country for the big fundamental transformation and Hillary Clinton as the control freak who would force it on the country. They were four years off as now the Biden administration is carrying out their desires.
“You see this type of misdirection or obfuscation taking place across the entire media spectrum. And a real driving force for me in writing the book was taking on the Steele dossier as a case study in how reporters can get manipulated or allow themselves to be manipulated and the havoc that results from that… No one went back and scrutinized Christopher Steele. No one went back and scrutinized Fusion GPS,” he later explained. “It’s the dossier that fueled it all. I mean, Christopher Steele, Glenn Simpson, and Peter Fritsch, who were the three principal authors or marketers of the dossier, may very well have believed that there was a conspiracy between Donald Trump and the Kremlin. Fine. God bless them. But that doesn’t mean that anyone else had to believe it.”
I think Meier is being too kind here. We have evidence that they knew the contents of the dossier were bullschtein from the very beginning. Documents that were declassified in the last days of the Trump administration revealed the release of a 12 to 14 inches stack of internal FBI and DOJ documents that reveal substantial problems found with the investigation and provide a well-detailed timeline of when James Comey’s FBI first understood that the Steele dossier was crap, according to multiple government officials. And that was in the beginning.
Meier contends that the massive screw up by the Obama government is that it used the Steele dossier for that FISA warrant against Page and he said FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s altering documents to throw out the fact that Carter Page was an asset of the CIA “very troubling.” Clinesmith later pleaded guilty over that falsifying of the document.
Meier also trashed the Times for not doing any due diligence to scrutinize the author of the dossier or any of the people who helped promote it.
“If I have a major criticism of the Times, it was they could have, I believe should have, done a major scrub of Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch and of Fusion GPS early in the game after the dossier came out,” Meier said. “It was the perfect opportunity to say: Here are these three people, the creators of the work of the dossier that’s all over the news. We’re not gonna tell our readers we believe that dossier, but we can sure as hell tell our readers everything that we can find out about these three people, their reliability, their careers, and the clients they work for.”
Though he is making an effort, I don’t think Meier yet fully appreciates the level of depravity in news outlets like the New York Times. I believe they knew the Steele dossier was crap from the beginning and they went with it anyway, because in their eyes it was worth a shot to get Trump out of office.
“It came out subsequently, for example, that one of Christopher Steele’s clients was the lawyer of Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch who was closely tied to Vladimir Putin. Does that mean that everything in the dossier was wrong? No, but it does mean the public should have known that early on,” he continued.
Pretty much everything in the dossier was wrong, and Chris Steele even said he could not verify the validity of everything in it.
When asked about the outrageous coverage of the dossier by Fake News losers like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Luke Harding of The Guardian, and how they never faced any fallout for pushing the fake dossier fantasy story.
“I’ve noticed in my career that there are all kinds of journalists. Myself, when I made a mistake, like misspelling something, I would feel horrible for a few days. But then there are other people, and I don’t know whether Rachel Maddow and Luke Harding fall into this category, who have these incredible carapaces, right? Any criticism, any scrutiny, just kind of bounces off of them,” Meier said. “There’s a phenomenal exchange that Rachel Maddow had with Michael Isikoff, who was probably one of the few reporters who publicly acknowledged that he had bit too quickly on the dossier story, in which he is asking her, ‘Well, do you think you bought into it too much?’ And she reacts with a defensive ferocity that is quite startling to behold.”
On a side note, I used to rip on CNN‘s Brian Stelter all the time on Twitter pointing out how he lied to his audience every day for two years about Russian collusion. Never got a peep out of him. Then one day he tweeted out a tease about his misnamed show “Reliable Sources,” and I replied “The most unreliable source of cable news is Reliable Sources.” And that’s when he blocked me. I wear it as a badge of honor.
By the end of his interview, Meier offered some advice about the use of sources for journalists.
“To put it another way, journalists too often see some people as their friends and other people as their enemies. And that’s a big mistake. Because sometimes your friends are not worthy of your trust, and when you allow these kinds of relationships and emotions to get involved, they can cloud things over,” Meier said. “I mean, it’s not surprising that the Steele dossier — even though a former British intelligence agent wrote it — really was a product of the Washington swamp. And if any journalist thinks that any creature that inhabits this swamp is their buddy, they should step back and think again.”
The media coverage of the Steele dossier was so bad it should all be considered in-kind donations to the Democratic Party.
