During his initial thirty-minute meeting with Kramer, Simpson said nothing about the identity of his client. Kramer didn’t bother to ask. But he was hooked. Kramer became Simpson’s single most important asset since the disinformation campaign crafted by Fusion GPS had begun.
The next day at about 5:00 p.m., Kramer met with Senator McCain and his staff aide, Brose, in order to physically hand over the memos. McCain read the “dossier,” then asked Kramer his opinion. “I said that Mr. Steele himself seemed to be credible and believable, but that he himself had acknowledged he was not in a position on his own to verify everything in there.” Perhaps that boilerplate lingo gave Kramer peace of mind. He would repeat it ad nauseam to those with whom he talked. “I suggested he provide a copy of it to the Director of the FBI and the Director of the CIA.”
Over the next week or so, Kramer often spoke by phone to Simpson and Steele, who were desperate to know what, if anything, McCain was doing to advance the tale that Trump was a secret Russian asset. On December 9, Brose informed Kramer that McCain had met privately with Comey and had given him the document. Triumphantly, Kramer passed on the news. Mission accomplished.
That handoff—from Steele to Simpson to Kramer to McCain—gave the “dossier” a Republican patina. It wasn’t merely Democrat Reid dishing a hated rival’s dirty linen; it was a patriot and war hero on Trump’s side of the aisle. “I think they felt a senior Republican was better to be the recipient of this rather than a Democrat because if it were a Democrat, I think that the view was that it would have been dismissed as a political attack,” Kramer said. It was a clever con.
Reporters had been calling Kramer to ask if McCain had passed the “dossier” to Comey. They included Corn, Tom Hamburger and Rosalind Helderman with the Washington Post, Brian Ross at ABC, Peter Stone and Greg Gordon at McClatchy, Alan Cullison at the Wall Street Journal, Robert Little at NPR, and more. At Steele’s request, Kramer met with Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame and Ken Bensinger, a reporter for BuzzFeed.
The Bensinger rendezvous proved to be a critical turning point. Bensinger visited Kramer at the McCain Institute on December 29 and revealed that he knew Steele from the FIFA investigation. Kramer declined to give him a copy of the “dossier” but said he could read it. Bensinger asked if he could take photos of the pages with his cell phone, but Kramer told him no. He was worried about the material being inadvertently spread. Bensinger agreed. After that pledge, Kramer conveniently excused himself from the room so that Bensinger could read in peace for thirty minutes, with his cell phone at the ready.
On January 10, 2017, Kramer sat near a TV in a lounge area at the McCain Institute, discussing the “dossier” with Julian Borger of The Guardian. At about 5:00 p.m., CNN reporters Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein broke the story that President Obama and President-elect Trump had been briefed on the “prostitute pee” part of the “dossier” in a two-page addendum attached to a report on Russian interference in the election.11 Former director of national intelligence James Clapper had leaked news of the briefing to Tapper.
The CNN story was the hook Bensinger needed to run with the story. Within an hour, BuzzFeed published the full “dossier”: “These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties to Russia.”12 Despite his promise, Bensinger had photographed the documents. Using weasel words such as “potentially unverifiable,” BuzzFeed posted the full thirty-five-page document online so that “Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.”
“Holy shit!” Kramer said as he watched CNN report on the BuzzFeed post. Shocked, he called Bensinger, demanding that the documents be taken off the internet. “You are going to get people killed.”
“Why?” Bensinger asked. “How?”
“By posting this, you will put people’s lives in danger,” Kramer said. Steele’s secret high-level Russian sources would be put at risk. Bensinger seemed unconcerned, as he had been blasé about first verifying the outrageous allegations.
BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith defended the decision, arguing that the “dossier” was worthy of being printed even without corroboration because its contents had been shared with Trump and others “at the highest levels of the U.S. government.” Such transparency was “how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”13
“FAKE NEWS—A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” Trump tweeted later that day.
Kramer learned that the Wall Street Journal was going to publish Steele’s name as the source of the “dossier.” He tried to dissuade them but failed. Steele was frantic. “This wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” he said. Kramer told Steele he had no idea how Bensinger had gotten the documents—a lie, but he hoped to keep communications with Steele open.
After his name surfaced, Steele complained to Kramer that it “was causing considerable problems for him.” He went into hiding. But Steele had no reason to be shocked. He and Simpson had been peddling the fabrications for months. Their scheme had worked splendidly. Kramer had talked to more than a dozen media people, assuring them of Steele’s credibility, touting the involvement of Sir Andrew Wood and Senator McCain. They knew of Kramer’s expertise and reputation.
After BuzzFeed splashed the whole thing onto the internet, the enraged Tapper emailed editor Smith to complain that BuzzFeed should have waited until the next day. (His emails became public after a Russian mentioned in the “dossier” filed a lawsuit against Steele and BuzzFeed.)14 “No one has verified this stuff,” Tapper told Smith. He had pointed out in his CNN report that a key allegation in the “dossier”—that Trump attorney Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin operatives—was likely false, that government officials believed a different Michael Cohen had gone to Prague.15 But Tapper was most angry about the timing. “Collegiality wise it was you stepping on my dick.”16 Tapper apparently had no problem with his own reporting about Comey briefing the president on the phony pee memo.
Within a few days, the Russia conspiracy erupted in the Washington and New York media. “What happened really quickly is that everybody committed to a narrative and they didn’t examine or test the core hypothesis,” Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone later explained. That “impacted a lot of reporters whether they realized it or not. They believed this underlying story that Trump had been activated as an asset or just as a useful idiot for the Russians, but certainly at that point, none of this had been corroborated by actual reporting. But the reporting became increasingly maniacal and alarmist.”17
The story was aided and abetted by timely leaks from FBI officials James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and career intelligence officials James Clapper and CIA director John Brennan, now paid TV analysts with coveted security clearances.
The main reason the hoax worked so well and for so long is that many of the highest-ranking officials were willing to lie about and misrepresent the (lack of) proof they had had in secret for years. Cable news allowed them to go on air and promise, week after week, that we were just on the edge of a big reveal, of a scandal too horrible to even detail. However, none of it would have worked without top journalists allowing themselves to be played for fools over and over. Scoops are born by working sources, getting confirmations, and putting news into context. Top reporters allowed their inquiries to be shaped by sources that lied to them again and again. It is not surprising that newsrooms ran headline after headline over stories of partisan leaks from the Justice Department and Congress. That is the kind of thing that wins journalism prizes. What’s utterly shocking is that no one in those newsrooms ever suggested delving deep into the other side. What if there was a partisan conspiracy holding sketchy meetings, lying under oath, meeting with Russians, and it was anti-Trump? What if the stories we were forced to retract weren’t honest mistakes but our anonymous sources coordinating a massive scam? What if all our best stories a
re a kind of political pyramid scheme, where everyone is making accusations because they are convinced that someone else has uncovered a truth much more damning than the original deception?
The most reliable news sources in the world allowed themselves to be exploited by a gang of remorseless liars, but the truly scary part is that they would all do it again in a heartbeat.
Reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post would go on to share the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for aggressive reporting on the “dossier,” with this citation: “For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”18 Announcing its win, the Post bragged that it “helped set the stage for the special counsel’s ongoing investigation of the administration.”19
In reality they were duped into publishing fabrications paid for by the opposition candidate, Hillary Clinton. Brit Hume of Fox News would call the ensuing two-year hysteria the “worst journalistic debacle of my lifetime, and I’ve been in this business 50 years.”20 Reporters’ reputations would be shredded, once-esteemed news organizations would be put to shame, the public’s trust in the media would collapse.
The spectacular self-immolation—and it was indeed self-induced—occurred because journalists ignored the basics. They abandoned fairness and accuracy. They trusted sources with secret agendas and, in evaluating the Steele “dossier,” failed to do what every student learns in Journalism 101: “Follow the money.” Who was paying for the “opposition research” on which they relied so heavily?
One New York Times reporter, Ali Watkins, even carried on a sexual relationship with James Wolfe, the security director at the Senate Intelligence Committee, which she had covered for BuzzFeed and Politico.21 Her “scoops,” courtesy of his leaks, had led to her getting the job at the Times. The affair came to light when her much older paramour was indicted for leaking classified documents to her and other reporters. Her editors shrugged, declining to fire her.
The legacy print media, network and cable news, anchors, pundits, and analysts shrieked in unison, “Collusion, collusion, collusion.” Fox News did not; across its many platforms, the network worked to maintain a balance. But even one network’s not continually bashing Trump was too many. The venerable NBC newsman Tom Brokaw responded to a Trump tweet praising Fox & Friends for its success by slamming the president on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “[Trump] watches [F&F] because it reinforces what he believes,” Brokaw said. “Fox News . . . is on a jihad right now.” He cited Newt Gingrich, a Fox contributor, calling the FBI a corrupt organization. “So, we’re at war here.”22
The war was mounted against the duly elected president of the United States. The media did it for ratings, they did it for the approval of their peers, and they did it because they hated Trump.
The Media Echo Chamber Determines What the Public Hears
Most Americans are not on Twitter. But the top stories of the day are dictated by it. Pundits and other journalists quickly identify which scoops are “important” and which can be ignored. Even if an outlet follows an unimpeachably nonpartisan agenda, journalists on Twitter are only going to point their hundreds of thousands of followers at the ones reinforcing the liberal narrative.
Over the past thirty years, the number of full-time journalists identifying themselves as Republicans has dropped significantly, from 25.7 percent in 1971 to 7.1 percent in 2013, according to a study by two Indiana University professors.23 One analysis found that 88 percent of political contributions from television network executives, producers, and reporters went to Democratic candidates, while a comparative trickle of money went to Republicans.24
It’s not just politics. Journalists at top media companies are less religious and far more likely to support issues such as government redistribution of wealth, alternative lifestyles, and abortion rights than are people in the country they cover.25 In their abundant arrogance, reporters have never understood why most Americans do not embrace their liberal values. Most members of the media are too insular and dogmatic to conceive of any intelligent principles beyond their own. In their minds, they are the privileged elite possessed of total knowledge and ultimate wisdom.
Called out for their bias, they consistently protest it’s not so. “Hardball is absolutely non-partisan,” said MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in 2010.26 “I can see how the intensity of coverage on certain issues may, to some people, seem to reflect a liberal point of view,” said Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times in 2013. “But I actually don’t think it does.”27 “It’s true that journalists tend to be more ‘liberal’ than the average American,” NPR’s Brooke Gladstone said in a 2011 interview with CNN. “But hyper-awareness of that fact has caused some of our most respected mainstream media outlets to bend over backwards to compensate—offering far more conservative voices than liberal ones.”28
Psychologists would call those laughable comments denial or groupthink. The problem is especially acute on the Washington–New York axis, where incestuous relationships prevail and conflicts of interest abound but are rarely disclosed. For example, CNN’s Evan Perez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, had coauthored stories with Glenn Simpson on national security. He repeatedly reported on the Trump-Russia story for CNN, usually relying on anonymous sources, without disclosing his close relationships with Simpson and other Fusion GPS executives such as Tom Catan, Peter Fritsch, and Neil King, who had also worked at the Wall Street Journal.29 In addition, King is married to Shailagh Murray, another former Journal reporter, who was a top communications adviser to President Obama.30
The relationships prompted the Wall Street Journal to publish an editorial in October 2017 accusing the media of complicity for attacking House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes after he issued subpoenas for Fusion GPS principals to testify before Congress: “Americans don’t need a Justice Department cover-up abetted by Glenn Simpson’s media buddies.”31 Politico’s Jason Schwartz in turn attacked the Journal for not following the media herd on the Trump-Russia “collusion.” Schwartz quoted “former Journal editor Neil King” as saying “I don’t know a single WSJ alum who’s not agog at where that edit page is heading.”32 Schwartz failed to mention that King worked for Fusion GPS.
Media people move into and out of jobs with administrations. They marry government employees and political strategists. They live in the same neighborhoods, vacation in the Hamptons, all the while congratulating themselves on being the elite. They value the advice of established experts and rarely watch what they considered lowbrow prime-time network fare such as The Apprentice. They knew nothing about Trump’s massive fame among middle Americans, or how well the fact that he listened to their political concerns went over. Hubris is the reason journalists never imagined that Trump would be elected president. They thought it was inconceivable that a man they judged to be so unrelievedly vulgar and unsuited for the presidency could possibly be elected to the highest office in the land.
By 2016, Americans’ trust in journalists “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” had plummeted to its lowest level in the history of Gallup polling.33 During the first one hundred days of Trump’s administration, a study by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy showed that coverage by CNN and NBC of the president had been 93 percent negative. In contrast, Fox News was more balanced, at 52 percent negative and 48 percent positive.34 A study by the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog, examined statements made by reporters and nonpartisan sources on evening newscasts in 2017 and determined that 90 percent had been negative of the president.35 Stories of alleged “collusion” with the Russians “comprised almost exactly one-fifth of all Trump News.”36
But the mainstream media in the twenty-first century have insisted that their reporting is “objective” despit
e their own biases. This is a myth. Their political favoritism and personal dislikes influence the stories they choose to cover and the way they tell those stories. They shape the content to conform to their own beliefs and, often, misconceptions. Bias doesn’t creep into a reporter’s story; it hits the viewer and reader over the head with it.
During the 2016 campaign, Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times encapsulated many of his colleagues’ views about covering Trump: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck do you cover him?”37 Well, “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century,” Rutenberg wrote. “You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.”
Why the old standards of accuracy, fairness, and solid sourcing didn’t apply were not explained except to blame Trump for being Trump. His candidacy was “extraordinary and precedent-shattering” and to “pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous with readers,” said Carolyn Ryan, the Times senior editor for politics.38 Thus, Rutenberg explained, “it would also be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world. It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment.”39
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