Andrew McCarthy Exposes ‘Steele’s Shoddy Dossier’ as a Sham, from Start to Finish

June 12, 2019 (EIRNS)—A lengthy piece published today by National Review editor Andrew McCarthy is appropriately named “Steele’s Shoddy Dossier.” In great detail, McCarthy documents the fact that British intelligence agent Christopher Steele’s so-called “dossier” was a collection of invented, unsubstantiated allegations—including misspellings and wrong facts—and so bad that Steele’s former MI6 superior Sir John Scarlett categorized it as “woefully short” of professional intelligence standards.

That’s an understatement. As McCarthy points out, the 17 reports authored by Steele were a “visible” part of a “commercial” venture, “unlikely ever to be corroborated and patently suspect due to questions about who commissioned them and why they were generated.”

Steele, McCarthy asserts,was nothing more than a “quite willing political hack ... marshaling (or inflating) information in the light most favorable to his clients.” The FBI and Justice Department knew very well about Steele’s “political hack” status, and that many of his allegations were unverified; yet they went on to peddle Steele’s “work,” using it to acquire a surveillance warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

McCarthy goes on to detail the numerous instances in which the FBI made no effort to verify Steele’s allegations about Donald Trump, whereas other, less “prestigious” agencies, or State Department personnel discovered that Steele’s evidence was faulty, such as his claims to have had “senior” Kremlin officials as sources, which turned out to be a myth.