That'll be interesting to know, but isn't it common for intel guys to pay sources? Especially sources in countries like Russia. I mean, most of the Americans who gave information to Russia over the years got paid for it.

I have a hard time believing the more salacious aspects of the dossier, but Steele seems entirely credible. If we're to believe his claims in the article I posted, it's hard not to take the dossier seriously.

This post was edited by IceMage on Nov 15 2017 06:15pm

I don't even know what you're trying to say... I really should reinstall post blocker.

Answer me this. What information from the dossier was used by Hillary during the campaign? It seems to me the info wasn't utilized at all. So even though everyone who relies on statistics knew Hillary would win(including the Russian government), they still paid Steele to fabricate some dossier just to plague Trump if he happened to win?

No...the DNC paid for the dossier to cause the American public to NOT look at the DNC, but to look at the Republicans instead...aka smoke screen.

Everything that is going on is about this: http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=77362871&f=119&o=0


Russiagate is a smoke screen. the sex harassment accusations are a smoke screen (whether they are true or not). Everything is about...money. Nothing more complex than that.
You're (not you alone), are being lead around by your noses...by experts in the craft.

Politicians are raised from birth to be...the best in the world at only letting the American public see what the politicians want you to see.
Trump is a nothing...he is as clear cut as can be. he really does think he has good ideas. maybe he does, maybe not. We'll never know, the way things are going.

We can sit on PaRD and feel like we're qualified to observe and judge. That might even be true if we had ANY direct info, from 100% reliable sources, which we don't.



Forget trump, forget Clinton...why do you think all these accusations of sexual harassment ...came out...NOW? Now, and not a year ago...or one or two at a time, like normal.
No...we get a tsunami of harassment cases. why...so we LOOK there, and not where the action is.


/e It's all smoke and mirrors...to hide what happened from 2009 to 2015-16. That's all.


/ee Hell, I'd bet money that even North Korea is a pawn in this...more smoke and mirrors. they have us all looking at a few things...not the things we should be looking at.


We are looking at North Korea, Russiagate, tax arguments, Obamacare arguments, harassment cases.

Explain why the DOJ and the FBI spent over 5 years investigating the Uranium One deal? Not a year, not 6 months...5+ YEARS.

This post was edited by Ghot on Nov 15 2017 06:37pm

Its hard to take the game of telephone from intermediaries to sources credibly whether they were paid or not, but both have issues. If they weren't paid, why would they volunteer that information? What's their motivation? These are active Kremlin sources, they're putting themselves at risk. If they were paid, then the setup of the mafiacracy in Russia calls into question whether Steele was just being milked for his money stream.
We know from the money trail that somewhere up to $300-800k flowed into Steele's efforts over his $128k retainer as operating expenses, so between the availability of the money and bribery being a way of life in Russia, not just common practice, today's report is dubious.

I can imagine two scenarios to explain it- perhaps morell mistakenly was informed that Steele had paid his Russian contacts in previous intelligence operations, and conflated that with the Dossier, mistakenly. Or perhaps Glenn Simpson testified that Steele did not directly pay his sources, but that the money went from an operating budget the intermediaries had access to, and between selective leaks from the closed door testimony and biased reporting from CNN, they added purple monkey dishwasher onto that.



It seems to me more like the Steele dossier was a moonshot operation: Pay a few hundred thousand bucks into a longshot oppo effort with as many layers of deniability as possible, with low chance of finding anything on Trump. If they had found something truly damning, it would have been a effective use of money for a billion dollar campaign. For example, if they found a pee-pee tape. Instead, they just found wild rumor and innuendo, mixed with provably wrong facts (like cohen's whereabouts).
What would have happened if Hillary had presented those wild rumors during the campaign? Trump would have denied it as a baseless smear, then the republican strategists would have dug up every detail about Hillary colluding with Russians to get dirt on Trump while hypocritically accusing him of colluding with Russia. What happens when they can't prove any of the damning allegations, but Trump's camp can disprove one or two bits, then flip the table and accuse Hillary of colluding with the Kremlin?

Using it during the campaign would have backfired, and they weren't dumb enough to run with it. I think the most rational explanation is that it was a moonshot that failed to turn up results.
And as to its credibility, in a world with so many people incredibly aligned against Trump and willing to leak from up and down the inside of the government, I think if any of those wild allegations were actually true, we would have heard about it in the past year.

Maybe I'm stating this the wrong way.

I don't think Obama, Clinton, Mueller and Comey did anything abnormal...I think they just happened to get...caught. Everything since then is a smoke screen.
Probably to keep the American people from overthrowing the govt.

Bureaucracies always protect themselves first, and do their jobs, second. This is so well known, there's old sayings about it.

This post was edited by Ghot on Nov 15 2017 06:45pm

https://www.justsecurity.org/44697/steele-dossier-knowing/

I think this is a pretty good summary of which parts of the dossier are accurate.

If the sources weren't paid, I'm not sure what their motivation would be to give information to Steele. A lot of the information is accurate though... and some claims clearly are not accurate. As explained in the article, this is a compilation of raw intelligence, so expecting it to be free of errors is silly.



You're right, it's oppo research that isn't really usable in that setting.

If partsa are inaccurate, than it probably ALL is inaccurate.
What'd Steele do, did he say to himself: Damn this dossier is too short, better add some random stuff to make it look worth the money paid for it.

Dossiers with inaccurate info are useless. Whatever the percentage of accurate to inaccurate is.

Alright... at this point I think you're trolling. Not even card_sultan is this stupid.

Let me make is really easy for you.

Let's say you were signing a loan agreement, but only parts of it were accurate. Would you sign it? Ofc not.
Yet you don't seem to be able to use this same insight with the dossier.

If part of the dossier is BS, they you can't trust any of it.

You can cut that anyways you like, but it won't change the fact that unless it's all accurate, ya just can't trust it.

Ooops, looks like that secret informant was a lobbyist for russia.