Elizabeth Nolan Brown, getting it so very, very wrong in so many varied ways

Elizabeth Nolan Brown, or “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” as she’s known around town, writes the “Reason Roundup” for Reason magazine’s online site each morning, covering the news that’s hot of the griddle. Usually, she’s excellent—check out last Friday’s riff on the continuing fraud of “sex trafficking”, a joint project of liberals and conservatives to throw people in jail for the crime of being human—and, I guess, the crime of taking advantage of the fact that people are human for both fun and profit.¹ But who wants to compliment people when you can, you know, bitch and moan? And, frankly, La Liz came a cropper a few days back, and I am not one to forgive and forget.

The head for the August 29 “Roundup” was “The Steele Dossier’s Origin Story Gets Even More Suspect”. Well, excusez-moi, ma chérie, but let’s discuss our comparatives, shall we? For the origin story of the celebrated “dossier” to get “even more suspect”, it had to be, well, pretty darn suspect to begin with, amirite? But it wasn’t, and isn’t. Why is it “wrong” to do opposition research on the, you know, opposition? Why is it wrong to seek out embarrassing, even “salacious” facts about your opponent? It isn’t wrong; it’s standard.

Well, that’s bad enough, but the kicker, or, rather, one of them, is that Liz’s story contains not one word about the “origin” of the dossier. What Liz gives us regarding the dossier is largely a retelling of a story that appeared in Politico by Kyle Cheney, “GOP lawmakers grill DOJ official Ohr over Trump dossier”, which is based, in turn, entirely on what Republican congressfolk told him took place in the closed session. No Democratic representatives were present, and, naturally, “DOJ official [Bruce] Ohr”, being a mere bureaucrat, could not offer one word in his own defense. And Cheney’s account says nothing about the origin of the dossier at all.

Nevertheless, Liz labels her one-sided, third-hand account “Damning testimony on dossier used to justify FBI wiretapping,” even though she has no first-hand knowledge of what Ohr said. On top of that, Liz makes the Republican accounts of Ohr’s testimony more “damning” than the Republicans themselves, to wit:

Lizzie’s version
Rep. Gaetz told reporters that Ohr had been cooperative but the dossier timeline he laid out didn’t jibe with what had been claimed before Congress by Glenn Simpson, the co-founder of Fusion GPS, and by ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

“Either Bruce Ohr’s lying or Glenn Simpson’s lying,” said Gaetz.

Cheney’s version
“Either Bruce Ohr’s lying or Glenn Simpson’s lying,” Gaetz said, describing “a number of factual conflicts” between their testimony. He added that they could conceivably have competing recollections but that it will be important to bring both before the Judiciary Committee in a public hearing to sort out the facts.

Yeah, so, either Bruce is lying or Glenn is lying, or maybe they just remember things differently. Quel scandale!

There are as well, naturally, complaints from the Republicans who attended Ohr’s “grilling” that the fabled dossier was used by the FBI to trick the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into allowing the investigation into oilman about town and foreign policy advisor Carter Page, a charge that National Review frequent anti-Trumper David French has made a virtual career out of refuting, but none of these complaints are new, and none of them are true.² What is true, of course, is that 1) the dossier was identified as “opposition resarch”, 2) that the purpose of such research is to obtain embarrasing information that is true, not to make up fairy tales, and 3) that there was additional information, not contained in the dossier, that the FBI used to substantiate its request. Also true, the request was first authorized, and then reauthorized, a total of four times, each time by a Republican-appointed judge. Who’s conspiring against the president, Democrats or Republicans?

But that’s still not enough for Lizzie. She jumps from Cheney’s account of what Republicans said Ohr said to an article in The Hill by John Solomon, “Russian oligarch, Justice Department and a clear case of collusion”. According to Liz, “Reporter John Solomon characterizes Ohr’s testimony as (finally!) ‘evidence of collusion between Russians and Americans, albeit not the sort that folks have been fretting over.’” The only problem is—or, at least, one of the many, many problems—with that statement is that it isn’t true. Here’s what John said:

“In a 20-month search for evidence of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, none that is compelling has emerged.

“Former FBI Director James Comey told Congress he found none. The U.S. intelligence community has given a similar assessment, though it did prove convincingly that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election through cyber warfare. And, so far, special counsel Robert Mueller has not offered any collusion evidence, though his work continues.

“But, for the first time, I can say there is evidence of collusion between Russians and Americans — specifically, the sort that is at the heart of counterintelligence work.”

So what has Ohr’s testimony to do with the “evidence of collusion”? Solomon never cites it, though he mentions Ohr frequently in the article—because Ohr’s job at the FBI involved investigation of Russian organized crime—but makes no mention of Ohr’s actual testimony at all.

The real “point” of Solomon’s column is that collusion—collusion in the sense of secret cooperation between the FBI agents (including Ohr) investigating Russian organized crime and Russian citizens offering useful testimony—did occur. Although Solomon makes reference to the Steele dossier, and tries to suggest that Steele made it all up, he offers no proof of this whatsoever, and, as I said earlier, makes no reference to Ohr’s testimony. His whole piece is, really, written to clear the name of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who, he claims, has been treated unfairly by the U.S., and is being treated unfairly now, because the Trump Administration banned him from the U.S. as part of its efforts to punish Russia for its meddling in the 2016 election. It’s almost enough to make one suspect that John and Oleg are buddies.

Regarding John, Liz characterizes him as a “reporter”. The Hill describes him as “opinion contributor”. Wikipedia, a possibly “liberal” outfit, has this to say: Solomon “is known primarily for his tenure as an executive and editor-in-chief at The Washington Times. He has been accused of biased reporting in favor of conservatives, and of repeatedly manufacturing faux scandals.” Considering the way Liz dragged John’s rap into her piece, perhaps they’re buddies as well.

There is nothing “suspect” about the origin of the Steele dossier. It is Trump, rather than the dossier, that is suspect. And it is more than suspect to weave together statements from biased sources, selectively edited quotations, and tendentious irrelevancies in an attempt to conceal that fact.

UPDATES
Here’s a story from the AP that contains more information about what Ohr (allegedly) said, in a far more balanced presentation than given by either Liz or Politico (or Fox News or John Solomon).

And here’s a separate story from the New York Times, “Agents Tried to Flip Russian Oligarchs. The Fallout Spread to Trump.”, by Kenneth P. Vogel and Mathew Rosenberg, which considerably fleshes out the relationships between Ohr, Steele, and Deripaska. According to the Times’ story, “[t]he contacts between Mr. Ohr and Mr. Steele were detailed in emails and notes from Mr. Ohr that the Justice Department turned over to Republicans in Congress earlier this year. A number of journalists, including some at conservative news outlets, have reported on elements of those contacts but not on the broader outreach program to the oligarchs or key aspects of the interactions between Mr. Ohr, Mr. Steele and Mr. Deripaska.”

The Times links to both Solomon’s “opinion” piece, which seems to have been written largely at Deripaska’s prompting, and a piece in the Washington Examiner by Byron York, “Emails show 2016 links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson—with Russian oligarch in background” (“Simpson” is Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS³). York was seemingly leaked the entire set of emails between Ohr and Steele that the Justice Department gave to Congress. I wonder if that might be considered illegal. The ranking minority (Democratic) members of the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees have raised concerns about the release of this information, according to this story in the Washington Post.

The Republican slant on all this is that this “proves” there was a “Deep State” conspiracy to obstruct Trump’s election. The “honest” slant on all this is that a lot of people were horrified by the manifest links between Trump folk and Russia, as the National Review’s David French explains for the fourteen thousandth time here.

Very long, very boring Afterwords
To let John and Oleg speak for themselves, I’ll provide the last several paragraphs of John’s “collusion” “scoop”:

“… [Oleg] wants to be clear about a few things, according to a statement provided by his team. First, he did collude with Americans in the form of voluntarily assisting and meeting with the FBI, the DOJ and people such as Ohr between 2009 and 2016.

“He also wants Americans to know he did not cooperate or assist with Steele’s dossier, and he tried to dispel the FBI notion that Russia and the Trump campaign colluded during the 2016 election.

“‘The latest reckless media chatter proposes that I had some unspecified involvement in the so-called dossier. Like most of the absurd fantasies and smears that ricochet across the internet, it is utterly false. I had absolutely nothing to do with this project, and I never had any knowledge of it until it was reported in the media and I certainly wasn’t involved in any activity related to it,’ Deripaska said in the statement his team provided me.”

“Americans can form their own conclusions about the veracity of those claims. But they now have a pretty convincing case of collusion between U.S. officials and Russians, one that isn’t necessarily all that harmful to the American interest.

“And the tale of Ohr, Steele, Deripaska, the FBI and the DOJ is a cogent reminder that people looking for black-and-white answers on Russia are more likely to find lots of gray—the favorite color of the murky counterintelligence world.”