The State of Russiagate... Ross Douthat

[mystery-ak]

 nytimes.com ›

The State of Russiagate
Ross Douthat March 02, 2019

In the window of calm between Michael Cohen’s testimony and the allegedly almost-at-hand delivery of Robert Mueller’s report, it’s worth returning for a moment to the document that established the darkest interpretation of all the Russian weirdness swirling around Donald Trump: the intelligence dossier created by Christopher Steele, late of MI6, on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, which brought together the reports and rumors that Steele deemed credible about the then-candidate, now-president’s Russia ties.

The Steele dossier made four big claims — or, since all those claims took the form of rumors and raw intelligence, let’s say that it raised four big possibilities. One of them, soon well corroborated, was that Russian intelligence was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the release of stolen emails through WikiLeaks.

The next possibility was that a Russian project to cultivate Trump, supported and directed by Putin, had been going on for many years, and included both offers of “sweetener real estate business deals” (which Trump supposedly declined) and “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” (which he supposedly accepted).

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[Sanguine]

...my sense after Cohen’s testimony is that the odds are as low as they’ve been since this whole affair started, and the increasing likelihood is that the Steele dossier was, in fact, as Trump’s defenders have long described it — a narrative primarily grounded in Russian disinformation.

[Fishrrman]

From the new york times?
I'm supposed to read that and believe it...?