by Chuck Ross, The Daily Caller:

• The Steele dossier has remained a subject of intense intrigue and speculation since its publication two years ago on Thursday.


• Republicans claim that much of the salacious document has been debunked while Democrats defend the report as being accurate in its broad allegation that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.


• But the Trump-specific claims in the dossier remain unverified, with some of the claims having come under intense scrutiny.


• This analysis helps make sense of where the dossier stands now.

Two years after its controversial publication, the Steele dossier remains a subject of intense intrigue.

The 35-page report, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele and funded by Democrats, is best known for the vast conspiracy it alleges between the Trump campaign and Russian government during the run-up to the 2016 election. Its salacious claim that the Kremlin has blackmail material on President Donald Trump in the form of a sex tape has also captured public attention.

But even under two years of scrutiny and debate, the dossier remains unverified, at least as far as its core Trump-related allegations are concerned. None of its specific claims about collusion have been verified, and there is ample reason to believe that its main allegation on that front (an alleged trip to Prague by Michael Cohen) is inaccurate.

Nevertheless, Democrats and some pundits have defended the dossier, claiming that while specific allegations of collusion remain unanswered, Steele’s broader claims of Russian meddling have proved accurate.

But that defense elides the basis on which Steele’s report has garnered so much attention. The FBI relied heavily on the dossier because of its specific allegations about Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser accused in the dossier of being a back-channel to Kremlin officials for the purposes of disseminating hacked emails and negotiating the relaxation of sanctions against Russia.

Here is where the dossier stands two years after BuzzFeed infamously published it. The 17 memos of the dossier are dated between June 20, 2016 and Dec. 13, 2016.

June 20, 2016

“The Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting US Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump for at least 5 years.” 

• Unsubstantiated. Trump has adamantly denied receiving any help from the Russian government.

“The Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, for several years.”

• Unsubstantiated. The Trump campaign has denied receiving help from the Kremlin during the campaign. But the date of this Steele memo — June 20 — is significant because it followed 11 days after the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a group of Russian lobbyists. Trump Jr. accepted the meeting after he was offered damaging information about Clinton, but he claims that no such information was provided.


• One Trump aide, George Papadopoulos, met during the campaign with a professor named Joseph Mifsud who claimed to have learned that Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands” of her emails. But Papadopoulos claims he was not offered the material and did not handle Clinton documents. He has since served a 12-day prison sentence for lying to the FBI about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud.

Former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos is pictured. (Photo: LinkedIn)

“The Kremlin’s cultivation operation on Trump had also comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development deals in Russia.”

• Unsubstantiated. Trump and his personal attorney, Cohen, did negotiate to build a Trump Tower Moscow through at least June 2016, but it is not clear whether that was an attempt to cultivate either Trump or Cohen. Cohen pleaded guilty in the special counsel’s investigation on Nov. 29, 2018 to lying to Congress in 2017 about the extent of his negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Russia. He spoke with an assistant to Kremlin official Dmitry Peskov.

Russians sought to “exploit Trump’s personal obsessions and sexual perversions to obtain suitable ‘kompromot’ [compromising material] on him.” Kremlin operatives filmed Trump in compromising positions in a Moscow hotel. 

• Unsubstantiated. In a press conference just after BuzzFeed published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017, Trump called the sex allegations “phony stuff.” After two years, no evidence has emerged to support the allegation. Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, has reportedly voiced skepticism in private about Sergei Millian, one of the alleged dossier sources for the claim. And Rob Goldstone, a music publicist who was with Trump during his visit to Moscow, has told The Daily Caller News Foundation that he doubts Trump had enough time to engage in the type of activity described by Steele. Michael Isikoff, a journalist who met with Steele prior to the 2016 election, has also cast doubt on the claim.

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