NY Times ‘Limited Hangout’ on Steele Dossier Spares Obama

Former CIA agent Howard Hunt introduced a useful phrase into the political lexicon during the Watergate brouhaha -- “limited hangout.” Those two words well describe the recent New York Times article, “Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists.”

Better late than never, one supposes, Barry Meier of the Times concedes that his newspaper and many others in the media fell for the trap set by former British intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, and his employers at Fusion GPS.

Only readers of the Times could be shocked to learn in May 2021 that “many of the [Steele] dossier’s most explosive claims -- like a salacious “pee” tape featuring Mr. Trump or a supposed meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former attorney, and Russian operatives -- have never materialized or have been proved false.” OMG!

Meier takes particular aim at his fellow journalists. He argues that “the dossier took them down a very different path” from the more traditional ones they had followed in the past --“court records, corporate documents and other tangible pieces of evidence.”

After BuzzFeed published the entire Steele dossier in January 2017, Meier notes that “countless articles, television shows, books, tweets and blog posts about it appeared.” What Meier seems to overlook, at least in this article, is that the dossier began influencing the media well before the 2016 election, not just afterwards. That, in fact, was the point of the dossier’s creation.

Omitted was reference to the “private spy organization” that fed manufactured dirt to Steele. The Brookings Institution. Brookings’ Russia expert, Fiona Hill, claimed in testimony that she first saw the Steele Dossier shortly before it was published by Buzzfeed. Who gave it to her? That would be Strobe Talbot, former President of Brookings, a Friend of Bill (Clinton) since college, and “Russia Hand” during the Clinton administration. For icing on the cake, Cody Shear, Clinton dirt-slinger, is Talbot’s brother in law. But Fiona Hill was lying about that being the first time. Most of the salacious trash in the dossier was given to Steele by FIONA HILL’S Ukrainian assistant, who she had hooked up with Steele. The spy trails all lead back to Hillary Clinton.
Strobe Talbot, former President of Brookings and boss of Fiona Hill gave Hill the Steele Dossier, before it was published. At least that is what she told Congress. In Fiona Hill hooked up Steele with her onetime assistant Oled Dura

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