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Did President Obama Read the ‘Steele Dossier’ in the White House Last August?

News of the News: Why the Timeline of the Scandalous Report that Fuels RussiaGate Matters

by Lee Smith

December 20, 2017
9:30 PM

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In a Facebook post from June 24, 2017, that Tablet has seen in screenshots, Jacoby claimed that her husband deserves the lion’s share of credit for Russiagate. (She has not replied to repeated requests for comment.) “It’s come to my attention that some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump,” Jacoby wrote. “Let’s be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn.” This assertion is hardly a simple assertion of family pride; it goes directly to the nature of what became known as the “Steele dossier,” on which the Russiagate narrative is founded. The fact that Jacoby is a reporter who often shared bylines with her husband at The Wall Street Journal is another reason to take her Facebook post seriously.

Last week’s revelation that Simpson hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of ranking Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, to work on the dossier certainly supports Jacoby’s implicit contention that Steele’s role in compiling the dossier has been exaggerated. Ohr is a Stanford Ph.D. whose expertise is Russia, and she appears to be fluent in the language. Perhaps she conducted interviews, along with—or even instead of—the British ex-spy whose byline helped credential the now-famous oppo research file as an “intelligence product.” Maybe she wrote up parts of the dossier or even the whole thing.

In any case, the history of the “Steele dossier” doesn’t begin with Christopher Steele or Nellie Ohr in the summer of 2016; it begins with a story that Glenn Simpson and Mary Jacoby co-wrote for The Wall Street Journal dated April 17, 2007. “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington” details how prominent Republicans, including the 1996 Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole, opened doors in the American capital for Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs and other friends of Vladimir Putin. Among those friends of Putin was Viktor Yanukovich, who would become president of Ukraine in 2010. According to the article, one of Yanukovich’s wealthy patrons paid a political fixer named Paul Manafort to introduce Yanukovich to powerful Washington, D.C., figures, including former Vice President Dick Cheney. Manafort figures prominently throughout the piece.

A year later, when Simpson and Jacoby discovered that a consultant to John McCain’s 2008 presidential run was working with Yanukovich, they could hardly have been surprised to find Paul Manafort in the middle of a new scandal. As they reported in another Wall Street Journal article, dated May 14, 2008, Davis Manafort, Manafort’s lobbying firm, was escorting Yanukovich around Washington. For instance, in 2006, Manafort accompanied him at a breakfast for journalists at the Willard Hotel.

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