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My Response to Bret Stephens Do your colleagues at the New York Times believe in the moral superiority of the West? By Dennis Prager

Bret Stephens devoted his New York Times column last week to admonishing me for my tweet of two weeks ago and critiquing my follow-up column last week explaining the tweet.

The tweet reads: “The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.”

As he wrote the column as a “Dear Dennis” letter to me, I will respond in kind.

Dear Bret:

I’ll try to respond to the most salient arguments you made. I’ll begin with one of the most troubling.

“Wiser conservatives — and I count you among them, Dennis — also know that when we speak of ‘the West,’ what we’re talking about is a particular strain within it. Marx and Lenin, after all, are also part of the Western tradition, as are Heidegger and Hitler.”

I was taken aback that such a serious thinker could write that nihilist Communists and nihilist Nazis are all “part of the Western tradition.”

That’s what the vast majority of professors in the social sciences teach: There’s nothing morally superior about Western civilization — it’s as much about Hitler and Lenin as it is about Moses and Jefferson. And, anyway, Moses never existed and Jefferson was a slaveholding rapist. Among those professors’ students are virtually all those who dominate the Western news media.

Am I wrong? Do you think that your colleagues at the Times or the Washington Post or Le Monde or the BBC believe in the moral superiority of the West?

Of course they don’t. Most believe in multiculturalism — the doctrine that all cultures are equal — and it is therefore nothing more than white racism to hold that Western civilization is superior. Didn’t nearly all of your (non-conservative) colleagues who commented on President Trump’s speech in Warsaw call it a dog whistle to white supremacists?

On those grounds alone, my tweet was accurate.

I am surprised that anyone — especially you — thinks that Putin’s Russia poses a greater threat to the survival of Western civilization than does the Western Left. No external force can destroy a civilization — especially one as powerful and wealthy as the West — as effectively as an internal one. The Western Left (not Western liberals) is such a force. Western liberals always adored the West: FDR, for example, repeatedly spoke about defending not only Western civilization but also “Christian civilization.”

I was also stunned by this comment: “I’m not sure that Justin Trudeau declaring there is ‘no core identity, no mainstream in Canada’ counts as a Spenglerian moment in the story of Western decline.”

The prime minister of Canada announces with pride that his country has no core identity, and you don’t think that counts as an example of a declining civilization?

Another upsetting passage: “To suggest that Vladimir Putin is a distant nuisance but Maggie Haberman or David Sanger is an existential threat to our civilization isn’t seeing things plain, to put it mildly.”

Jared Kushner Rebuts Fake News Accounts of his Contacts with Russians Detailed public statement contrasts with sketchy news reports based on anonymous sources. Joseph Klein

Innuendos and wild speculation passing as “objective” reporting, based on leaks from anonymous sources, have become the stock in trade of the fake media. Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been one of the principal targets of the media campaign to discredit the Trump administration. Silent for months in the face of mounting speculation of his possible role in alleged collusion of the Trump campaign with Russia, Kushner has finally sought to set the record straight. This week he is meeting with congressional staffers and lawmakers to discuss in detail his activities during the campaign and transition periods, particularly his contacts with Russian officials.

In a statement issued ahead of his closed-door interview with Senate intelligence committee staffers, Kushner said, “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.” He provided details on several contacts he had with Russians during his father-in-law’s campaign and transition, none of which he deemed to be improper.

Kushner’s statement provides valuable context to the meetings in which he participated. He pointed out that during the course of the campaign, he had contacts with people from approximately 15 countries, noting that he “must have received thousands of calls, letters and emails from people looking to talk or meet on a variety of issues and topics, including hundreds from outside the United States.” Russia was one of those countries.

Kushner recalled his first contact with Russia’s ambassador to the United States as having occurred at the Washington, D.C. Mayflower Hotel in April 2016. His father-in-law, then-candidate Donald Trump, was giving a major foreign policy speech.

Some in the media have sought to portray Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ own brief encounter with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the Mayflower Hotel as something more sinister than it really was. NBC breathlessly reported last month that Kushner too was involved in the encounter, along with then-candidate Donald Trump. Citing “multiple” anonymous sources, NBC said they were part of “a small gathering with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak and other diplomats at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.” NBC further characterized this gathering as “some sort of private encounter.”

CNN: King of Fake News and Queen of Leftist Indoctrination: Linda Goudsmith

CNN is already King of Fake News and now has crowned itself Queen of Leftist Indoctrination.

In a stunning exploitation of American children CNN partnered with PBS and IRC to bring Sesame Street’s Elmo on screen to “educate” the youngest American children on refugees.

Clearly American pre-schoolers are not watching CNN but this shocking interview exposed what they will be watching when they tune into Sesame Street.

Early childhood education is arguably the most powerful influencer and indicator of the direction of society. Palestinian children are being indoctrinated to hate Jews and to destroy Israel. Muslim children are being taught Islamic supremacy and hatred of infidels (all non-Muslims). The purpose of propagandizing Palestinian children is to produce Palestinian adults who will fight to achieve the destruction of Israel. The purpose of propagandizing Muslim children with Islamic hate education is to produce Muslim adults who will fight for re-establishment of the caliphate and imposition of sharia law worldwide.

So what are American children being taught and what is the purpose of their education?

Since the end of World War II, American children have been indoctrinated in left-wing liberal tenets of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism courtesy of Tavistock Institute and its principles of mass psychology for social engineering. The purpose is to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. Socialism, the necessary condition for cradle-to-grave control by the government, will be replaced by an internationalized globalist elite dream of one-world government.

American children are being tutored in passivity and collectivism while Middle Eastern children are being tutored to be warriors. In The Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris’ stunning analysis of the existential threat of Islam to the West describes the conflict between the tribal mind and the enlightened mind. The book jacket provides a concise summary:

“The Suicide of Reason shows how modern liberal societies, whose political theories are born of the Enlightenment are unfamiliar with the nature of mass fanaticism. The West, so accustomed to thinking of history as an inevitable progress toward enlightenment, can only think of fanaticism as a social pathology, a failure to modernize, rather than what it is: a variety of social order that is not only fully viable in the modern world but that possesses weapons to which the West is uniquely vulnerable. A governing philosophy based on reason, tolerance, consensus and deliberation cannot defend itself against a strategy of ruthless violence without being radically transformed – or worse, destroyed.”

Media, Tell the Truth: The Women’s March and Black Lives Matter Embrace Terrorists After all, you’d surely let us know if a conservative group with comparable clout did the same. By David French

Let’s begin with a thought experiment. Imagine if one of America’s largest and most-respected pro-life organizations tweeted birthday greetings to Robert Dear, the terrorist who attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in 2015. Imagine the reaction if an allegedly mainstream conservative organization said “happy birthday” to Dylann Roof, the white-supremacist murderer who slaughtered nine innocent people in Charleston.

How would the media respond? What would the tweets reveal about the character and intentions of the people running the organization? Should well-meaning Americans continue to support groups that applaud violent, vicious terrorists?

The answers are obvious. Of course the media would and should absolutely roast any conservative group that applauded “pro-life” or white-supremacist violence. Of course well-meaning Americans should shun and withdraw support for groups that celebrate terrorists. And of course support for terrorists would reveal a moral corruption at the heart of even the most popular organizations.

Unless, however, those groups are on the left, their leaders are progressive radicals, and the terrorists they applaud are cop-killers. Then, the media ignores the outrage, elevates the outrageous, and maintains the charade that key elements of the progressive #Resistance represent nothing more than a spontaneous, reasonable, and virtuous response to a dangerous and authoritarian president.

Doubt me? Consider the reverence reserved for the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter.

Mainstream media coverage of both organizations has been fawning, and their leaders have been subject to heroic profiles. As a result, millions of well-intentioned, reasonable liberals have been duped into supporting and elevating both groups, which do things like this:

Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur! Today’s #SignOfResistance, in Assata’s honor, is by @Meloniousfunk. pic.twitter.com/V66au1dRnl
— Women’s March (@womensmarch) July 16, 2017

Yes, that’s an official Women’s March tweet delivering birthday greetings to one of the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists. Shakur (born Joanne Chesimard) is a convicted cop-killer who now lives in Cuba after escaping an American prison. Here’s the FBI summary of her crimes:

Joanne Chesimard is wanted for escaping from prison in Clinton, New Jersey, while serving a life sentence for murder. On May 2, 1973, Chesimard, who was part of a revolutionary extremist organization known as the Black Liberation Army, and two accomplices were stopped for a motor vehicle violation on the New Jersey Turnpike by two troopers with the New Jersey State Police. At the time, Chesimard was wanted for her involvement in several felonies, including bank robbery. Chesimard and her accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One trooper was wounded and the other was shot and killed execution-style at point-blank range. Chesimard fled the scene, but was subsequently apprehended. One of her accomplices was killed in the shoot-out and the other was also apprehended and remains in jail.

Has President Trump’s ‘Fake News’ Criticism Made a Shambles of CNN? Turmoil at the network could spell the end for CEO Jeff Zucker.by Sarah Ellison

After relentless attacks from Trump and his allies, a series of journalistic problems, and in the shadow of a possible merger, the network’s C.E.O., Jeff Zucker, is feeling the heat. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said one employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.”

CNN regularly welcomes members of the Donald Trump White House to appear on New Day, its morning show. When the administration sent word last Monday evening that White House adviser Sebastian Gorka was available the following morning to discuss the retaking of Mosul from ISIS, CNN producers readied the script. New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota handled the interview, and spent the first portion of the conversation on the scheduled topic. But when the discussion inevitably turned to Donald Trump Jr.’s recently revealed “I love it” e-mail to the Russian attorney, Gorka had his opening to change the topic. He made CNN, and its coverage of the Russia investigation, the story. Gorka scoffed at Camerota, deriding “the amount of time you spend in desperation on a topic that has plummeted you to 13th place in viewership ranking across America.”

“More people watch Nick at Night cartoons than CNN today,” Gorka continued, before suggesting that his appearance was revenge for a long, contentious interview the previous day between Camerota’s co-host Chris Cuomo and Kellyanne Conway. “They called us to offer that he come on the show,” Camerota told me, regarding her interaction with Gorka. “Why do they do that if he doesn’t think anyone watches us and that we don’t practice good journalism? It makes no sense.” The tactic nevertheless played very well with its most important audience. “Did you see Gorka?,” Trump reportedly told his advisers. “So great, I mean really, truly great.” It’s a tactic that CNN’s own anchors have grown accustomed to. “When the light goes on, to me, it’s like hearing the bell sound the beginning of a round,” Cuomo told me later. “When the show starts, it is ding ding ding, who is coming at me and with what kind of weapon today? Is it a personal insult? Is it questioning our reporting? Is it a false narrative? Is it whataboutism?”

This is the strange theater of Donald Trump’s battle with the media, often making for riveting television, and fantastic for ratings, but operating on multiple levels. It’s more than just theater, however, and CNN is at the center of it. The president has targeted the network more vocally than even The New York Times and The Washington Post, the outlets that have delivered the most harmful journalistic blows to his administration. Partly, this is because, with CNN, it’s personal. The network’s president Jeff Zucker greenlit the Apprentice back when he was running NBC, and the two were friendly before they found themselves as bitter adversaries after the election.

And for Zucker and CNN, the circus is already having dangerous consequences. Despite all his flaws and unpreparedness for office, Trump is good at one thing: throwing people off their game. His war with the media has kept him afloat politically while he and his family have been dogged by increasingly damaging information about their connections to Russia. As the Republicans’ latest stab at a health-care bill falters, and the Trump administration fails to rack up a single significant legislative achievement, the president has thrown much of his public commentary into trashing CNN. He rewards surrogates, such as Gorka and Conway, who denigrate CNN on its own airways, even as the network pays other Trump surrogates, such as Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany, to defend the administration’s talking points. “He’s gone full war with the media, no doubt about that,” said one editor with close ties to the White House. “It is full-on full-scale warfare with CNN.”

The struggle is coming at a time when there are backstage pressures. Zucker’s bosses at Time Warner are now preparing to merge into telecom behemoth AT&T, a deal that requires regulatory approval from the Department of Justice, and a deal Trump has said he doesn’t like.

For both Zucker and CNN, the pressure is distorting. “We may look back in five years and find that CNN was fundamentally changed because of Trump,” one CNN employee told me. “Maybe it will turn out that Trump changed the brand” through his battle with the network. “We think we’re the middle. What if there is no middle anymore?” (A CNN executive told me that the network has conducted extensive research on its brand, which has “found zero diminution in the brand as a result of the attacks on us.”)

Time, Trump Jr. and Double Standards Time demonizes the president’s son — but guess who it hails as the “Hero and Icon of the Century”? Humberto Fontova

“Russia is a fierce rival of the U.S. and has been for generations. What politician jumps in bed with Russia? For advisers to a would-be President to take at face value an offer of clandestine assistance from Moscow is foolish at best, reckless for sure and potentially treasonous in the worst-case scenario.” (“Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and J. Edgar Hoover were all limp-wristed pinkos compared to this week’s Time magazine.)

Yet this very same Time magazine hails the Soviet Russians’ most faithful devotee/agent in the Americas as “Hero and Icon of the Century.”

“The solution to the world’s problems lies behind the Iron Curtain.” (Che Guevara.)

“I have sworn before a picture of the old and mourned comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses (the U.S.) annihilated!” (Che Guevara.)

“I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin.” (Che Guevara.)

“If the nuclear missiles had remained in Cuba we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of Atomic victims.” (Che Guevara, 1962.)

“What!? Is he (Fidel Castro) proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba…But that is insane!…Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before it’s too late. Before something terrible happens!” (Nikita Khrushchev Oct. 28th 1962.)

As documented above, had an aghast Butcher of Budapest not yanked the missiles from their “hero and icon” and his sidekick in the nick of time, the cinders representing New York’s Time-Life building along with its staff would today fit in a milk carton.

In 1999 when Time magazine hailed “The 100 Most Important People of the Century,” Che Guevara was among them, which at first glance seems reasonable. The term “important,” after all, can be construed as morally-neutral.

But Time placed Che in its “Heroes and Icons” category of the Century’s Most Important People, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. Sean Hannity’s former partner, the late Alan Colmes, scoffed when I pointed to Time’s classification of Che’s “heroism” as a classic example of the ignorance (if not outright insanity) of the mainstream media’s treatment of the mass-murdering terrorist. Colmes flat-out refused to believe me, smirkingly implying to his huge TV audience that I was a typical “right-wing Cuban-American crackpot!”

‘Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly’ Reaches New Viewership Low Kelly’s attempt at hard-hitting political analysis struggles to do well in the ratings.

When Megyn Kelly publicly defected to NBC from Fox News following the Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal, it was pretty much assumed by her new employer (and former fans) that Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly would be a major player in the broadcast news magazine space. And on paper, it looked exactly like that: It promised hard-hitting interviews, a more conservative-friendly target audience, and big-name guests like Vladimir Putin.

But ever since that first interview—and most notably after Kelly decided to feature conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on the show—the show’s ratings have been in free fall.

As The Hill tweeted out last night, Kelly’s latest show was beaten out by a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos. And Ad Age TV reporter Anthony Crupi provided the crippling data points:

Through 6 episodes, the show is averaging just 941,332 members of the target demo (adults 25-54). This experiment ends w/ the new a.m. show.

NBC has a tough decision ahead if their would-be star doesn’t start producing better numbers on Sunday nights. That said, Kelly has nothing to worry about at the moment, though, as she’s still tapped to launch a morning show this fall.

On Don Jr., the Media Can’t Help Itself The Trump-Russia conspiracy meme is a farce, not a scandal. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

We’ll admit to being gobsmacked by the latest revelation. We always assumed that it would be somebody like Carter Page who’d eventually be discovered to have participated in an ill-advised email chain showing that even Team Trump noticed the Hindenburg-size fact of Russian delight in the Trump phenomenon.

Now the press has its gotcha, and it’s Donald Trump Jr. Golly.

Yet, after the first flush of hysteria, Don Jr. may be only half a rube for not being more sensitive to the Russian connection, which would explode in Hindenburg fashion only with the DNC email hack a few days later.

Bloomberg News suggests that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya wasn’t bringing secrets gleaned from Russia’s “crown prosecutor,” but news she read in the Russian press. Not the Russians but a Russian was trying to peddle this info to Trump Tower, as a pretext to lobby on behalf of a wealthy Russian client.

And it wasn’t any Russian but a tubby British music publicist who babbled fourth-hand, or perhaps was apple polishing all on his own, in claiming “Russian government support” for the Trump effort.

The farcical element continues to predominate in Russiagate, including with the mostly ignored Russian influence on FBI chief James Comey’s actions.

But real trouble can flow even from a farce. Thinkers for whom Russia was just one problem in a world full of problems, who previously did not identify Moscow as the No. 1 enemy, now do so, vociferously, for fear of being lumped in with Mr. Trump as a traitor to America or some such.

A mob is a machine for mass-producing cowards and bullies. That’s where we are now. Just turn on cable TV.

Even the estimable Anne Applebaum, author of a book on the Soviet gulag, fulminates in the Washington Post against every recent president for failing to heed Russia’s “peculiar dangers.” With all due respect, U.S. presidents are better informed than anybody about the nature of the Russian regime. They read the intelligence. George W. Bush looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and didn’t see his soul. He saw a potential nightmare that would have to be managed somehow. Ditto President Obama.

But neither are U.S. presidents equipped with magical powers to make such facts go away. The world is stuck with Mr. Putin, an authoritarian who cannot afford to modernize, whose quest for survival inevitably drives him down a funnel of deepening hostility toward a superpower where the rule of law prevails.

In the U.S. election, what began as Mr. Putin’s vendetta against Hillary morphed into his cynical promotion of Mr. Trump, and now is coming up roses a third time as a way to discredit the U.S. government and its new president.

A respected Russian journalist, Mikhail Zygar, in the New Yorker, dismisses the idea of some Putin “master plan. . . . There is no plan—it’s chaos.”

Another, Roman Shleinov, apropos of supposed payoffs to Mr. Trump via his real-estate business, explains that it has nothing to do with Trump: “Money is fleeing Russia in all directions, people are trying to invest anywhere they can, to get their assets out.”

If there was a conspiracy to put a Trump in the White House, let’s face it, Don Jr. would never have been fielding a blind email about it in June 2016 from a Miss Universe hanger-on.

Here’s another secret: Most U.S. reporters know they are overplaying the Trump-Russia connection, even as they revel in the Don Jr. gotcha moment, even as they play up the circus of legal and political jeopardy the administration has created for itself. CONTINUE AT SITE

How Social Media Stifles Free Speech by Jeff Trag

Even more problematic is that those platforms are free to delete the pages and posts of users they deem to have violated whatever they decide are “community standards.” This includes judging content supportive of, for example, restricting migration in Europe.

Facebook, for example, also often permits real hate speech while banning websites that expose this hate speech.

Ultimately, the only way to keep the United States safe is by protecting its citizens’ ability to discuss ideas that without fear. If we lose our freedom of expression on the internet, we lose our democracy.

One of the greatest contemporary battles for individual liberty and freedom of the press is being conducted in cyber space.

Today, political, journalistic and corporate elites are in the process of trying to control, and even rewrite, “story lines” of history and current events with which they might disagree, and that they see slipping through their fingers.

It is a form of censorship akin to banning the printing press or preventing open debate in the literal and proverbial public square.

Facebook, for example, also often permits real hate speech while banning websites that expose this hate speech.

There are, however, constitutional and legal measures that can and should be taken to protect Americans from having their right to express themselves as they wish – without causing harm to public safety or engaging in illegal activity — violated every time they log in to their social media accounts.

New laws need to be codified to prevent what have become virtual utilities such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube from steering debate in a particular ideological direction.

One argument against holding these social media giants accountable is that they are private companies, and that consumers can simply stop using them.

This claim is disingenuous, however: these companies have an effective monopoly on expression in the international public sphere. Although people are ostensibly free not to use Facebook or Twitter, there are no other comparable alternative platforms at their disposal.

Even more problematic is that those platforms are free to delete the pages and posts of users they deem to have violated whatever they decide are “community standards.” This includes judging content supportive of, for example, restricting migration in Europe.

Have Consumers Decided Most News Is Fake News? Global investors seem nearly as skeptical as Trump partisans. By James Freeman

Skepticism toward the media is most often associated with conservatives in Middle America, some of whom eat something other than artisanal sandwiches. But this week brings more evidence that investors worldwide have become very reluctant to buy what many established news organizations are selling. How else to explain the collective shrug of the shoulders in financial markets to the latest breathless media reports about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia?

Such reports have dominated this week’s news as much of the professional commentariat has pondered out loud whether treason has been committed in the President’s inner circle. Yet after an ever-so-slight hiccup on Tuesday following Donald Trump Jr.’s release of emails regarding a meeting he took last June with a Russian lawyer, stocks drifted higher. Since then, investors have spent much of their time parsing the remarks of Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. Reassured by her questionable suggestion that interest rates won’t have to rise very fast or very far in the years ahead, they continue to keep market indexes near record levels.

Investors in the aggregate obviously don’t believe that the republic is coming to an end, nor do they seem to expect a wrenching change in U.S. leadership. There have been similar episodes over the last several months of sharp divergence between the collective analytical judgment of journalists and that of investors. This era of reported turmoil has been marked by a striking lack of volatility in the financial markets. Stocks aren’t cheap by historical standards and corrections do happen.

Yet the world’s investors still like U.S. equities, despite constant media reports that U.S. constitutional governance is hanging in the balance. Now let’s look at the general population in the U.S. A new report from the Pew Research Center also suggests that the news media’s credibility problem reaches well beyond the hard-core MAGA crowd. A full 85% of Republicans and those who lean Republican have a negative view of the national news media. And even among Democrats and those who lean Democratic, the press corps is underwater, with 46% holding a negative view compared to 44% holding a positive one.

Each respondent may distrust the media for a different reason. And perhaps investors are not so much ignoring the reported news as they are trying to strike a balance between conflicting reports. For example, let’s say that an investor has concluded that the New York Times and the Washington Times are equally trustworthy. A reader of this story from the New York paper is bound to take away a very pessimistic view of the current White House:

As Air Force One jetted back from Europe on Saturday, a small cadre of Mr. Trump’s advisers huddled in a cabin helping to craft a statement for the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to give to The New York Times explaining why he met last summer with a lawyer connected to the Russian government. Participants on the plane and back in the United States debated how transparent to be in the statement, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Ultimately, the people said, the president signed off on a statement from Donald Trump Jr. for The Times that was so incomplete that it required day after day of follow-up statements, each more revealing than the last. It culminated on Tuesday with a release of emails making clear that Mr. Trump’s son believed the Russian lawyer was seeking to meet with him to provide incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

The Russia story has become the brier patch from which the president seemingly cannot escape.

But an investor reading this Washington Times story published the same day may conclude that the real danger to the republic was narrowly avoided last November:

While the mainstream news media hunts for evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, the public record shows that Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump and attack his administration.

The disinformation came in the form of a Russian-fed dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It contains a series of unverified criminal charges against Mr. Trump’s campaign aides, such as coordinating Moscow’s hacking of Democratic Party computers.

Some Democrats have widely circulated the discredited information. Mr. Steele was paid by the Democrat-funded opposition research firm Fusion GPS with money from a Hillary Clinton backer. Fusion GPS distributed the dossier among Democrats and journalists. The information fell into the hands of the FBI, which used it in part to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign aides.

Mr. Steele makes clear that his unproven charges came almost exclusively from sources linked to the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He identified his sources as “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure,” a former “top level Russian intelligence officer active inside the Kremlin,” a “senior Kremlin official” and a “senior Russian government official.”