https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/ny_emtimesem_limited_hangout_on_steele_dossier_spares_obama.html
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.
In September 2016, for instance, Michael Isikoff wrote a lengthy breakout article for Yahoo News based on a briefing by “multiple sources,” the most notable of whom, unnamed in the article, was Steele. As Isikoff reported, intelligence officials were investigating Trump adviser Carter Page’s “private communications with senior Russian officials.”
Isikoff reported too that Senate majority leader Harry Reid had briefed FBI director James Comey on the “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, information Reid could only have gotten from the dossier. The word was spreading.
In Meier’s retelling, Isikoff is something of a hero for having “backed away” from the dossier before his peers. Meier also cites Erik Wemple of the Washington Post for writing a series of columns about “the media infatuation with the dossier.” Although Isikoff’s comment is undated, Wemple’s columns appeared in 2020. No misprint, 2020.