RUTHFULLY YOURS

The U.S. Senate approved several top Treasury officials on Thursday, giving the administration’s tax, regulatory and international financial diplomacy agendas a boost.

Among the five senior Treasury officials given the green light are former Bear-Stearns chief economist David Malpass to represent the U.S. Treasury as its top financial diplomat; David Kautter as assistant secretary for tax policy; and Christopher Campbell, a former Republican Senate Finance Committee staffer, to be assistant secretary for financial institutions.

The Senate also approved Andrew Maloney as Treasury deputy undersecretary for legislative affairs and Brent McIntosh as the department’s general counsel.

Mr. Malpass, as Treasury’s undersecretary for international affairs, will act as the administration’s key advocate for dealing with sensitive issues such as exchange rates and cross-border rifts over financial regulation, including at the G-7 and G-20.

Mr. Kautter, a veteran accountant and lawyer, will head the team of experts who are helping shape and analyze the details of the tax bill that Republicans want to push through Congress this year. He will also oversee the administration’s efforts to lighten the burden of tax regulations. Earlier this year, Treasury listed eight Obama-era tax regulations it was considering changing or ending. Those include a rule limiting companies from using internal cross-border debt to lower their tax bills.

Mr. Campbell would play a critical role coordinating and advancing the administration’s regulatory agenda, including easing or rolling back provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, as well as its plans for a major rewrite of the U.S. tax code.

A former senior official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, Mr. Malpass has long been critical of global trade agreements and multilateral financial institutions that represent the backbone of world economic diplomacy.

Former colleagues say that while Mr. Malpass might try to downsize the role that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other international institutions play, he will still use Washington’s dominant power within them to advance its interests.

Espousing an “America First” policy platform, the administration is pushing multilateral institutions to operate more efficiently and speak more vocally against imbalances in the global economy, such as those caused by capital controls and currency interventions.

Mr. Malpass will take office at a delicate time for U.S. diplomatic relations, both economic and strategic. The administration’s threats to levy higher tariffs, ignore some World Trade Organization rulings, and focus on what administration officials have called “economic nationalism,” has fueled worries Washington could spark a trade war, including among longtime allies. While Mr. Malpass is considered more of an internationalist than some key administration officials, he too has been sharply critical of many of the international institutions he will now have to engage to leverage U.S. power.

Mr. Malpass faced a relatively smooth nomination through the Senate, though two lawmakers voted against his approval out of the finance committee. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) objected to his views on financial regulations enacted by Congress in the wake of the 2008 crisis while Robert Menendez, (D., N.J.), expressed concerns about his statements in the lead-up to the recession.

Barack and Michelle Obama have snapped up the 1920s brick house they were renting in the posh Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Kalorama for $8.1 million.

The former president and his family plan to spend at least another two-and -a-half-years in the nation’s capital, said Kevin Lewis, spokesman to the Obamas.

“It made sense for them to buy a home rather than continuing to rent,” Mr. Lewis said in an email confirming the purchase.

The Obamas have been living in the 8,200-square-foot home since leaving the White House in January. Mr. Obama, 55, has said in the past that the family intends to stay in Washington, D.C., until their youngest daughter, Sasha, finishes school.

The house was renovated in 2011, includes up to nine bedrooms, eight-and-a-half bathrooms, a finished basement with room for staff, an oversized terrace and formal gardens, according to a former listing with Washington Fine Properties. There’s also a two-car garage plus ample parking for a Secret Service detail in a gated courtyard that can fit eight to 10 cars.

The sellers, Joe Lockhart, Glover Park Group co-founder, and his wife, Giovanna Gray Lockhart, the Washington editor of Glamour, bought the home in 2014 for $5.3 million, according to property records.

Kalorama is a popular spot for D.C. elite. Mr. Obama’s neighbors include top adviser to President Donald Trump Jared Kushner and his wife, Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, as well as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

The Washington Post first reported the sale.

Imran Awan was arrested at Dulles International Airport July 24, while attempting to board a flight to Pakistan. For more than a decade the congressional staffer had worked under top House Democrats, and he had just been accused by the FBI of bank fraud.

It was a dramatic moment in a saga that started in February, when Capitol Police confirmed an investigation into Mr. Awan and his family on separate accusations of government theft. The details are tantalizing: The family all worked for top Democrats, were paid huge sums, and had access to sensitive congressional data, even while having ties to Pakistan.

The media largely has ignored the affair, the ho-hum coverage summed up by a New York Times piece suggesting it may be nothing more than an “overblown Washington story, typical of midsummer.” But even without evidence of espionage or blackmail, this ought to be an enormous scandal.

Because based on what we already know, the Awan story is—at the very least—a tale of massive government incompetence that seemingly allowed a family of accused swindlers to bilk federal taxpayers out of millions and even put national secrets at risk. In a more accountable world, House Democrats would be forced to step down.

Mr. Awan, 37, began working for House Democrats as an IT staffer in 2004. By the next year, he was working for future Democratic National Committee head Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Over time he would add his wife, two brothers, a brother’s wife and a friend to the payroll—and at handsome sums. One brother, Jamal, hired in 2014 reportedly at age 20, was paid $160,000. That’s in line with what a chief of staff makes—about four times the average Capitol Hill staffer. No Democrat appears to have investigated these huge numbers or been asked to account for them.

According to an analysis by the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak, who has owned this story, the family has collected $5 million since 2003 and “appeared at one time or another on an estimated 80 House Democrats’ payrolls.” Yet Mr. Rosiak interviewed House staffers who claim most of the family were “ghost” employees and didn’t come to work. Only in government does nobody notice when staffers fail to show up.

The family was plenty busy elsewhere. A litany of court documents accuse them of bankruptcy fraud, life-insurance fraud, tax fraud and extortion. Abid Awan, a brother, ran up more than $1 million in debts on a failed car dealership he somehow operated while supposedly working full time on the Hill. One document ties the family to a loan from a man stripped of his Maryland medical license after false billing. Capitol Police are investigating allegations of procurement fraud and theft. The brothers filed false financial-disclosure forms, with Imran Awan claiming his wife had no income, even as she worked as a fellow House IT staffer. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Russia election probe aside, President Trump has so far avoided any major foreign-policy mistakes. But he will commit an Obama -sized blunder if he overrules the advice of his generals who want a modest surge of forces and a new strategy in Afghanistan.

Mr. Trump had by all accounts agreed weeks ago to the Pentagon’s request for an additional 3,000-5,000 troops plus more aggressive use of air power and other assets. But he’s having second thoughts as he indulges his isolationist instincts fanned by aide Stephen Bannon. Mr. Trump’s decision will determine whether he’ll repeat Mr. Obama’s catastrophic 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, and it will echo among allies and adversaries for the rest of his Presidency.

Mr. Trump—like all Americans—is understandably frustrated that the Afghan war still isn’t won after 16 years and 2,400 American lives lost. Barack Obama undermined his own 2009 surge of troops with a fixed exit date, and then tried to time the departure of all U.S. troops to his own White House exit.

This told the Taliban to wait the U.S. out, and the insurgents have since regained much ground they lost during the surge. Mr. Obama recognized his mistake enough to keep 8,400 troops in the country, but he limited their duties mainly to training and pursuing Islamic State enclaves. We’re told there are only about a dozen F-16s in the country, and the Afghan military lacks crucial close-air support during Taliban engagements.

Mr. Trump has given his field commanders more freedom, and they can now pursue Taliban fighters. But the Afghan forces are still losing ground in much of the country and need more support. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s plan would inject U.S. advisers with Afghan battalions to assist on the battlefield.

The U.S. could also deploy some Apache attack helicopters to blunt Taliban advances, and close-air support and air evacuation assistance would give Afghan forces a dose of confidence. They’re certainly willing to fight, having lost 2,531 soldiers through May 8 this year alone, with 4,238 wounded. The U.S. has lost 10 soldiers in Afghanistan this year.

Mr. Mattis also needs a strategy for Pakistan, which provides a refuge for the Taliban and lethal Haqqani network. This may require cross-border U.S. military raids, ideally with Pakistani cooperation, but alone if necessary. Mr. Trump could help by naming an ambassador to Islamabad, and perhaps a special envoy like former General David Petraeus to all of the main regional players.

Mr. Trump is fond of saying around the White House that Afghanistan is “the graveyard of empires,” which might be relevant if the U.S. were running an empire. The U.S. is there at the request of a legitimate elected government and a population that doesn’t like the Taliban. A Trump troop mini-surge would be a crucial political signal to the Afghan government and regional players that we aren’t bugging out.

The startling 2016 presidential election weakened the notion of tribal identity rather than a shared American identity. And it may have begun a return to the old idea of unhyphenated Americans.

Many working-class voters left the Democratic party and voted for a billionaire reality-TV star in 2016 because he promised jobs and economic growth first, a new sense of united Americanism second, and an end to politically correct ethnic tribalism third.

In the 19th century, huge influxes of Irish and German immigrants warred for influence and power against the existing American coastal establishment that traced its ancestry to England. Despite their ethnic chauvinism, these immigrant activist groups eventually became indistinguishable from their hosts.

Then and now, the forces of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage make it hard to retain an ethnic cachet beyond two generations — at least without constant inflows of new and often poor fellow immigrants.

The strained effort to champion the victimized tribe can turn comical. In the 1960s, my family still tried to buy Swedish-made Volvo automobiles and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. But it proved hopeless to cling to a fading Swedish heritage.

For all the trendy talk of the salad bowl and the careerist rewards of hyping a multicultural ancestry, America still remains a melting pot of diverse races, ethnicities, and agendas.

The alternative of adjudicating which particular group is more victimized and in greater need of government reparations is a hopeless task in a multiracial society — one that inevitably results in internecine strife among identity-politics groups.

Recent scholarly studies, here and abroad, have found that the aggressive effort to win government preferences for particular ethnic and religious minorities descends into “competitive victimhood.” In other words, such groups battle each other even more than they battle the majority.

After all, who can calibrate necessary government set-asides and reparations for a century and a half of slavery, for ill treatment of Native Americans, and for descendants of victims of the Asian immigration exclusionary laws, of segregation, of the unconstitutional repression of German citizens during World War I and of Japanese-American internment during World War II?

In his article “Modernity and the Secularization of Reason,” Tim Jones claims that fascism and communism are “rooted in the reason midwifed out of philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, Bacon, Hume, and Marx.” He then makes this astonishing assertion: “[This] makes American democratic republicanism a first cousin of those tyrannical ideologies [fascism and communism] since it, too, grew out of the same philosophical soil.”

The claim Jones makes – that American democratic republicanism is a first cousin to fascism and communism – is simply not true.

Trying to sort out everything in the article would be a huge challenge. Let’s keep it simple by beginning with Rousseau. The line from Rousseau to Kant is direct. Kant had only one picture in his austere household: a picture of Rousseau on the wall above where he wrote. From Kant to Hegel and on to Marx is also a direct line, and the line from Hegel and Marx to fascism and communism is, obviously, direct as well. But this line misses the American Founding entirely, and misses it by a country mile.

This line from Rousseau begins with his “general will” and his rejection of individual rights. In Rousseau’s political vision, everyone surrenders all rights and submits to the general will, which then maintains absolute equality. What is required, Rousseau wrote, is “the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community.” Submission to the general will entailed the surrender of all property rights.

Rousseau’s vision was finally realized in the 20th century in Nazi Germany and in the USSR. Nazi ideology – national socialism – and Soviet ideology – international socialism – aligned with Rousseau quite precisely. Here is Richard Overy in his book on Hitler and Stalin, The Dictators: “The two dictatorships … preached the absolute value of the collective and the absolute obligation to abandon concern for self in the name of the whole.” Hitler and Stalin showed us what it means for everyone and everything to be subject to the general will.

Note the word “alienation,” which Rousseau uses. In the language of Rousseau’s time, to alienate is to transfer the title to a property or other right to another person. The American Founders used the negation of that term to advance a different vision of rights. They claimed that we have “unalienable rights,” rights that cannot be alienated, which cannot be surrendered. According to the Founders, our unalienable right to our lives and our unalienable right to our liberty cannot rightfully be transferred or taken from us, because those rights are inherent to us as human beings, part of what it means to be a rational being and a moral agent.

The American idea did not grow out of the same philosophical soil as fascism and communism.

Let’s briefly turn to another claim made in the article, a claim about the Enlightenment era: “The Enlightenment secularized reason with no moral strings attached making it morally neutral.” This claim is perhaps a fair assessment of the French Enlightenment, but not of the very different American Enlightenment.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 22,000 for the first time on Wednesday. “ Donald Trump is loving the stock market these days,” observes the Journal, which adds that Wednesday’s milestone “marks a rise of precisely 20% since Mr. Trump was elected in November. Assuming the blue-chip index closes above 22000, it will have taken just 183 days to do that, the fastest jump of 20% after a new president was elected since George H.W. Bush in 1988, according to WSJ’s Market Data Group.” But how much credit does Mr. Trump deserve?

The investor euphoria after Mr. Trump’s election has bumped up against the reluctance of Republican legislators to enact significant reform. After several GOP senators broke their promises last week to repeal ObamaCare, now the Washington Post says, “The White House’s push to quickly pass a major package of tax cuts through Congress is facing a fall calendar full of legislative land mines, potentially delaying a key part of President Trump’s agenda into at least 2018.”

These days many investors argue whether the rising market is still being driven by optimism about the Trump agenda or simply by rising corporate sales and profits thanks to improving global growth. Monetary policy has also left the financial system awash in cash looking for assets to buy. And then there’s the thesis from Brian Reynolds of Canaccord Genuity that as long as pension funds continue to buy huge volumes of corporate bonds, those corporations will continue to have the cash to buy back their own stock and keep markets grinding higher. He points out that credit investors “bought a record amount of corporate bonds in July.”

Whether the stock market boom is largely driven by one of these factors or some combination, it’s clear that investors continue to be much more optimistic about the United States than most journalists, who write daily on the latest alleged signal from Washington that civilization is heading into an abyss.

Mr. Trump certainly runs a risk in pointing to the markets as an arbiter of his performance. The Journal notes:

Stock-market strategists have warned that hitching his administration to the market may be dangerous. After all, big gains in the Dow during the early months of a presidency don’t always equate to big gains during the rest of the presidency. The fastest 20% rise following the election of a new president was the 63 days it took after President Herbert Hoover’s win in 1928.

But Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics thinks Mr. Trump has every right to take credit for rising markets. In a note to clients this week he acknowledges the view of many investors that “all of the pro-growth hopes and dreams that flourished right after Trump’s surprise election have now been crushed by the swamp, and Trump’s own seeming self-destructiveness.”

Mr. Luskin has a different view and writes that booming U.S. stock markets probably represent a “rational recognition that, since Trump took office, many pro-growth hopes and dreams have already become reality.” Mr. Luskin continues, “We’re not trying to be either cheerleaders or partisans here. But it’s a reality that a great deal of pro-growth progress has been made.” He ticks off a list that includes pipeline approvals, the rollback of various Obama-era rules, and the hiring of deregulators to run the EPA, the FCC and other federal agencies. CONTINUE AT SITE

A top official of the National Security Council was fired last month after arguing in a memo that President Trump is under sustained attack from subversive forces both within and outside the government who are deploying Maoist tactics to defeat President Trump’s nationalist agenda.

His dismissal marks the latest victory by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the ongoing war within Trump’s White House between those who believe that the president is under threat from dark forces plotting to undermine him, and those like McMaster who dismiss this as conspiratorial thinking.

Rich Higgins, a former Pentagon official who served in the NSC’s strategic-planning office as a director for strategic planning, was let go on July 21. Higgins’s memo describes supposed domestic and international threats to Trump’s presidency, including globalists, bankers, the “deep state,” and Islamists. The memo characterizes the Russia story as a plot to sabotage Trump’s nationalist agenda. It asserts that globalists and Islamists are seeking to destroy America. The memo also includes a set of recommendations, arguing that the problem constitutes a national-security priority.

“Globalists and Islamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed,” the memo warns. It argues that this has led “Islamists [to] ally with cultural Marxists,” but that in the long run, “Islamists will co-opt the movement in its entirety.”

Higgins wrote the memo in late May, and at some point afterwards it began circulating among people outside the White House associated with the Trump campaign to whom Higgins had given it.

Higgins, according to another source with direct knowledge of the incident, was called into the White House Counsel’s office the week before last and asked about the memo. On July 21, the Friday of that week, he was informed by McMaster’s deputy Ricky Waddell that he was losing his job.

NSC spokesman Michael Anton declined to comment on Higgins’s firing, saying that the White House does not comment on internal personnel matters.

“In Maoist insurgencies, the formation of a counter-state is essential to seizing state power,” the memo reads. “Functioning as a hostile complete state acting within an existing state, it has an alternate infrastructure. Political warfare operates as one of the activities of the ‘counter-state.’” I was able to review large portions of the memo, and to secure extracts for publication.

“Because the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives … These attack narratives are pervasive, full spectrum, and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”

Sources offered conflicting accounts of how the memo came to McMaster’s attention. Several sources with knowledge of the events said they believed the memo made its way to Trump’s desk, a version that others disputed.

Higgins’s bosses at the NSC were not pleased with the memo, sources say, the creation of which was not part of Higgins’s job. Higgins, seen as an ally of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, had only served on the council for a couple months.

Imagine, if you will, that there is a shadow government.

The actual government, the administration of Donald Trump, is coming off the worst week of his presidency, although there haven’t been any smooth weeks. Trump’s top legislative priority, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, seems dead for the moment. (Tax reform? Forget it.) His administration has set a new standard for chaos and dysfunction, rolling through staffers the way other administrations run through, well, legislative initiatives. Trump’s foreign policy remains inchoate and ineffective. Meanwhile, a special counsel investigation looms over the entire administration, threatening both its legitimacy and legal jeopardy for some of its members.

Things are going considerably better for the shadow government. With the Trump administration’s chaos sucking up all the attention, it’s been able to move forward on a range of its priorities, which tend to be more focused on regulatory matters anyway. It is remaking the justice system, rewriting environmental rules, overhauling public-lands administration, and greenlighting major infrastructure projects. It is appointing figures who will guarantee the triumph of its ideological vision for decades to come.

The trick here is that the administration and this shadow government are one and the same. Even as the public government sputters, other elements of the Trump administration are quietly remaking the nation’s regulatory landscape, especially on the environment and criminal justice.

There is so much attention paid to the chaos in the executive branch that it’s easy to come to believe that Trump is getting nothing whatsoever accomplished. Even for people who don’t support the president’s agenda—especially for them, in fact—it is useful to step back occasionally and take stock of what this presidency is doing to work toward its goals.

Trump’s complaints that the press is ignoring his victories in favor of covering controversies ring hollow. You can’t very well go around setting things on fire and then asking why the press keeps covering the fires. But warnings that the Trump administration is doing X to distract from Y seem misguided for a couple of reasons—one being that they ascribe a greater organization that the White House evinces in any other sphere, and another being that the supposedly distracting stories are often just as catastrophic. But the large-scale disasters do keep attention focused away from what smaller agencies are doing, as Ben Carson acknowledged recently.

“Let me put it this way,” the secretary of housing and urban development told the Washington Examiner. “I’m glad that Trump is drawing all the fire so I can get stuff done.”

Meanwhile, Trump continues to make preposterous claims. His assertion, at the six-month mark of his presidency last month, that he’d signed more bills than any other president over that stretch earned a snarky rejoinder even from The New York Times. But that is small consolation for progressive environmentalists, public-lands advocates, LGBT activists, and criminal-justice reformers. The list of accomplishments fall short of what Trump promised, but many of them are still quite consequential, with effects to be felt for decades to come. That’s one reason this sort of devil’s advocate exercise is important, although when I tried it in January it was not well received (except by the White House). Still, in the spirit of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who intends to establish a “red-team blue-team” exercise to investigate whether climate change is actually happening, let’s consider the Trump administration’s accomplishments. Spoiler alert: like climate change, they’re real.

One of the two biggest victories has come on border security, which was one of Trump’s top campaign priorities. Border crossings have already plummeted, suggesting that rhetoric making it clear to immigrants that they are not welcome is effective in its own right. Customs and Border Protections report that apprehensions of unauthorized people are down nearly 20 percent from the same time in 2016. (Trump continues to radically exaggerate these figures, though.) This decline has occurred despite Trump being foiled on his actual policy proposals at the border. Construction hasn’t begun on his border wall yet, and federal courts have repeatedly smacked down his Muslim travel ban.

That said, he did get one good result in courts—and that points to a second area of success. The Supreme Court allowed parts of the travel ban to go forward, in a victory that would not have happened without Neil Gorsuch on the court, filling a seat that under all previous customs would have been filled by Barack Obama’s appointee Merrick Garland. Given his legislative struggles, the most enduring Trump victories are likely to come in the judicial branch.

Trump may get to appoint several more justices to the high court. And in the meantime, he’s filling up lower courts with lifetime appointees. As the veteran Democratic official Ron Klain wrote recently, “A massive transformation is underway in how our fundamental rights are defined by the federal judiciary. For while President Trump is incompetent at countless aspects of his job, he is proving wildly successful in one respect: naming youthful conservative nominees to the federal bench in record-setting numbers.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/07/ishmael-jones-phoniness-of-the-trump-dossier.php

Ishmael Jones writes to comment on the infamous Trump “dossier.” It is one of the keys to the “collusion” hysteria and related “fake news” with which we have been inundated since the 2016 election. Mr. Jones is the pseudonymous former CIA officer and author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He notes that his comments here are based upon his experience in writing “lots of intelligence reports” and that they have been approved by the CIA for publication. Mr. Jones writes:

The media continue to produce smoke in their efforts to accuse President Trump of collusion with the Russian government. But the founding document – the core set of beliefs – of the collusion story remains the infamous Russian Dossier, which is a fabrication.

I have written before on the nothingness of the reporting on Russian collusion and I want to make it clear how phony this Dossier is from the point of view of an intelligence officer.

I do not have a magical espionage sixth sense. Rather, it is the same instinct that we all have. If you know how to fly a plane, or plant roses, or collect stamps, or play the saxophone, you have an instinctive and visceral awareness when you encounter false information involving your specialty.

For fun, you can click on these photographs, which will instinctively make you think something’s not right here. That’s the same feeling I get when I watch CNN’s reporting on intelligence issues.

Spies don’t even use the word “dossier.” They keep information in “files,” just like everybody else. English is such a rich language that we can use different words for the same object when we want to gussy things up. We don’t “eat raw cow,” we “dine upon steak tartare.” “Dossier” makes this fabrication sound better.

The heading on the Dossier says CONFIDENTIAL/SENSITIVE SOURCE which sounds official except I’ve never seen such a heading.

The first page of the Dossier gets right down to business with the golden showers accusation, that Donald Trump had women urinate upon him for his personal enjoyment. Sure, crazy things can happen, but the professional’s first instinct is skepticism. Crazy accusations with no details, no proof, no names, and no sourcing mean it didn’t happen.

The CIA has professional reports officers who review intelligence reporting. It’s as if they carry rulers, ready to rap the knuckles of any CIA case officer who writes a report like the Dossier. They demand details and the who, what, when, why, and where.

Fabrications are everywhere in both espionage and journalism. Fabricators create this stuff relentlessly for profit. Even before Al Gore invented the Internet, fabricated stories were everywhere.

Many journalists have the same standards as CIA reports officers, which is why so many journalists had already seen and dismissed the Dossier, before CNN finally took the bait.

The Dossier occasionally uses the passive voice such as “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones …” or “there had been talk in the Kremlin…” The passive voice makes CIA reports officers howl, “Who knew it, why did they know it, how did they know it!” Reports officers hate the passive voice because it is misleading and weaselly. No professional spy writes in the passive voice.

The Dossier is sprinkled with words like “kompromat” and “plausible deniability” which sound like spy words but spies don’t write this way.

Fabricators try to include a bit of truth in their reporting to make the false reporting appear true. Some of the Dossier’s observations, such as that the Russians spy on other nations, are true but add nothing. Those few details that the Dossier contains have been disproven. Trump’s lawyer did not travel to Prague for a meeting with Russians, for example. Trump associates and acquaintances mentioned in the Dossier turned out to have no connection to the described events.