On Saturday, Donald Trump took a brief break from his sliming of Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis to once again claim that all of the talk that he may have been compromised by Russia was bogus.
INTELLIGENCE INSIDERS NOW CLAIM THE TRUMP DOSSIER IS "A COMPLETE FRAUD!" @OANN
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2017
In light of what has emerged in the week since we learned Trump had been told the Kremlin was boasting that it had him by the combover, this tweet is downright laughable even by Trumpian standards. After all, we now know that American intelligence officials believe this dossier is very real, and were worried enough to warn their Israeli counterparts not to share secrets with the Trump administration until they were absolutely sure Trump had not been compromised.
That alone would be enough to prove that this news is as far from fake as you can get. But it turns out that dossier isn’t just alarming people in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. It turns out that a number of other intelligence agencies suspect that there might actually be something to the “golden showers” dossier.
BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel had lengthy conversations last weekend with two Israeli intelligence officers. They revealed that intellgence agencies in several countries are taking a long look at Trump’s ties to the Kremlin, as well as the prospect that he may have indeed been compromised by Russia. They also revealed that the “golden showers” dossier has been circulating around the global intelligence community “for some months.”
More tellingly, one of them says that this isn’t the only concern that the intelligence community has about Trump.
“There have been various reports about Trump’s ties to Russia,” the officer said in reference to other unpublished reports. “The dossier is one of them, but there are others, they make other allegations. Some are more specific, and some are less. You can trust me that many intelligence agencies are trying to evaluate the extent to which Trump might have ties, or a weakness of some type, to Russia.”
Specifically, intelligence officials are investigating reports about Trump’s past Russian ties, as well as his family’s myriad business interests. Additionally, according to the BBC, the American CIA–and presumably other agencies as well–are investigating reports that Russia illegally sent donations to Trump’s campaign. Watch more details here.
BuzzFeed, for those who don’t know, set the political world ablaze on Monday when it published a 35-page intelligence report claiming that Russia had not only been stroking Trump for years, but had reams of details about his financial and sexual activities that it could use against him. It turns out that Frenkel received that report from her Israeli contacts, who in turn said that Israel received the report from a Western European intelligence agency. For obvious reasons, the officer wouldn’t name the country. Eventually, according to the BBC, the dossier made its way to the United States via one of the three Baltic states.
For most of the last week, BuzzFeed has been under fire for publishing this dossier even though it openly admitted that the document contained errors. Frenkel’s piece suggests that Ben Smith and his team may have blown a chance to stick a fork in Trump. Had they revealed at the time they published the dossier that that they learned about itfrom Israeli intelligence, or that multiple intelligence agencies had been investigating these allegations for some time, it would have been a lot easier to shut down the Trump noise machine.
At the same time, though, this report proves that Trump’s bleating and screeting about this being fake news is nothing more than hot air from Trump Tower. The closest parallel is the Bill Cosby rape allegations. If you seriously believe that 35 women who claimed to have been assaulted over a period of three decades somehow conspired to cobble together nearly identical stories of how Cosby attacked them, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
This is no different. When multiple intelligence agencies believe that there actually may be a there there, this isn’t fake news. This is a five-alarm national security crisis playing out before our eyes.
“OANN” is One America News Network, a small-time, hard-right cable news network. It’s very telling that the best answer Trump has comes from a lightweight Republican agitprop machine. Unless he can come up with something better than that, he should either stand down as president-elect or get his resignation letter ready.
(featured image courtesy DonkeyHotey, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
