Timeline: Monsignor sets up a Steele trap

Amerigo Vespucci next to a Map of the Americas and East Asia. Detail from Universal Cosmography world Map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published April 1507, via reddit/map porn.

Now that so much material has come out on the Trump-Russia conspiracy that wasn't known or knowable to Christopher Steele, from George Papadopoulos's antics in the spring of 2016 through the Trump Tower "adoptions" meeting of 9 June to the odd fact that Paul Manafort sent some 75 pages of sensitive US election polling data in August 2016 to his old henchman Konstantin Kilimnik to transmit to two very wealthy Ukrainians, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov (the richest man in Ukraine and the man who introduced Manafort to the Party of Regions in 2004-05) from whom he was at the moment expecting a payment of $2.4 million to come in November, though he'd had no money from Ukrainian politicians for well over a year, and if you think that polling data was just for Lyovochkin's and Akhmetov's personal entertainment and wasn't destined for somebody in Russia, I don't know what to tell you (Emptywheel thinks she has some solid evidence that it was going to the Russian Oleg Deripaska as well but refuses to speculate on the thing that interests me, who the end user might be)—

Now, I was saying, that we've heard a couple of hours of the testimony of Michael Cohen that Special Counsel Mueller thinks it's safe for the public to hear, though not the several hours that the House and Senate intelligence committees have heard in secret, to say nothing of Cohen's seven visits to the Special Counsel's office since he offered his guilty plea, Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd St. ("The State of Russiagate"), thinks that

it’s worth returning for a moment to the document that established the darkest interpretation of all the Russian weirdness swirling around Donald Trump: the intelligence dossier created by Christopher Steele, late of MI6, on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, which brought together the reports and rumors that Steele deemed credible about the then-candidate, now-president’s Russia ties.

—which to me is a little like saying now that we can map the earth in exquisite detail with satellite imagery, it's time to revisit Amerigo Vespucci's hypothesis that there's a great big continent in the ocean someplace between West Africa and Japan. Vespucci didn't get all the details straight—turns out there were two continents—but he did a terrific job with the material he had to work with, and there's no real point in criticizing him, unless of course you want to ignore everything we've learned since the beginning of the 16th century and claim North and South America don't exist, and I don't see why anybody would want to do that.

But let's humor him a little bit:

The Steele dossier made four big claims — or, since all those claims took the form of rumors and raw intelligence, let’s say that it raised four big possibilities.

You think the rhetorical reason for calling them "possibilities" is just to magnify the doubt with which we entertain Steele's reports, and it does do that, but it also serves another function, which is to disaggregate them from each other; when we talk about a list of possibilities, we generally mean alternative explanations of some phenomenon or other, whereas Ross's list is actually a single story divided into four parts:

One of them, soon well corroborated, was that Russian intelligence was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the release of stolen emails through WikiLeaks.

The next possibility was that a Russian project to cultivate Trump, supported and directed by Putin, had been going on for many years, and included both offers of “sweetener real estate business deals” (which Trump supposedly declined) and “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” (which he supposedly accepted).

In fact, the "next" possibility here isn't "next" to anything; it's the first two paragraphs of Steele's first memo, dated 20 June 2016, which nowhere mentions DNC emails, though the Russian team calling itself "Guccifer II" had announced on the 14th that they'd be releasing them themselves, and then published a Podesta document instead, the following day. It wasn't until more than a month later that Steele got to the DNC emails and WikiLeaks, after WikiLeaks began releasing them on 22 July, in the dossier's third, unfortunately undated, memo (presumably between the 22nd and the fifth memo, of the 30th). Trump seems to have known about that before the 20th, well before Steele heard anything, if Cohen's testimony to the Oversight Committee is true, because Trump's conduit to WikiLeaks, Roger Stone, told him.

WikiLeaks itself didn't know before that, I should note; Guccifer II had been having difficulty getting them the file, and it wasn't until the 18th that they were able to confirm they had it and proposed to publish it "this week", according to Stone's charging documents—so when Douthat and others claim that anybody might have known about the emails, "WikiLeaks had already been hinting at an email dump, so Stone was not exactly delivering privileged information," that's just wrong. Nailing it to within a couple of days could have been done only by somebody who was in touch with the organization.

The third possibility was that this relationship dramatically influenced the 2016 campaign. According to Steele’s sources, there was possibly “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” between Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence, managed by Paul Manafort with Michael Cohen playing go-between in Prague, which encompassed the D.N.C. hacking — a crime carried out “with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.”

The well-developed conspiracy of cooperation is also from the third memo, except for the Cohen part, which doesn't show up until the ninth memo, dated 20 October. Another thing the third memo does is to flesh out some of the very crude material of the first memo, in particular that "regular flow of intelligence" over an unspecified period of time, which turns out to be several different and unrelated things, from the American side communications from Manafort and his lieutenants including Carter Page, plants in the DNC, members of the Russian émigré community and diplomats making use of the Russian pension system as a channel for communication, more strictly focused on the activities of Russian oligarchs in the US than on politics (this is reinforced in the fifth memo, 30 July, which discusses Trump associates feeding their handlers information on rich Russians in America for the past eight years, and I expect that means thugs like Sater and Epshteyn), and cyber agents—

and from the Russian side pretty much only cyber agents, who are easily identified with the Internet Research Agency staffers and GRU officers indicted last February and July respectively.

Also a more precise picture of the very tenuous nature of Trump's business interests in Russia; Trump's people actually welcomed Democratic and media attention to this relatively minor part of his portfolio, Steele's sources told him, because it took attention away from his much bigger and more scandalous activities in China and elsewhere:

The final possibility, of course, was that Russia had so-called “kompromat” on Trump — above all, the pee tape.

And that's back to the first memo, and everybody's favorite part, and the least confirmable of course, to which Steele himself never returned,  although in the 13th memo, 14 September, there's a new discussion of Trump spreading around bribe money and participating in sex parties in St. Petersburg, on "several occasions in the past" and in some kind of association with our friend Aras Agalarov, sponsor of the Miss Universe competition (so that he would know about the pee incident if it did take place), owner of the Crocus City development where the Trump Tower Moscow was to be built in one of its incarnations, and the presiding spirit of the 9 June "adoptions" meeting, all of which Steele apparently knew nothing whatever about.

And by the way there are all kinds of kompromat, not just the "salacious" ones, and it's probably much more important in the grand scheme of things that Putin has evidence of Trump's agreement to illegally accept Russian assistance in the campaign, which, if I'm right, he periodically allows to drift out toward the US press, as in the case of the "private" Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak of May 2017, and the Goldstone Junior emails of that June, and so on. That would do very nicely if it appeared at a slightly faster tempo.

In any event, you can see here what Douthat is doing with the "four possibilities" breakdown of the things he wants to discuss: it's intended as a ranking, from the most possible (the link between WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence doesn't need to be questioned, though Douthat doesn't wonder why Trump has really never stopped trying to question it) to the least (the very uncorroborated legend of the Golden Shower, though Douthat and other critics don't notice that Steele is not at all committed to it himself, or at least he too has failed to find confirmation). So you accept the top one and laugh at the bottom one, and the specific aim is to make the third "possibility", of the Manafort-managed conspiracy, sound as improbable as possible, because that's what he's most anxious to deny—

Cohen’s testimony dovetailed with the always-more-plausible narrative in which Trump and his circle weren’t collaborators but fools and wannabes, who might have been willing to play games with spies and hackers, but who mostly just bumbled around haplessly on the sidelines

And the thing about the Steele dossier, in fact, is how very weak the evidence for conspiracy is compared to what we have now. For instance with all those meetings Steele didn't know about or foresee between Trump campaign officials and Russians that the campaign officials subsequently lied about, sometimes getting themselves charged with perjury (Steele notes Flynn's December 2015 visit to Moscow along with Jill Stein's as of interest, in the eighth memo of 10 August, but with no idea that Flynn is going to get appointed National Security Adviser, and Flynn didn't lie about that one anyway). The key cases of Papadopoulos and of the 9 June meeting are unknown to Steele, and he has no clue about the importance to Putin of lifting sanctions, which doesn't come into real focus until his work was largely done, with the attempts of the incoming administration to fix them.

Steele hardly mention sanctions at all until the 11th memo, 14 September, where the Russians are taking pleasure in having gotten both candidates to oppose TPP and TTIP, but complaining that the sanctions are designed to "divide the Russian elite". But there's no talk of lifting them as a goal, even though there's a formal list of goals of the pro-Trump policy. That comes up only once, in the 16th memo, 18 October, in the elaborate discussion of Carter Page's negotiations over the Rosneft sale (the first time he mentions the Page meeting, in the fourth memo, 19 July, sanctions don't come into the discussion, and the only other implicit reference to sanctions involves poor ex-president Medvedev, in the sixth memo of 5 August, who really hates the whole Trump project because he wants to be friends with Hillary Clinton and above all to go back to traveling freely in the US). In this, the mention of sanctions could be evidence that Steele really has the goods on this one, which I've not seen seriously disputed, though I don't hear anybody saying it's true either.

Douthat has no idea what the content of the conspiracy would be—

If the D.N.C. hack took place with Trump’s cooperation as part of a longstanding exchange of favors, then he would be guiltier than Nixon

—is just idiotic. Obviously the Republicans had no assistance to offer them in this technical matter; what they had to offer, and may have agreed to in principle in the "adoptions" meeting and surely agreed to later, was a quid pro quo in return for the Russian assistance, in unlocking all Putin's and Deripaska's and the others' bank accounts if Trump were to win the election.

It is so evident to me that you can now make this case, assuming Mueller has proper evidence, without any reference to the Steele dossier at all. (Including the issue of Cohen's trip to Prague, or even Page's personal piracy efforts, both of which I hate to lose, but they're just not essential to any case based on the things we know now). Douthat's clever obfuscation notwithstanding.