This possibility is one I have also taken seriously. We are fortunate that Daniel Hoffman has gone to the trouble of making the case for it, in a “Commentary” posting at the Wall Street Journal.
I will let readers peruse his post, for the most part; Hoffman offers three significant points about the opportunity the Kremlin would have seen, which is what I will cite here:
There are three reasons the Kremlin would have detected Mr. Steele’s information gathering and seen an opportunity to intervene. First, Mr. Steele did not travel to Russia to acquire his information and instead relied on intermediaries. That is a weak link, since Russia’s internal police service, the FSB, devotes significant technical and human resources to blanket surveillance of Western private citizens and government officials, with a particular focus on uncovering their Russian contacts.
Second, Mr. Steele was an especially likely target for such surveillance given that he had retired from MI-6, the British spy agency, after serving in Moscow. Russians are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer. The FSB would have had its eye on him.
Third, the Kremlin successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee. Emails there could have tipped it off that the Clinton campaign was collecting information on Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia.
The three points stand on their own, but let’s focus on the last one, because we have other information that sheds a strong light on it.
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Hoffman says this in the next paragraph:
If the FSB did discover that Mr. Steele was poking around for information [i.e., by implication, discovered from the DNC emails], it hardly could have resisted using the gravitas of a retired MI-6 agent to plant false information.
This would no doubt be true about what the FSB couldn’t resist. But Hoffman doesn’t emphasize – or mention – something we already know. We know that the “Fancy Bear” intruders on the DNC’s IT system spent the month of May 2016 scooping off everything there was about opposition research on Trump.
We know this from Scott Ritter’s report on the sequence of events in that odd episode, in which CrowdStrike, the cyber-security firm, placed an analytic program on the DNC system on 5 May, and then let it follow Fancy Bear as it hunted around in the system for data over the next 34 days.
In other words, we know for sure that Fancy Bear made off with whatever oppo research files there were on the DNC system. We don’t have to wonder about that.
Here, again, is the passage I’ve quoted before (emphasis added):
Shawn Henry and his team used CrowdStrike’s Falcon Overwatch capability to monitor the DNC’s compromised servers for more than 30 days, mapping out the scope of the intrusion and tracking the actions of the attackers. The scope of the Cozy Bear intrusion was potentially devastating. According to CrowdStrike, Cozy Bear had roamed uncontested throughout the totality of the DNC server, collecting and transmitting email and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications. Significant amounts of data had been exfiltrated during this time, CrowdStrike assessed, and the DNC had to assume that anything stored in the server had been compromised.
Fancy Bear appeared to have more limited objectives. Henry’s team detected evidence of a few select files having already been exfiltrated, while others were staged for future exfiltration. An analysis of these files showed that Fancy Bear was focused on opposition research being done by the DNC on the erstwhile Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.
We are not 100% sure that Fancy Bear was a Russian state actor, although it appears increasingly likely. The Dutch national intelligence service believes that Cozy Bear definitely was. CrowdStrike believes that both were Russian State actors (with Fancy Bear being linked to the FSB).
Cozy Bear had been vacuuming up emails for some time (as far back as late 2015, according to some accounts). There were probably references to the Fusion GPS oppo project in Cozy Bear’s email haul.
But something equally important is that Fancy Bear, which appears to have penetrated the DNC system in mid- to late-April 2016, could have uncovered the nature of the oppo research on Trump. Fancy Bear was focused on the oppo files themselves, and would thus have gathered information on what themes would be developed and emphasized, and anything the Democrats had, or thought they had, in the way of facts.
If Hoffman is right – and there’s a good chance he is – we’d have a strong case that the Russians were able to tailor their disinformation to Steele in such a way that it would scratch exactly the itch of the existing DNC oppo effort. In short, the Democrats had a narrative in mind, and the Russians wrote them one.
That still leaves us with where the Democrats got the shell of the original oppo narrative. Remember, they were retailing it by the end of July 2016, when the dossier was by no means complete. Only two of the dossier’s memos were dated prior to 25 July, when both the Democrats and the mainstream media suddenly began blaring out the anti-Trump narrative that Trump had colluded with Russians. Most of what Democratic spokesmen and the MSM were saying at the time did not come from the dossier, or at least doesn’t appear to have been sourced to it. (They mentioned Paul Manafort and Carter Page at the time, but they weren’t specifically retailing information from the dossier — i.e., the memo dated 19 July 2016.)
General information on Manafort could have come from public reporting on his role with Russian oligarchs and Ukraine in 2013 (a case made in Lee Smith’s seminal article on the reporting work Glenn Simpson had done years before, covering Russian oligarchs and indeed Manafort himself). Carter Page is more problematic; few knew who he was prior to late July 2016.
But DOJ and the FBI did. And we do keep circling back to their peculiar interest in Page, which persists in never coming up with anything.
I’m just hearing on Fox News as I type this that the House’s FBI/FISA memo could be released for public perusal as early as Wednesday (31 January). The memo won’t tell us whether the Russians seized an emerging opportunity to turn the Steele dossier into a neatly packaged, precision-targeted disinformation missile. But it may well help with the answer to the other question: whether the Obama administration’s Justice Department is implicated in concocting the Hillary/DNC opposition narrative against Trump.