A former British spy compiled a "dossier" containing dirt on Trump. It looks like the Clinton campaign and the DNC helped fund that research. Is there hypocrisy here? I consider hypocrisy a high crime. There is, however, a difference between being an ex-spy in British terms and an ex-spy in Russian terms. And hey! An ex-British spy! I'm referencing an ex-British spy on a blog called "The Unmutual!" Get it? No, of course not. Never mind.
Anyway, ex-FSB is still FSB. Steele, on the other hand, really may have been just working on his own, or as a contractor. Most likely at this point, just working as a contractor. If that's the case, he was a non-citizen working as a contractor. In that case, this was opposition research conducted by a non-citizen. Maybe sketchy, but different from the other possibility...
If Steele was actually working with the blessing of, or support of the British government, then the production of the dossier would have been exactly what Democrats are accusing Putin of doing. You can't complain about one from a process perspective without levying the same complaint on the other. To do so is hypocrisy, and I fucking hate hypocrisy.
So, maybe Steele was just a contractor, who happened to be an ex-British spy, in which case the production of the dossier was just odd. Then again, maybe Clinton was getting support from the Brits while Trump was getting support from the Russians. What is this, the French-Indian War? (Actually, to reference Charles Stross's Merchant Princes series, in "Timeline 3," New Britain, which controls us, is at war with the French Empire, which has its capitol in St. Petersburg, so let's go with that).
Basic point: if you care about foreign government intervention, be consistent about it. I really do want to know if Steele had support from the British government. Right now, that's a legitimate question to ask. Do I trust congressional Republicans to look into that? Fuck no. Mueller? Maybe. One way or another, though, I want to know.
That's just idle wondering, though. Here's where I'm really stuck. Clinton's campaign looks like it helped pay for the dossier. Yet, it didn't get released until January. After the election. Right before the inauguration, Buzzfeed decided to publish the thing, which had been floating around as a rumor-kind-of-deal, and the intelligence agencies had it long-prior, but the Clinton campaign paid for the dossier and then... what happened to it?
Here's the thing about opposition research. You pay somebody to do research, you find dirt, and then you fucking use it! What did the Clinton campaign do with the dossier? Float it around quietly?! Why? What the fuck were they doing with it and why? This is what I don't get. Why not use it?
So, I'm just going to speculate. No fancy-schmancy political science today. Just idle punditry.
1) Clinton's Shakespearean flaw (one of many, actually-- she pretty much sucks) is hubris. In 2008, she handed the nomination to Obama by assuming she would win everything on "super-Tuesday" (the day on which lots of states held their contests), and didn't put together campaigns in any of the states immediately after super-Tuesday. Obama did. So, he racked up a shit-ton of delegates immediately after super-Tuesday, and his delegate lead from that is what carried him to victory in 2008. You may remember some stupid shit about how Clinton won the primaries and Obama won the caucuses. Nope. Those post-super-Tuesday states just happened to be caucus states. It was just Clinton hubris. Flash-forward to 2016. She gets the dossier, but assumes she'll win. So, she sits on it. Then, she loses. Evidence for the hubris hypothesis? The 2016 Democratic Convention. During the convention, I was puzzled by how little time they spent going after Trump for what a shitbag he is. They were handed an opponent who is the most vile, reprehensible, unqualified pile of toxic waste in the history of politics, and the convention was a bunch of touchy-feely crap. Why? 'Cuz... 'Cuz they didn't think they had to go after Trump. Clinton hubris.
2) The dossier had a bunch of claims without the supporting evidence. The Clinton campaign wasn't sure how to use the claims. This was particularly true of, for example, the golden shower nonsense, which was almost certainly false anyway. From a practical sense, what were they supposed to do? Clinton didn't know. The dossier itself was opposition research, but the opposition research document itself didn't help without the supporting evidence, so in the absence of a way to use it, they just sat on it. Now, this wouldn't have stopped the Republicans. The GOP spent years having its members split between those who openly embraced birtherism and those who just gave it a wink and a nod, but perhaps the Clinton campaign just didn't know what to do. So, they did nothing.
3) The dossier was floating around in media circles, and perhaps the Clinton people (or Steele himself) floated it, but nobody wanted to cover it until Buzzfeed released it. Clinton's relationship with the media was pretty damned hostile, and had been for decades. Perhaps Clinton's campaign had hoped that the leaked dossier would get coverage on its own, and was just frustrated that nobody talked about it until after the election, when Buzzfeed decided to publish it. While the media were (yes, "were") openly hostile to Trump during the pussy-grabbing affair, their long-running hostility to Hillary Clinton dates back decades. Furthermore, serious journalistic outlets like the New York Times have fact-checking standards which would make coverage of an unsubstantiated document like the dossier a dubious prospect at best. Buzzfeed is just a joke of an outlet, so they didn't give a fuck whether or not they could verify anything. Then, once Buzzfeed did put it out there, the dossier's release itself became a story, which real outlets could cover.
Anyway, I'm still thinking through this stuff. That's why this post is a bunch of speculative mumbo-jumbo. Whether or not Clinton paid for the dossier, though, doesn't have any bearing on whether or not the claims in it were true. Some of it has been verified, and some of it is almost certainly bullshit, like the golden shower stuff. Trump's people have had a disturbing number of contacts with the Russians, we know the Russians actively intervened to try to help Trump win, people around Trump, like Flynn, were susceptible to blackmail and Trump was warned about that by intelligence agencies, Manafort is about to be indicted, Don Jr. was meeting with a Russian spy, Trump fired Comey for looking into this, and that's just what we know so far before seeing anything Mueller has dug up. There is some scary shit going on. I want to know more about the origins of the dossier, but I am more concerned with how much of the dossier is true because as long as Steele wasn't working on behalf of the British government, then what Clinton did was just opposition research and not at all the same thing as Don Jr.'s meeting, which was an attempt to secure information from the Russian government.
Let's not lose sight of the big picture here. The big picture is that the President of the United States fired the Director of the FBI for looking into ties between his people and Russia. That is obstruction of justice. It is a federal crime, and impeachable, even if all Trump was doing was trying to hide something embarrassing rather than criminal. And, the most plausible way to influence Trump is financial, and we still know little about his finances because unique among modern presidents, Trump has decided to keep his finances secret. After his idiot son told everyone that his investors are Russian. The same people we know were actively meddling in the election to get him into office.
Bigger picture here...