Moreover, it was an abdication of journalistic responsibility. First, I noted that it was unfair to Trump, or any public figure, to respond to allegations that might be entirely scurrilous, and which the reporters, by their own admission, had not verified.
Buzz feed trump dossier full#
Publishing the dossier at the time seemed like a mistake to many people, including me, and the aftermath has only confirmed that judgment.īuzzFeed explained its decision at the time by noting that “BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” I explained why I disagreed the same day. “Our responsibility to the readers is to share with them what we know, not to game out the political consequences of every story,” he said.īut the dossier set the stage for the political response to investigations to come-inflating expectations in the public, moving the goalposts for Trump in a way that has fostered bad behavior, and tainting the press’s standing. The BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith told me Thursday that he doesn’t regret the decision to publish it in the first place-and that the ramifications now are beside the point.
And a few hours later, BuzzFeed published the document, a collection of unverified intelligence that ran the gamut from troubling to salacious, in full.
Less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, CNN reported on the existence of a memo summarizing intelligence reports about Trump and Russia, compiled by a former British-intelligence operative named Christopher Steele for the research firm Fusion GPS. The seeds of the disappointment that many adversaries of Donald Trump felt this week, when Attorney General William Barr published his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, were sown in January 2017, with the publication of what would become known as the Steele dossier.
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