See that’s the thing, the denial is being packaged as the whole thing (especially the possibly incriminating bits) being fabricated rather than only the meta story.
I think the lack of denial from the campaign (as well as taking the candidate off the campaign trail for days) is a strong indicator the contents are not fabricated.
It's not a strong indicator, it's an indicator there the story doesn't have enough credibility to warrant answering. Engaging with the story would give it life. Let the real journalists do the work to verify the claims and then the campaign would have to actually engage. A story from Rudy Giuliani who's working with known Russian agents and refuses to let anyone verify the metadata is not credible enough to warrant a response.
So why do they take the candidate off the campaign trail?
They’re not calling this one fake news. Even Twitter is not saying it was faked but rather that the data was illicitly obtained.
Speaking of Russian agents wasn’t it the Dems who pedaled the now discredited Steel Dossier?
Using “Russia” as an adjective right now has limited value and if anything should be viewed with suspicion of purposeful “redirection”. It’s not a believable accusation any more.
Perhaps not by the Russian government, but interestingly the dossier’s primary sub-source (responsible for assembling the claims from other sources) was a Russian, Igor Danchenko, who had previously been investigated as a potential Russian spy. He admitted he mostly fabricated the claims, i.e. it was disinformation, and he pulled it from contacts in Russia.
Curiously, he was working at Brookings, home to people like Ben Wittes of Lawfare (a good friend of James Comey), who was a major proponent of Russiagate.
Now if he actually was a Russian spy, he’s a very good one, as he managed to trigger ongoing surveillance of a campaign and a sitting President (& it was acknowledged this wouldn’t have been approved without the dossier), which led to a massive investigation and ultimately an impeachment (thanks in part to Mueller holding back the report until the Democrats took the house). And all this continues to echo in the division and anger we see today. That would have to be some of the most effective Russian meddling ever.
I'm not sure what this has to do with whether or not the dossier was a Russian disinformation campaign. Did they give him the intelligence? Were they expecting it to be released before the election (it wasn't)? What was the goal of the disinformation? The result was sanctions against Russia, which doesn't seem like something they would want to have happen.
Russian agents gave Steele dirt on Trump. Their motive is unclear. But I think its a bit naive to think Russian FSK agents were betraying their country to Steele for no real reason.
>Were they expecting it to be released before the election (it wasn't)?
It wasn't openly published before the election, but it was used during the election. It was given to law enforcement and major media outlets. Mother Jones wrote about it before the election.
Newspapers are pretty well shielded from such lawsuits (for good reason) which allows for tabloids to accuse people of being reptilians and such. I'm sure real journalists are researching this just as they researched the Ukraine accusations.
Given that there is no chain of custody, and given that some of the people who are involved are very very fucking shady, the chances of some or all of this 'evidence' being tampered with is very high.
