[tristor]

> It says the Steele dossier is largely discredited - I wasn't aware of any discrediting, let alone total. I don't know why the author thought this spin was necessary for the article.

This was a political football during the last US election, since then it's been more thoroughly investigated and the majority of the content has either been proven false, or has yet to be verified as true. There was some truthful information within the dossier, but generally speaking it was mostly hearsay and unverified allegations and not completed when it was leaked. The leaking was clearly politically motivated and it was used as the basis of starting Congressional investigations which ultimately resulted in only minimal parts of the content being verified. There are many people who are politically aligned with the leaker of the dossier that believe the dossier is true because the general thrust of the allegations was true, but the actual specifics were mostly false, and the truth of what did occur mostly was found in the later investigation, which did not corroborate the dossier.

[notavalleyman]

Thanks for the context - I didn't really understand you though - why do you say the actual specifics were mostly false, while also saying the Congress investigation verified some parts and couldn't verify others?

[AnimalMuppet]

There were a large number of allegations in the dossier. So, pulling numbers out of the air, but... say it was something like 70% of the allegations were false, 10% were verified true, and 20% could not be verified as either true or false.

As I said, the numbers are made up. But I think the general gist is right - mostly false, a bit true, and some that is unknown.

But this is why people say the dossier was discredited - the majority of it was false.

[ch4s3]

According to Bellingcat[1], Igor Danchenko who was Steeler’s primary source was probably being fed information by the GRU.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/161913/we-are-bellingcat-spo...

[lazyier]

It is hard to take unverifiable claims seriously when the verifiable ones turn out to be false.

[jjoonathan]

> it was used as the basis of starting Congressional investigations

This is false and a right-wing talking point. Papadopoulos's bragging launched the investigation.

[omnicognate]

This has been downvoted at the time of writing, but it's quite right: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_investigation_origins...

[tristor]

I wasn't in the room when the decision was made, but my understanding from reading both the Steele Dossier and the published Mueller report is that Mueller drew considerably from the Steele Dossier as a way to understand where to consider targeting the investigation early on, and then expanded elsewhere after they had identified that most of it was not actionable intelligence. Mueller's investigation ultimately resulted in several convictions, so where there is smoke there is fire, but in this case the fire was burning oak wood and the smoke smelled like mesquite.

[benmmurphy]

The whole thing was completely fucking wild. Papa was ‘caught’ bragging to an Australian diplomat that was politically connected. The diplomat could have just been making the whole thing up because he either received instruction from Australian security services or because the diplomat in question has a bunch of strong incentives to ingratiate himself to the US permanent government. Have a read of Papa’s book to get an alternative view of what happened. In most realities he is going to deny the encounter so we should be suspicious of his narrative but there was a lot of suspect stuff going on.

After seeing how the US intelligence people acted with the Hunter Biden story I have zero faith they wouldn’t monkey around. To be fair I think a lot of the shade that was thrown on the story was from ex-intelligence people and not current US government employees. However, this whole thing looks like a vast conspiracy. You have ex-intelligence people, some who have plum media jobs signing up to this statement that seems to claim that Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation. But if you carefully review the statement it doesn’t actually make this claim. And if someone produced irrefutable proof that the laptop was genuine then all these people who signed up to this claim could claim they were still right. The actually claim was the laptop had the hallmarks of Russian misinformation. But that is not a very useful claim if you as a voter are trying to assess the probability that the laptop is genuine or not. For example it could have the hallmarks but it could still be like a 95% probability that it is genuine. Of course this claim about hallmarks is not strong enough so when it was reported in the press it was often reported as X ex-intelligence people have confirmed it is Russian disinformation. So what the hell is going on here?