“A former British intelligence” honcho. Well, OK, how “former”? Don’t know as how info more than a year or so old is going to rattle my cage any. We already know that Il Douche had many business dealings in Russia, America has already swallowed that and said “Mmm-mmm good!”.
Plus, its been around the block a few times, if there was anything in it that would really go “bang!” it would have by now. Feh, meh, and “next!”.
While none of the allegations in that “report” seem in the least implausible to me, I would nonetheless bet that the whole document is a hoax.
Like the joke about Dan Quayle wishing he had worked harder at studying Latin so he could converse with people in Latin America, it sounds like the sort of thing that seems believable because it perfectly matches the public image of the person in question, not because it’s actually factual.
And I was responding to a statement made in the present tense. The whole thing about fake news is that it only works when people WANT the fake news item to be true. That’s the root of the problem-- judging the value of a news item not by the likelihood of its veracity, but the likelihood of it re-enforcing one’s political stance (and especially when it hurts the other side).
Not that this confirms the veracity of the report in any way, but the “errors” are spelling the common word “Alpha” in the traditional transliterated-from-the-Greek way with the “ph” rather than using Alfa Group’s variant spelling, and a barely-contestable characterization of the rich part of town.
It’s interesting to finally read this, but I’m surprised no-one pointed out that all these allegations were reported (sans explicit description of the supposed kompromat) months ago. The Mother Jones and Slate articles were discussed here in detail on Halloween, IIRC.