The DNC didn’t use the opposition research though. This all didn’t come out until after the election. For whatever reason, likely that the dossier was, at the time, not verified, the campaign did nothing public with it. That’s pretty damned honest, no? Would the Trump campaign have been that honest? Hell, the Trump campaign could have been entirely certain that the dossier was false, and they still would have run with it publicly.
Yes, I linked to this above (#2654).
Very hard to know what went down. The Clinton campaign couldn’t use it directly, because it would probably have rebounded negatively. The way these things are done is generally to leak them to the media. And the dossier was in fact leaked to the media before the election, although for the most part the media refused to report it (other than an allusion in MJ).
That doesn’t say that the DNC did leak it to the media either. It was apparently circulating throughout media and government/political circles, and it’s hard to say who leaked it. But it’s also hard to say who didn’t.
[The ones who come out looking pretty good in all this are the media outlets who refused to publish it due to it being unverified.]
So many choices!
Dopers, should I respond:
- That’s too much work
Or
- Hey, you prove my point for me!
I’ll take votes until, say, 6pm central. And PM me, no need to clutter the thread. 
Hmm, so on the one hand you have the amount of work involved in reading through every post of a 53 page (2,600+ post) thread to ensue that there are no instances of something happening. On the other hand, you have the amount of work involved in clicking on a footnote to read the source of something that’s been cited and which you’re challenging as being insufficiently sourced.
Are these equivalent? Sounds like you think they are. Now what does that tell us? At the risk of repeating myself, hmm …
Feel free to vote too. Voting will be anonymous, unless otherwise requested. 
This has the flavor of a “snap election”. How you should respond to some random MB post is a very weighty matter, and people are going to want to give it their full attention and ponder and research for a while before making a decision of that magnitude. I think you need to extend the deadline.
I was referencing this part of the WaPo article:
The part you are referencing seems ambiguous at best:
This doesn’t really reference a timeframe.
All this seems to suggest is that the oppo research continued after the republican donor stopped paying…not that work related to Russia ties was continuing.
I’m not sure the timeline is fully known at this point but I’m sure that this info will come out eventually.
Or from the NYT, back in January:
So they were doing “routine work” assembling public documents, until they hired Steele to investigate the Russia connection in the wake of the June disclosures of DNC hacking, by which point the Republican funder was out of the picture.
This reminds me of that time in this thread when F-P refused to read that annotated copy of the dossier that had cites and links to show what had been verified thus far. Couldn’t be bothered, and even if he could - it was probably partisan nonsense anyway.
But now he wants us to read a pile of wiki references to prove his point.
Also are y’all forgetting that the FBI had started investigating the Trump-Russia stuff on their own, independent of the oppo research that led to the dossier? The dossier didn’t create this investigation. The FBI just used it as a road map to continue what they already had in the works.
This type of specious silliness does not imply any sort of intellectual rigor.
With the rigorous consistency that so typifies my posts to this board, I did not simply link to a mass of material and say “go read this” as did the post I had earlier criticized. Rather, I quoted the exact text from Wiki which made the specific point I was claiming. Someone countered that his exalted standards of proof were such that he didn’t trust mere Wiki articles, and to that I responded that the very Wiki quote that I cited contained within it the source of those claims, which could easily be clicked and read should anyone be genuinely interested.
That said, you also err in saying that I want you to read anything. My post was directed at those whose interests are more substantive than yours apparently are.
Exactly. All this fuss and bother over who paid for what part of the information is just smoke and mirrors, and a diversionary tactic away from what’s really important: Are the allegations contained in the dossier true?
There are three categories into which the findings may fall:
Verified
Unverified
False
To date, the findings all fall into the first two categories. None have yet fallen into the third. Which is a big problem for TrumpCo.
Do we know this for sure? I know the FBI started their investigation before the dossier leaked but they were in possession of it before that. McCain is reported to have given Comey a copy in December 2016 or Jan 2017 but I thought I read somewhere that Comey had already obtained a copy. Steele briefed reporters from NYT, WaPo and CNN on his material as early as Sept. 2016 so I’m sure the FBI was in the loop.
You didn’t direct your question to me, but the answer is yes, we do know this for sure. The investigation began as a result of an intelligence assessment by our own intelligence agencies. Comey’s investigation was underway by July 2016, and it was started as a counter-intelligence investigation – not a criminal investigation.
The FBI also had intelligence from other international agencies that predated the Steele dossier, first from Britain in 2015: British Spies First to Spot Trump Team Links to Russia The Guardian
According to Wiki, The UK, Germany, Estonia, Poland, and Australia (and possibly the Netherlands and France) also relayed their discoveries to the U.S. Wikipedia Link re Russian Interference in the 2016 US Elections
Independent of the above, Christopher Steele had indeed briefed the FBI as to his discoveries as an intelligence officer who had worked with the FBI in the past, who felt they should know about it. It was before he wrote the dossier, but I’m not sure exactly when it happened.
Also refer to the ever-helpful Trump Russia Timeline.
(I know Wiki is frowned upon in these parts, but sometimes it’s the only place to find references to the information.)
The Trump-Russia investigation started last summer, but was gagged by Obama because he feared the appearance of government interference would taint election results.
The White House felt the need to issue a statement distancing themselves from Cambridge Analytica that reads like all of their statements about how their campaign managers and such were only with the campaign for a short time, so their illegal activities don’t count:
- “Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics. Leading into the election, the RNC had invested in the most sophisticated data targeting program in modern American in history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. We were proud to have worked with the RNC and its data experts and relied on them as our main source for data analytics. We as a campaign made the choice to rely on the voter data of the Republican National Committee to help elect President Donald J. Trump. Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false.”*
Thanks for the info. Just in case it was a mistake you should know that your first two links go to the same story.
Some members of Trump’s team were under investigation long before the dossier but my question is whether Trump himself was under investigation before the dossier was obtained by the FBI. I know Paige and Manafort were under investigation but now we are finding out that Manafort may have been under investigation for working with the Podesta group
And who else got that data? Did the RNC jealously guard their data? OK, the RNC didn’t get info from the Russians! Good! Did they give the Russians any?
Say you are a dastardly agent of Putin. You would like to sway the election in favor of Trump. Say you start up a little PAC, Americans for Trump’s Crunchy Goodness. And you would like to put out some electro-slime for that end.
Maybe want to remind white working class Democrats about how Obama gave away everything to the brown people, which is why he doesn’t have money. And you would like to target that effort to…white working class Democrats. But the RNC won’t give that data to you, despite the value of your cause? “We know you want to use this to help Trump, but sorry, no can do?”
This is that other option: what RNC may have unknowingly colluded with the Russians. Indeed, a more plausible scenario, in that there is no good reason to include amateurs in a conspiracy. Especially dumb ones. And IIRC, the Pubbies also got hacked. What did they take?
I am utterly shocked that Michael S. Glassner’s statement from October 2017 quoted above seems to directly contradict Jared Kushner’s statement from November 2016.
“We found that Facebook and digital targeting were the most effective ways to reach the audiences. After the primary, we started ramping up because we knew that doing a national campaign is different than doing a primary campaign. That was when we formalized the system because we had to ramp up for digital fundraising. We brought in Cambridge Analytica. I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley who were some of the best digital marketers in the world. And I asked them how to scale this stuff. Doing it state by state is not that hard. But scaling is a very, very hard thing. They gave me a lot of their subcontractors and I built in Austin a data hub that would complement the RNC’s data hub. We had about 100 people in that office, which nobody knew about, until towards the end. We used that as the nerve center that drove a lot of the deployment of our ground game resources.”
Actually the second link was meant to go to the Wiki reference that spawned the first link to the Guardian. It just went to the footnote rather than the entire Wiki reference. Sorry about that!
With respect to whether Trump himself was under investigation, the counter-intelligence investigation undertaken by Comey in July 2016 was into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. I will reiterate what I have said repeatedly in this thread: Anyone who thinks that an investigation into his campaign isn’t an investigation into him, personally, is an idiot.
As for the links between Manfort and the Podesta Group, it should be noted that 1) John Podesta was no longer was part of the Podesta Group at the time Manafort used them for his work with Ukraine; and 2) the work the Podesta Group performed for Manafort was in 2014, long before any campaigns were underway.
So as much as TrumpCo want to make this an issue relating to Russian interference in our elections, there’s no nexus there that I can see.