And I wish that’s how the information was actually being treated, but it’s not. It was published without that context and has taken on a life of its own. In an ideal world it would have been handled responsibly, Louise Mensch wouldn’t have run her FISA story, and the investigation would have continued unimpeded.
If you mean they’re trying to validate and corroborate the specific allegations in the dossier, no, they’re not. The dossier is so politically toxic that I guarantee they’ve purposely avoided using it as a roadmap. While the various investigations will inevitably intersect with things it mentions, they won’t mention it unless defendants invoke it, to which they’ll respond that it played no part in their investigations.
Which is related to the point I made when I first mentioned the dossier. The whole reason I mentioned it is that I think this McClatchy story is itself a symptom of the mistaken belief that the legitimacy of both the dossier and the investigation are one and the same. I’m confident this story won’t be confirmed, and that’s going to affect the perceived legitimacy of the dossier and, for a significant number of people, of the investigation too.
What I’m much less confident about is whether that particular part of the dossier is a slightly distorted truth, or an outright fabrication. I’m currently leaning towards the former, due to the way Cohen’s sentencing went. It’s quite possible that he genuinely did have secret meetings with Russians and they’ll be a key component of the case in chief, but I’d be extremely surprised to discover they took place in Prague, despite what this story says.
