Consider the increasing number of claims that the incendiary allegations of the dossier "check out," in the words of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
Bankrolled by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, guided by the dirt-digging opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier's key allegation is this: "There was a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership." Steele attributed that claim to "Source E," whom he described as "an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump."
"What's relevant is [Steele's] credibility, the reliability of his sources and the truthfulness of their claims," Stephens wrote recently. "These check out."
But do they? In reality, most reasonable people not named Mueller would have to say we don't know.
"As it relates to the Steele dossier, unfortunately the committee has hit a wall," Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr noted last month. The committee's investigation, the best probe outside of the Mueller special prosecutor operation, has not even been able to discover who Steele's sources were, Burr said.
So how do outsiders conclude that the document's key allegations check out? How do they know what they know?
Consider one of the dossier's underlying claims in support of the "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" between Trump and the Russians. In a section of the dossier dated July 19, 2016, Steele wrote Carter Page, who was briefly on Trump's little-used foreign policy advisory team, held secret meetings with two high-ranking Russians, one in the Putin government and one the head of Rosneft, the state-owned oil company, during a visit to Moscow early in the month of July. Here are the relevant portions of the dossier, written in spy style, from the July 19 Steele memo:
Byron York: Spinning in circles on the Trump dossier
