Much of the media's attention is now focused on a New Yorker puff piece about Clinton operative Christopher Steele who put together the infamous Clinton-Steele dossier. It's clearly been undertaken with the cooperation of Steele and his associates. The piece is an extended longread chock full of propaganda, whitewashing and virtue signaling. It makes all sorts of absurd claims, such as that the Clinton campaign had no idea what was in the dossier that it was paying for, but anything big enough will have some interesting nuggets between the lines.
Here are a few short excerpts.
Steele was a middle-of-the-road Labour Party supporter, and at the Cambridge Union his allies, known as the Anti-Establishment Faction, were state-schooled, middle-class students.
Steele is said to be the first president of the Cambridge Union to invite a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization to speak.
Steele graduated in 1986, with a degree in social and political science, and initially thought that he might go into journalism or the law.
On June 24, 2016, Steele’s fifty-second birthday, Simpson called, asking him to submit the dossier. The previous day, the U.K. had voted to withdraw from the E.U., and Steele was feeling wretched about it. Few had thought that Brexit was possible.
On November 8, 2016, Steele stayed up all night, watching the U.S. election returns. Trump’s surprise victory hit Orbis hard. A staff memo went out forgiving anyone who wanted to stay home and hide under his duvet
This establishes Steele rather firmly as a lefty. And helps explain why even beyond the Clinton payroll, he was so obsessed with stopping a Republican from winning an election in another country.
A lot of people have a glamorized view of the agents who operate in intelligence services. But they're not James Bond. A lot of them, like Steele, would have become journalists or lawyers, natural lefties, who instead had a talent for foreign languages and a desire for travel, who were then recruited into intelligence agencies. The CIA is also full of guys like Christopher Steele.
Christopher Steele was a lefty who at one point at least had sympathies for Islamic terrorists. He was furious over Brexit and, as the Nunes memo reveals, was angry at the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton. He was and is a partisan figure. He was getting paid to do what he loved, go after people on the right on behalf of the left. He had a network of fellow travelers in the State Department and other branches of the United States government. And it would be interesting to explore just how deep those interfaces between lefties in the US and UK governments go. And what they've done to undermine their political opponents.