“The count is growing higher and higher of porn actresses,” Slate’s editor at the time, Jacob Weisberg, said on MSNBC, adding, “The whole picture starts to be more plausible, the picture that’s painted in the dossier.” Natasha Bertrand, who was then a staff writer at The Atlantic, chimed in, “It makes it much more plausible that Trump did go to Russia and he did have these kinds of sexual escapades with prostitutes.” So his alleged sexual relationship with Stormy Daniels, who appeared in pornographic films, became the backup for the dossier’s claim of a lurid round with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Trump’s other serious misdeeds and tie them to the dossier. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow once put it: A number of the elements “remain neither verified nor proven false, but none so far have been publicly disproven.” Over time, the standards for proof diminished to the point that if something couldn’t be proved to be false, the assumption was that it was probably true.
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That would have been a key link in the claim that he was there to coordinate campaign strategy with the Russians. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen secretly visited Prague during the 2016 campaign.
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Two reporters in McClatchy’s Washington bureau, for example, wrote that the special counsel Robert Mueller had found evidence for one of the most tantalizing bits of the dossier, that Mr. The New York Times’s Adam Goldman was asked by the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple about two years ago how reporters should have approached an unverified rumor from the dossier. That wasn’t for want of trying by reporters from mainstream and progressive media outlets. Many of the dossier’s allegations have turned out to be fictitious or, at best, unprovable. Now it has been largely discredited by two federal investigations and the indictment of a key source, leaving journalists to reckon how, in the heat of competition, so many were taken in so easily because the dossier seemed to confirm what they already suspected. That memo, soon to become known as the “Steele dossier” when a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele was publicly identified as its author, would inspire a slew of juicy, and often thinly sourced, articles and commentaries about Mr. Any caveats - even BuzzFeed’s own opening description of the allegations as “explosive but unverified” - could be dismissed as a kind of obligatory cautiousness.
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government” and had “acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers and intelligence officials.” This, along with tantalizing tidbits like “Source A confided” or “confirmed by Source E,” gave it a patina of authenticity, especially to those unaware that spycraft often involves chasing unverified information down dead ends. Sure, the memo provided little hard evidence or specific detail, but, BuzzFeed said, it had “circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. Yes, these were just allegations, but perhaps this was the Rosetta Stone of Trump corruption, touching everything from dodgy real estate negotiations to a sordid hotel-room tryst, all tied together by the president-elect’s obeisance to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Those who were online that evening remember the jolt.
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Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship With the Kremlin.” 10, 2017, BuzzFeed News published a photo rendition of a 35-page memo titled “U.S.