Intel Pro Says the Steele Dossier Was Garbage

Something else interesting when you're talking about China though is, and you think about okay what should we be watching, and we touched on Russia a little bit, is the alliance between, possible alliance between Russia and China. And it's an interesting dynamic. You know traditionally Russia and China haven't been together. They've always been some areas of concern, you know, distrust. But there are signs, there are things happening that appear as if China and Russia have made a strategic decision to align themselves closer. And that would be because they've made that determination that somehow it's in their best interests. You know, not necessarily that it's going to be that way for any long period of time, but right now in the current environment you see Russia acting as if what they want is a stronger alliance, military alliance and political alliance, economic alliance with China. And it's an interesting dynamic that we need to be watching, we need to be aware of. And part of that is, you know, people, again, it's this idea that, you know, there was this Russia-Trump collusion. And thinking okay well that's good, except our relations with Russia have been this bad in a long time. So maybe it's all a very clever mind game that they're playing because they're closely aligned but I don't think so. So we've actually laid on more significant sanctions on Russia. We've attacked them from an energy perspective in terms of our ability to create our independence, you know, particularly from natural gas. That has damaged Russia's abilities. So I think there's reasons why they're gravitating towards China right now. But this idea that somehow Trump is super friendly and is a useful idiot of Putin, it doesn't play out when you look at the reality of the relationship between the two countries. The whole Russian collusion thing is a very confusing narrative because on one hand you have the Democrats who are saying without doubt there's Russian collusion and then the other side you have the Republicans that say the Mueller report essentially exonerated Trump from being a part of any sort of Russian collusion. I don't think either one is totally accurate. I think there's a lot of like weird gray in both narratives. I think the Democrat narrative is easier to understand. It just makes sense from their perspective. Why wouldn't we push that? To this day they're just still amazed that they lost and so there must be some grander reason why because clearly we couldn't lose to this guy. And it was also a talking point. Much like, you know, let's hit everybody with the racist hammer, it's a talking point and it's worked for them over at least the first couple of years. On the Republican side, look, the Russians knew what they were doing, right? They were fucking with the election on several different levels. It wasn't just trolling through the internet. It wasn't just placing stories that they could. It wasn't just trying to foment divisiveness and discontent. It was also doing these little dangle things where they're looking to see are they going to bite? What are they going to do? I think that Christopher Steele dossier, that was a piece of shit. If we saw that in the commercial side of things, I've got a business in global intelligence and research and security, that thing was just, it was shot full of holes. And so you think, well, somebody should have asked, tell me about your sources. Why are your sources talking? Anytime you've got a piece of intelligence, you've got to do a few basic things. Where'd it come from? Could you explain to people what the Steele dossier was all about? Yeah, it was basically just, look, they were going after opposition research, political opposition research, right? So Christopher Steele, who was a paid, hired consultant, used to be with British intelligence, not a James Bond type, but decent enough by all accounts, a decent enough guy. But he entered the world of private sector information gathering, right? And I've got a company that's what we do all around the world. And you can't relax your standards just because you're now in the commercial sector, right? When you get a piece of information, you need to test that piece of information. And one of the first things you need to do is understand what's the sourcing for it? And why did they have access? How credible are they? What's their track record? And why, by the way, are they providing this information? And how did it eventually make its way to this report? And those are the sort of simple things that whether you're a corporation that's gathering intelligence about a market that you may enter with an investment, or whether you're still in the business and you're an intel officer and you're talking to a source that works in some foreign ministry somewhere, you got to be able to stress test the intelligence. And shit wasn't done. People liked what they saw. They saw negative information about the candidate and just run with that shit, right? And the more times you, it's like the old WMD reporting that came out of the early days in Iraq. The more you repeat it, even if it's one source and that source is a piece of shit, the more you repeat it, people are going to buy it, right? So yeah. Russian collusion. Russian collusion. You just keep repeating that and that it's going to happen. At some point it'll happen. But anyway, so. But it seems like Russia definitely likes to disrupt our democracy. Absolutely. And they've been... What's the benefit of that? Well, part of it is in the old days, it was sort of a struggle for supremacy in the world, right? I mean, that was... That's kind of at its core. That's what it was, right? And their ability to chip away in faith in democratic institutions was at the core of a lot of the crap that they pulled. And it still is. I mean, so that's all the... When you're talking about a propaganda effort like the screwing with the last election, what's their goal? My goal isn't necessarily... That's where they... Do they care whether one candidate or another wins? Well, maybe they do, right? But you'd be hard pressed to argue that they were working against Hillary Clinton who had said, we want to have a reset and have a new relationship with Russia and work with them. I mean, maybe they looked at Trump and thought, yeah, that's a guy we want to work with. But over that, the more important issue was in just chipping away at Americans' belief in democratic institutions. Get us all so that we question the credibility of democracy. And that's been the fundamental belief for propaganda efforts within the old KGB and now the FSU. And so it's as simple as that in a way. And it worked. I mean, look at this. We spent years now just bitching at each other and yelling and screaming and complaining. And we bought into it because we all... Like we talked about before, we all were easily duped. And I don't know how you get around that. I don't know how we walk that back. Maybe we don't, but I think it's an informed public that helps to battle this. But we haven't... We lost sight of what was important here. And so I think the public needs... It's their responsibility. You like this? Yeah. You like where you live? Then you got to make an effort to try to keep it, right? And part of that is being an informed public and understanding what the hostile elements may be out there without being paranoid, but just understand why they're doing things in the way that the world operates.