Donald Trump Dossier: ‘BuzzFeed Just Did President-Elect A Huge Favor’
The Donald Trump dossier has dominated much of the political conversation this week since BuzzFeed published it on January 10.
The gist of the unverified — and by BuzzFeed’s own admission, “unverifiable” — 35-page document is that Russia has been “cultivating” the president-elect for “at least 5 years” in order to bring about divisions in the western alliance.
There is also the whole sex acts with prostitutes thing, enough to make most politicians go away and never be heard from again on the basis of mere allegation. But for the Republican, as New York Post columnist Rich Lowry points out, the left-wing blog just did him “a huge favor.”
In Lowry’s words, here is why the Trump dossier is not the political nightmare it might appear to be. Lowry says the president-elect “thrives off of media hostility, and the more hostile — and the less defensible — the better.”
Less defensible because the report does, as BuzzFeed notes, contain a number of errors, and it really is not verifiable at this point whether Steele is who he claims to be — a British MI6 operative.
By publishing the Trump dossier, which other websites had for months but found to be too risky, BuzzFeed has allowed Trump “to portray himself as the victim of a stilted establishment.”
“It fires up his supporters. It keeps the debate on terrain that is familiar and favorable to him — whether or not he is being treated ‘fairly’ — and allows him to adopt his preferred posture as a ‘counterpuncher,'” Lowry writes.
While the “legitimate questions” about the Trump dossier reaction are there (i.e. why does Trump defend Russia so much), it is ultimately overshadowed by the reality that such a document would have almost certainly never seen the light of day if Hillary Clinton was the president-elect, the writer argues.
Buzzfeed just did Donald Trump a huge favor https://t.co/kEBCaBNNZU pic.twitter.com/sUiiAkr5nJ
— New York Post (@nypost) January 13, 2017
One of the most debilitating flaws in the Trump dossier report is the naming of Michael Cohen, an attorney for the president-elect, as one of the Republican’s main liaisons between Russia and the billionaire’s organization.
As it turns out — and this is something Donald seized on at his now famously contentious news conference — the Michael Cohen was a different and unassociated Michael Cohen. The Cohen in Trump’s camp produced his passport, showing that he had not left or entered the U.S. during the time period the Trump dossier states he was in Prague.
Also at the press conference, Sean Spicer, the incoming press secretary for the administration, rattled off a list of other not-so-friendly-to-Trump journalists who called the releasing of the “unsubstantiated” report “irresponsible.”
Lowry notes that provable flaws like this highlight the reason many journalists sat on the materials rather than giving them a louder mouthpiece.
Incidentally, the FBI briefed both the president-elect and the current president, Barack Obama, on a two-page summary of the Trump dossier, and in both cases, it was emphasized the information was unverified.
Lowry’s piece is striking a chord with New York Post readers; it quickly shot to No. 1 on the site and has been echoed by a number of other conservative critics, most prominently Sean Hannity, who has characterized the Trump dossier as a victory in the president-elect’s continual allegations that the media is heavily biased toward liberal causes.
Only time will tell if these favorable assessments on the BuzzFeed report are true. But what do you think, readers?
‘SLEAZEBAG OPERATIVES’? Trump sticks knife into dossier story, won’t let intel community off the hook https://t.co/1U6uAEG75t pic.twitter.com/hs0QnuXMnw
— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 13, 2017
Is the Trump dossier going to sink the president-elect, or is Lowry correct in stating that BuzzFeed just did him a “huge favor”? Sound off in the comments section below.
[Featured Image by Gage Skidmore/Flickr Creative Commons/Resized and Cropped/CC BY-SA 2.0]
