The press versus the president, part one

The press versus the president,

part one

Editor's Note (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-

up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php)

Part one (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-1.php)

Part two (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-2.php)

Part three (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-3.php)

Part four (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-4.php)

INTRODUCTION: ‘I REALIZED EARLY ON I HAD TWO JOBS’

The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia

came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven,

sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no.

“Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,” is how Dean Baquet, then the

executive editor of the New York Times, described the moment his paper’s readers

realized Mueller was not going to pursue Trump’s ouster.

Baquet, speaking to his colleagues in a town hall meeting soon after the testimony

concluded, acknowledged the Times had been caught “a little tiny bit flat-footed” by

the outcome of Mueller’s investigation.

That would prove to be more than an understatement. But neither Baquet nor his

successor, nor any of the paper’s reporters, would offer anything like a postmortem

of the paper’s Trump-Russia saga, unlike the examination the Times did of its

coverage before the Iraq War.

In fact, Baquet added, “I think we covered that story better than anyone else” and

had the prizes to prove it, according to a tape of the event published by Slate. In a

statement to CJR, the Times continued to stand by its reporting, noting not only the

prizes it had won but substantiation of the paper’s reporting by various

investigations. The paper “thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited,

and ultimately produced ground-breaking journalism that has proven true time and

again,” the statement said.

But outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and

its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation

faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. At its

root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of

disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The

Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.)

At times, Trump seemed almost to be toying with the press, offering spontaneous

answers to questions about Russia that seemed to point to darker narratives. When

those storylines were authoritatively undercut, the follow ups were downplayed or

ignored.

Trump and his acolytes in the conservative media fueled the ensuing political storm,

but the hottest flashpoints emerged from the work of mainstream journalism. The

two most inflammatory, and enduring, slogans commandeered by Trump in this

conflict were “fake news” and the news media as “the enemy of the American

people.” They both grew out of stories in the first weeks of 2017 about Trump and

Russia that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or

debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public. Both

relied on anonymous sources.

Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the

trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. The phrase “fake

news” was limited to a few reporters and a newly organized social media watchdog.

The idea that the media were “enemies of the American people” was voiced only

once, just before the election on an obscure podcast, and not by Trump, according

to a Nexis search.

Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six

nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of

Journalism. In 2021, 83 percent of Americans saw “fake news” as a “problem,” and

56 percent mostly Republicans and independents agreed that the media were

“truly the enemy of the American people,” according to Rasmussen Reports.

Trump, years later, can’t stop looking back. In two interviews with CJR, he made it

clear he remains furious over what he calls the “witch hunt” or “hoax” and remains

obsessed with Mueller. His staff has compiled a short video, made up of what he

sees as Mueller’s worst moments from his appearance before Congress, and he

played it for me when I first went to interview him, just after Labor Day in 2021, at

his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

During my interview with Trump, he appeared tired as he sat behind his desk. He

wore golf attire and his signature red MAGA hat, having just finished eighteen

holes. But his energy and level of engagement kicked in when it came to questions

about perceived enemies, mainly Mueller and the media.

He made clear that in the early weeks of 2017, after initially hoping to “get along”

with the press, he found himself inundated by a wave of Russia-related stories. He

then realized that surviving, if not combating, the media was an integral part of his

job.

“I realized early on I had two jobs,” he said. “The first was to run the country, and

the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”

What follows is the story of Trump, Russia, and the press. Trump’s attacks against

media outlets and individual reporters are a well-known theme of his campaigns.

But news outlets and watchdogs haven’t been as forthright in examining their own

Trump-Russia coverage, which includes serious flaws. Bob Woodward, of the Post,

told me that news coverage of the Russia inquiry ” wasn’t handled well” and that he

thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.” He urged newsrooms to “walk

down the painful road of introspection.”

Over the past two years, I put questions to, and received answers from, Trump, as

well as his enemies. The latter include Christopher Steele, the author of the so-

called dossier, financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that claimed Trump was in

service of the Kremlin, and Peter Strzok, the FBI official who opened and led the

inquiry into possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign before he was

fired. I also sought interviews, often unsuccessfully, with scores of journalists—

print, broadcast, and online—hoping they would cooperate with the same scrutiny

they applied to Trump. And I pored through countless official documents, court

records, books, and articles, a daunting task given that, over Mueller’s tenure, there

were more than half a million news stories concerning Trump and Russia or

Mueller.

On the eve of a new era of intense political coverage, this is a look back at what the

press got right, and what it got wrong, about the man who once again wants to be

president. So far, few news organizations have reckoned seriously with what

transpired between the press and the presidency during this period. That failure will

almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.

Chapter 1: A narrative takes hold

Trump entered the presidential race on June 16, 2015. In his campaign speech, he

offered a rambling analysis of global affairs that briefly touched on Russia and

Vladimir Putin, noting “all our problems with Russia” and the need to modernize

America’s outdated nuclear arsenal to better deter the Russian leader.

The media covered his inflammatory comments about Mexico and China, and

ignored Russia. The next day, Trump gave a long interview to Sean Hannity, the Fox

News host and Trump supporter and friend, who would go on to become an

informal adviser to the president. In the interview, Trump indicated he thought he

could have good relations with Russia. Asked if he had any previous “contact” with

Putin, Trump answered yes. When pressed by Hannity to elaborate, Trump replied,

“I don’t want to say.” Trump, as he acknowledged at a debate in October 2016,

didn’t know Putin.

Three days before Trump’s presidential announcement, Hillary Clinton entered the

race, and it was she, not Trump, who began her campaign facing scrutiny over

Russia ties. Weeks earlier, the Times had collaborated with the conservative author

of a best-selling book to explore various Clinton-Russia links, including a lucrative

speech in Moscow by Bill Clinton, Russia-related donations to the Clinton family

foundation, and Russia-friendly initiatives by the Obama administration while

Hillary was secretary of state. The Times itself said it had an “exclusive agreement”

with the author to “pursue the story lines found in the book” through “its own

reporting.” An internal Clinton campaign poll, shared within the campaign the day

of Trump’s announcement, showed that the Russia entanglements exposed in the

book and the Times were the most worrisome “Clinton negative message,”

according to campaign records. Robert Trout, Clinton’s campaign lawyer, declined

to comment on the record after an exchange of emails.

By 2016, as Trump’s political viability grew and he voiced admiration for Russia’s

“strong leader,” Clinton and her campaign would secretly sponsor and publicly

promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance

between Trump and Russia. The media would eventually play a role in all that, but

at the outset, reporters viewed Trump and his candidacy as a sideshow. Maggie

Haberman of the Times, a longtime Trump chronicler, burst into a boisterous laugh

when a fellow panelist on a television news show suggested Trump might succeed at

the polls.

Fairly quickly, Trump started to gain traction with voters, and it was clear his

candidacy was no longer a joke. His popularity drew large television audiences and

online clicks, boosting media organizations’ revenues while generating free publicity

for the candidate. The relationship would remain symbiotic throughout the Trump

era.

As Trump began to nail down the GOP nomination in 2016, he spoke critically

about NATO. He focused mostly on America’s disproportionate share of the

financial burden, though he occasionally called the alliance “obsolete” in an era of

counterterrorism and voiced his hope to “get along” with Putin, prompting some

concerns inside the national-security world.

Those concerns would be supercharged by a small group of former journalists

turned private investigators who operated out of a small office near Dupont Circle in

Washington under the name Fusion GPS.

In late May 2016, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a

Fusion cofounder, flew to London to meet Steele, a former official within MI6, the

British spy agency. Steele had his own investigative firm, Orbis Business

Intelligence. By then, Fusion had assembled records on Trump’s business dealings

and associates, some with Russia ties, from a previous, now terminated

engagement. The client for the old job was the Washington Free Beacon, a

conservative online publication backed in part by Paul Singer, a hedge fund

billionaire and a Republican Trump critic. Weeks before the trip to London, Fusion

signed a new research contract with the law firm representing the Democratic

National Committee and the Clinton campaign.

Simpson not only had a new client, but Fusion’s mission had changed, from

collection of public records to human intelligence gathering related to Russia. Over

lasagna at an Italian restaurant at Heathrow Airport, Simpson told Steele about the

project, indicating only that his client was a law firm, according to a book co-

authored by Simpson. The other author of the 2019 book, Crime in Progress, was

Peter Fritsch, also a former WSJ reporter and Fusion’s other cofounder. Soon after

the London meeting, Steele agreed to probe Trump’s activities in Russia. Simpson

and I exchanged emails over the course of several months. But he ultimately

declined to respond to my last message, which had included extensive background

and questions about Fusion’s actions.

As that work was underway, in June 2016, the Russia cloud over the election

darkened. First, the Washington Post broke the story that the Democratic National

Committee had been hacked, a breach the party’s cyber experts attributed, in the

story, to Russia. (The Post reporter, Ellen Nakashima, received “off the record”

guidance from FBI cyber experts just prior to publication, according to FBI

documents made public in 2022.) Soon, a purported Romanian hacker, Guccifer

2.0, published DNC data, starting with the party’s negative research on Trump,

followed by the DNC dossier on its own candidate, Clinton.

The next week, the Post weighed in with a long piece, headlined “Inside Trump’s

Financial Ties to Russia and His Unusual Flattery of Vladimir Putin.” It began with

Trump’s trip to Moscow in 2013 for his Miss Universe pageant, quickly summarized

Trump’s desire for a “new partnership” with Russia, coupled with a possible

overhaul of NATO, and delved into a collection of Trump advisers with financial ties

to Russia. The piece covered the dependence of Trump’s global real estate empire

on wealthy Russians, as well as the “multiple” times Trump himself had tried and

failed to do a real estate deal in Moscow.

The lead author of the story, Tom Hamburger, was a former Wall Street Journal

reporter who had worked with Simpson; the two were friends, according to

Simpson’s book. By 2022, emails between the two from the summer of 2016

surfaced in court records, showing their frequent interactions on Trump-related

matters. Hamburger, who recently retired from the Post, declined to comment. The

Post also declined to comment on Hamburger’s ties to Fusion.

By July, Trump was poised to become the GOP nominee at the party’s convention in

Cleveland. On July 18, the first day of the gathering, Josh Rogin, an opinion

columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a piece about the party’s platform

position on Ukraine under the headline “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian

stance on Ukraine.” The story would turn out to be an overreach. Subsequent

investigations found that the original draft of the platform was actually

strengthened by adding language on tightening sanctions on Russia for Ukraine

related actions, if warranted, and calling for “additional assistance” for Ukraine.

What was rejected was a proposal to supply arms to Ukraine, something the Obama

administration hadn’t done.

Rogin’s piece nevertheless caught the attention of other journalists. Within a few

days, Paul Krugman, in his Times column, called Trump the “Siberian candidate,”

citing the “watering down” of the platform. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The

Atlantic, labeled Trump a “de facto agent” of Putin. He cited the Rogin report and a

recent interview Trump gave to the Times where he emphasized the importance of

NATO members paying their bills and didn’t answer a question on whether nations

in arrears could count on American support if Russia attacked them.

But other journalists saw the Rogin piece differently, introducing a level of

skepticism that most of the press would ignore. Masha Gessen, a Russian-American

journalist and harsh Putin critic, writing in the New York Review of Books that

month, said labeling Trump a Putin agent was “deeply flawed.” Gessen, in articles

then and a few months later, said the accounts of the platform revisions were

“slightly misleading” because sanctions, something the “Russians had hoped to see

gone,” remained, while the proposal for lethal aid to Ukraine was, at the time, a step

too far for most experts and the Obama administration.

Matt Taibbi, who spent time as a journalist in Russia, also grew uneasy about the

Trump Russia coverage. Eventually, he would compare the media’s performance to

its failures during the run up to the Iraq War. “It was a career changing moment for

me,” he said in an interview. The “more neutral approach” to reporting “went

completely out the window once Trump got elected. Saying anything publicly about

the story that did not align with the narrative—the repercussions were huge for any

of us that did not go there. That is crazy.”

Taibbi, as well as Glenn Greenwald, then at The Intercept, and Aaron Mate, then at

The Nation, left their publications and continue to be widely followed, though they

are now independent journalists. All were publicly critical of the press’s Trump

Russia narrative. (Taibbi, over the last month, surged back into the spotlight after

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, gave him access to the tech platform’s files.)

At the end of July, the DNC held its nominating convention in Philadelphia. In

attendance were legions of journalists, as well as Simpson and Fritsch. On the eve of

the events, the hacked emails from the DNC were dumped, angering supporters of

Bernie Sanders, who saw confirmation in the messages of their fears that the

committee had favored Hillary.

The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia

narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby

Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had

“changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump

“was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to

unnamed “experts.”

Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer

Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the

campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have

approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump

by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,”

according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan

gave President Obama a few days later.

Trump, unaware of any plan to tie him to the Kremlin, pumped life into the

sputtering Russia narrative. Asked about the DNC hacks by reporters at his Trump

National Doral Miami golf resort on July 27, he said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I

hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” The quip was

picked up everywhere. Clinton national-security aide Jake Sullivan quickly seized

on the remarks, calling them “a national-security issue.” The comment became a

major exhibit over the next several years for those who believed Trump had an

untoward relationship with Russia. Clinton’s own Russia baggage, meantime, began

to fade into the background.

Hope Hicks, Trump’s press aide, later testified to Congress that she told Trump

some in the media were taking his statement “quite literally” but that she believed it

was “a joke.”

I asked Trump what he meant. “If you look at the whole tape,” he said in an

interview, “it is obvious that it was being said sarcastically,” a point he made at the

time.

I reviewed the tape. After several minutes of repeated questions about Russia,

Trump’s facial demeanor evolved, to what seemed like his TV entertainer mode;

that’s when, in response to a final Russia question, he said the widely quoted words.

Then, appearing to be playful, he said the leakers “would probably be rewarded

mightily by the press” if they found Clinton’s long-lost emails, because they

contained “some beauties.” Trump, after talking with Hicks that day in Florida,

sought to control the damage by tweeting that whoever had Clinton’s deleted emails

“should share them with the FBI.”

That didn’t mute the response. Sullivan immediately jumped in, saying the remarks

at Doral encouraged “espionage.”

On another track, Fusion became involved in an effort to promote another

unproven conspiracy theory, that Trump’s company was involved in back-channel

communications with a Russian bank. Clinton personally supported pitching a

reporter to explore the story as the campaign was not “totally confident” of its

accuracy, according to 2022 court testimony by Mook. The back-channel theory was

pushed to the media and the FBI at the same time, though the campaign did not

direct and was not aware of all the various efforts.

Hundreds of emails were exchanged between Fusion employees and reporters for

such outlets as ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, the Washington Post, Slate,

Reuters, and the Times during the last months of the campaign; they involved

sharing of “raw” Trump-related information and hints to contact government and

campaign officials to bolster the information’s credibility, according to a federal

prosecutor’s court filings in 2022. The lawyer who hired Fusion, Marc Elias,

testified, in 2022, that he would brief Sullivan and other Clinton campaign officials

about Fusion’s findings, having been updated himself through regular meetings

with Simpson and Fritsch. With Elias as the intermediary, the Fusion founders

could write in 2019 that “no one in the company has ever met or spoken to” Clinton.

In mid-August, after the Times published an investigation into the Ukrainian

business dealings of Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman since May, the

longtime Republican resigned. Manafort’s ties to business interests and a pro

Russian political party in Ukraine were well known, but the Times obtained a

“secret ledger” purporting to show cash payments of almost $13 million to

Manafort. Manafort denied he dealt in cash and explained that the payments

covered expenses for his whole team, but he nevertheless resigned from his post. (In

a 2022 memoir, Manafort wrote that the amounts of money in the ledger were “in

the range of what I had been paid” but “the cash angle was clearly wrong.”)

Manafort’s finances and his work for Ukraine would eventually lead to his being

convicted of multiple crimes, jailed, and then pardoned by Trump. (The Ukraine-

related cases were based on banking records and wire transfers, as opposed to

cash.) The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for the work on Manafort.

In late August, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, wrote a

letter to FBI director James Comey, hoping to prod the agency into probing Trump’s

Russia ties and Russian election influence efforts. While not naming the Trump

aide, Reid’s letter said “questions have been raised” about a volunteer foreign-policy

adviser who had business ties in Russia, including their recent meetings with “high-

ranking sanctioned individuals” in Russia. That fit the description of a recent,

unsubstantiated Fusion/Steele dossier report, about Carter Page, a Trump volunteer

with his own business dealings in Russia and previous contacts with Russian

officials.

Reid, who died in 2021, never publicly disclosed how he knew about that

information, but in an interview for the HBO documentary Agents of Chaos a few

years before his death, he said that he first heard about the dossier from two

unidentified “men that worked in the press for a long time,” according to a

transcript of the interview.

By the time Reid wrote the letter, some reporters, aware of the dossier’s Page

allegations, had pursued them, but no one had published the details. Hamburger, of

the Washington Post, told Simpson the Page allegations were found to be “bullshit”

and “impossible” by the paper’s Moscow correspondent, according to court records.

But not everyone held back. In late September, Michael Isikoff, chief investigative

correspondent at Yahoo News, published a story about the allegation, confirmed

that Reid was referring to Page, and added a new detail that he says was key: a

senior law enforcement source said the Page matters were “being looked at.” That

was accurate—the FBI was already investigating Steele’s dossier—but it would later

emerge that the FBI clandestinely surveilled Page and those he communicated with

on the campaign based on seriously flawed applications to the secret surveillance

court. The applications not only relied heavily on the unsubstantiated dossier, but

they left out exculpatory evidence, including Page’s previous cooperation with the

CIA and more recent statements he made to an undercover FBI informant,

according to a subsequent Justice Department inquiry. Page would quickly deny the

allegations to other reporters and write a letter to Comey denouncing the

“completely false media reports” and mentioning his “decades” of having

“interacted” with the “FBI and CIA.” But, after the Yahoo piece, he stepped down

from his volunteer position with the campaign.

The Clinton campaign put out a statement on Twitter, linking to what it called the

“bombshell report” on Yahoo, but did not disclose that the campaign secretly paid

the researchers who pitched it to Isikoff. In essence, the campaign was boosting,

through the press, a story line it had itself engineered.

Isikoff says he first learned about the Page allegations when he met that September

with Steele in Washington, a meeting arranged by Fusion. After being the first

reporter to go public with Steele’s claims, Isikoff, by late 2018, began publicly

casting doubt about their accuracy—earning praise from Trump—and had a falling-

out with Simpson, his former friend. In a 2022 interview, Isikoff pointed to his

earlier description of the dossier as “third hand stuff” and added that, “in retrospect,

it never should have been given the credence it was.”

The 2016 dossier’s conspiracy claim was never corroborated by the media, and the

supposed plot involving the Russian bank, Alfa Bank, didn’t fare much better. Still,

that fall Fritsch made frantic efforts to persuade reporters from several outlets,

including Isikoff, to publish the bank story. Their best hope appeared to be the

Times.

The Clinton campaign, in mid-September, was eagerly anticipating a “bombshell”

story on “Trump-Russia” from the Times. It was causing a “Trump freak out,”

headlined a private September 18 memo by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime close

Clinton confidant. His memo circulated among top campaign aides, the two Fusion

leaders, Elias, and Michael Sussmann, then a partner in the same firm as Elias. (The

memo was made public in 2022.)

Two hours after Sussmann received the memo, he texted the private phone of James

Baker, the general counsel of the FBI, seeking a meeting on a “sensitive” matter.

They met the next afternoon, where Sussmann briefed him about the back-channel

allegations. Sussmann upped the ante with Baker by pointing out that the media—

soon understood to be the Times—was about to publish something about the

supposed secret Russian communication link.

Sussmann later testified to Congress that he gave the story to a Times reporter, Eric

Lichtblau. The reporter and the lawyer had started communicating at the beginning

of September, according to emails filed in court. (Sussmann was acquitted in 2022

of a charge that he had lied to Baker about who he was representing when he

delivered the Alfa Bank allegations.)

Lichtblau later paired up with Steven Lee Myers, a former Moscow hand for the

Times. Whereas Myers, in an interview, said he saw some “red flags” in the Alfa

Bank tip, Lichtblau, he added, “believed in the Alfa thing more than I did.”

A few days after Sussmann’s meeting with Baker, Myers and Lichtblau met with the

FBI, where officials, including Baker, asked them to hold off on publishing anything

until the bureau could further investigate the allegation, according to the journalists

and public records. The Times agreed, and the bureau quickly concluded “there was

nothing there,” according to Baker’s testimony and other evidence at Sussmann’s

trial. Once the Times learned of the dead end, the story went into remission as

Baquet told the reporters, “You don’t have it yet,” according to Myers and other

current and former Times journalists.

In early October, the intelligence community put out a brief statement concluding

that Russia had been behind the recent hacks, a pattern of behavior “not new to

Moscow.” But, the report continued, it would be “extremely difficult,” even for a

nation-state, to alter voter ballots or election data.

The report was quickly lost in a frenzied news cycle. First, the Post published a tape

recording of Trump bragging, in vulgar terms, about some of his sexual activities.

Then WikiLeaks published the first of a weeks-long series of leaked emails from the

email account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, causing more

problems for her campaign. Two weeks later the Times would report that a private

security group had concluded that the GRU, a Russian intelligence agency, was

behind the Podesta hack. (The Justice Department, in 2018, charged twelve GRU

officials for the Podesta and DNC hacks, but the charges have never been litigated.)

As the election entered its final weeks, Lichtblau thought there was a bigger story

beyond the FBI rejection of the Alfa Bank theory; the bureau, the paper had learned,

was conducting a broader counterintelligence investigation into possible Russian

ties to Trump aides. In mid-October, two Times reporters, Adam Goldman and Matt

Apuzzo, were in California, where they met with a top federal official who cautioned

them about the larger FBI inquiry, according to current and former Times reporters.

(FBI records show that then–deputy director Andrew McCabe met the two reporters

at the Broken Yoke Café in San Diego on October 16, during a conference there. I

exchanged emails with McCabe in September, but after I sent him a detailed list of

questions, he didn’t respond.)

After Baquet heard the feedback from California, the story stayed on hold, according

to current and former Times journalists. Finally, at the end of the month, the

languishing story was published. The headline read “Investigating Donald Trump,

FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The top of the piece dealt with the FBI’s doubts

about the Alfa Bank allegation, and waited until the tenth paragraph to disclose the

broader inquiry. It also noted the FBI believed the hacking operation “was aimed at

disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.” The piece

mentioned a letter to Comey the day before from Senator Reid, who again was

trying to spur the FBI to look into what he believed was “explosive information.”

The letter, according to Myers, was an impetus for publishing the story. Another

factor, Times journalists said, was the publication earlier that day of a piece about

the Alfa-Trump allegation in Slate, which wrote less critically about the supposed

back channel at length, though the title framed it as a question.

That piece’s author, Franklin Foer, worked closely with Fusion, forwarding drafts of

his stories to the private investigative firm prior to their publication, according to

court records. Foer, now at The Atlantic, declined to respond to an email seeking

comment.

Fusion’s co-founders would later call the Times story “a journalistic travesty.”

Baquet, in April 2018, told Erik Wemple, the Post’s media critic, that the story was

“not inaccurate based on what we knew at the time,” but, he added, the “headline

was off.” A few weeks after Wemple’s column, the Times explained to its readers

what Baquet meant: in a piece about the FBI inquiry, the reporters said the headline

that October night “gave an air of finality to an investigation that was just

beginning” and that “the story significantly played down the case” because unnamed

law enforcement officials in 2016 had “cautioned against drawing any conclusions.”

That Halloween night the Clinton campaign, anticipating the imminent publication

of the Alfa Bank story, was prepared to “light it up,” Fritsch emailed a reporter that

morning. Another story Fusion helped arrange appeared that day, too, in the left-

leaning magazine Mother Jones. It said a “veteran spy” had provided the FBI

information about an alleged five-year Russian operation to cultivate and

coordinate with Trump. That came from Steele’s dossier. Within hours, the FBI

contacted Steele, who “confirmed” he had been a source for the article. After

working with the bureau for several months as a confidential informant on the

Russia inquiry, he was terminated by the FBI, bureau documents show.

Before the election, the author of the article, David Corn, provided a copy of the

dossier to Baker, the FBI’s general counsel, a longtime acquaintance. “It was a

standard journalistic ploy to try and get information out of them, because I knew

they had the dossier,” Corn said in an interview. But, he added, “it didn’t work.”

At 8:36 at night on October 31, the campaign lit up, as Fritsch promised, on Twitter.

Hillary tweeted out a statement by Jake Sullivan about “Trump’s secret line of

communication to Russia.” Her aide only cited the Slate story on Alfa Bank.

Clinton had also been aware of the Times’ unpublished story. She hoped it “would

push the Russia story onto the front burner of the election,” but was “crestfallen”

when an aide showed her the headline, according to an account in Merchants of

Truth, a 2019 book about the news media by Jill Abramson, a former executive

editor of the Times. The story was a closely guarded secret, but campaign operatives

had been pushing it with Times reporters and were aware of some internal

deliberations, according to the book by Fusion’s founders. Moreover, the candidate

herself was aware of efforts to push the Trump-Russia story to the media, according

to court testimony.

At the FBI, agents who debunked the Alfa Bank allegations appreciated the Times’

report: “made us look on top of our game,” one agent messaged another, according

to court records.

After the election that ushered Trump into office, the Times began to undertake

some soul-searching about its Trump-Russia coverage. The intelligence community

did its own assessment on Russia, including a new take by the FBI.

Lichtblau left the Times in 2017, but continued to believe in the Alfa Bank story. He

wrote a piece for Time magazine in 2019 about the supposed secret channel, even

after the FBI, and other investigators, had debunked it.

In December, President Obama secretly ordered a quick assessment by the

intelligence community of Russia’s involvement in the election. Instead of the usual

group of seventeen agencies, however, it was coordinated by the Director of

National Intelligence and produced by the National Security Agency, which gathers

electronic intercepts, the CIA, and the FBI.

In mid-December the Post reported that the FBI now backed the CIA view that

Russia aimed to help Trump win the election, compared with a broader set of

motivations, as the Times had reported on October 31. Strzok, the FBI official

running the probe, texted a colleague about the unprecedented wave of leaks: “our

sisters have been leaking like mad,” he wrote, referring to intelligence agencies like

the CIA. Strzok now believes the leaks originated elsewhere. “I now believe,” he told

me in a 2022 interview, “that it is more likely they came not from the CIA but from

senior levels of the US government or Congress.”

Trump, unaware of the coming tornado, including the most salacious contents of

the dossier, set out to form a government and make peace with the press. He made

the rounds of news organizations, meeting with broadcast anchors, editors at Condé

Nast magazines, and the Times.

Trump’s longest sit-down after the election was with the Times, including the then-

publisher, editors, and reporters. For seventy-five minutes Trump’s love/hate

relationship with his hometown paper was on display.

At the end, he called the Times a “world jewel.”

He added, “I hope we can get along.”

A note on disclosure

In 2015–16, I was a senior reporter at ProPublica. There, I reported on Hillary

Clinton, Donald Trump, and Russian oligarchs, among other subjects. I helped

ProPublica decide whether to collaborate with a book that was critical of the

Clintons’ involvement with Russia; the arrangement didn’t happen. Another of the

projects I worked on, also involving Clinton, was published in the Washington Post

in 2016, where I shared a byline. Some of my other Clinton-related work was used

in 2016 articles appearing in the New York Times, my employer between 1976 and

2005, but without my byline. Initially, the Times sought my assistance on a story

about Hillary’s handling of Bill Clinton’s infidelity. Subsequently I approached the

paper on my own about the Clinton family foundation. In both cases, I interacted

with reporters and editors but was not involved in the writing or editing of the

stories that used my reporting. During the second interaction, I expressed

disappointment to one of the Times reporters about the final result.

I left ProPublica in December 2016. That month I was approached by one of the

cofounders of Fusion GPS, who sounded me out about joining a Trump-related

project the firm was contemplating. The discussion did not lead to any

collaboration. I had previously interacted with Fusion related to my reporting on

Russian oligarchs.

In the 2017–18 academic year I was a nonresident fellow at the Investigative

Reporting Program, affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism at the

University of California, Berkeley. There, one of my projects involved looking into

the dossier as part of preliminary research for a 2020 film the Investigative

Reporting Program helped produce for HBO on Russian meddling. I was not on the

film’s credits.

At CJR, these stories have been edited by Kyle Pope, its editor and publisher. Kyle’s

wife, Kate Kelly, is a reporter for the Washington bureau of the New York Times.

CJR’s former board chair was Steve Adler, formerly the editor in chief of Reuters; its

current board chair is Rebecca Blumenstein, a former deputy managing editor of

the Times who recently became president of editorial for NBC News.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misnamed Michael Sussmann.

Jeﬀ Gerth is a freelance journalist who spent three decades as an investigative reporter at the

New York Times.

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Columbia Journalism Review

The press versus the president,

part two

Editor's Note (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-

up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php)

Part one (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-1.php)

Part two (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-2.php)

Part three (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-3.php)

Part four (https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-

press-versus-president-part-4.php)

CHAPTER 2: THE ORIGINS OF FAKE NEWS

In a windowless conference room at Trump Tower, on January 6, 2017, Comey

briefed the president-elect about the dossier about him and Russia. Trump had

heard, from aides, media “rumblings” about Russia, but, in an interview, he said he

was unaware of the dossier until he met with Comey.

Comey’s one-on-one with Trump came after the intelligence community briefed him

on a new “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) on Russian activities in 2016.

The ICA claimed that Russia had mounted an “influence campaign” aimed at the

election but had not targeted or compromised vote-tallying systems. Its most

important, and controversial, finding was that “Putin and the Russian government

developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” as opposed to Russia’s

usual goal, which was generally sowing chaos in the United States. An unclassified

version of the ICA was released the same day in Washington. The dossier, actually a

series of reports in 2016, was included in the assessment, but it remained secret,

temporarily, because a summary of it was attached as a classified appendix.

“The only thing that really resonated,” Trump said about the briefing, “was when he

said four hookers,” a reference to the unsubstantiated claim of a salacious encounter

in Moscow. Trump’s immediate reaction was that “this is not going to be good for

the family,” he recalled. But his wife, Melania, “did not believe it at all,” telling him,

“That’s not your deal with the golden shower,” Trump recalled.

Trump’s marriage might have survived but his hoped for honeymoon with the press

was about to end. The dossier, largely suppressed by the media in 2016, was about

to surface.

But first came the ICA. It received massive, and largely uncritical coverage.

Some other reporters weren’t convinced. Gessen called the ICA “flawed” because it

was based on “conjecture” and incorporated “misreported or mistranslated” and

“false” public statements. They criticized the major media, including the New York

Times, for describing the ICA as a “strong statement.”

In an interview, Gessen said that their skepticism left them isolated and they began

to “lose confidence.”

The dossier wound up in the ICA because the FBI pushed it, despite reservations at

the CIA. Agency analysts saw it as an “internet rumor,” according to Justice

Department documents. Two “senior managers in the CIA mission center

responsible for Russia” also had reservations, according to a memoir by Brennan,

the head of the agency at the time. Brennan testified that it didn’t inform the

report’s analysis or judgments, though Adm. Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA, told

the House Intelligence Committee it was “part of the overall ICA review/approval

process.” Whatever its significance, the fact that top government officials were using

the dossier in an official report and a presidential briefing was the news hook the

media needed.

On Sunday, January 8, McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director, sent a memo to the

bureau’s leadership headlined “the flood is coming.” He noted that CNN was “close

to” publishing a piece about the dossier, with the “trigger” being Comey’s brief and

the dossier’s attachment to the ICA.

The dam broke two days later when CNN disclosed the Comey briefing. Hours later,

BuzzFeed News posted the full dossier, with a warning that the material was

“unverified and potentially unverifiable.” Both outlets cited the government use of

the dossier to justify their going ahead.

It was a twist to the symbiotic relationship between the media and the national

security apparatus; usually, reporters use pending government action as a peg for

their stories. In this case the government cited the media for its actions. Comey, in

his 2018 book A Higher Loyalty, wrote that CNN had “informed the FBI press office

they were going to run with it as soon as the next day,” so “I could see no way out of”

telling Trump. Comey also cited CNN’s imminent disclosure in a subsequent

explanation to Trump, according to Comey’s notes.

Ben Smith, then the editor of BuzzFeed News, said in an interview the decision was

a “journalistic no brainer,” especially since BuzzFeed was a “slightly fringy place.” A

BuzzFeed reporter, Ken Bensinger, got access to the dossier via David Kramer, a

close associate of then-senator John McCain. He photographed the pages when

Kramer was out of the room, according to Kramer’s testimony in a libel suit. Kramer

also testified he would not have granted “access” to Bensinger if he knew “BuzzFeed

would publish.” (Kramer declined to comment after I sent him an email explaining

what this article would say about him.)

Bensinger had been vetting the dossier, but was on vacation at Disney World with

his family when CNN aired its story. A BuzzFeed editor called him to say the

publication planned to publish the entire document, a possibility that had not

previously been discussed, Bensinger said in an interview. A few minutes later, in a

call with Smith and other editors, Bensinger voiced his opposition to publishing the

raw material but was told the decision had already been made. Smith declined to

discuss Bensinger’s role, suggesting I ask him directly. (Bensinger joined the New

York Times in August; Smith left last January, after two years as a media columnist,

to co-found a new global media outlet, Semafor.)

Though many in the media later criticized Smith’s decision—some even called it

“fake news”— Smith held his ground in our conversation. He said some publications

had “problematic” and “secret” relationships with the dossier’s sponsor or author

that prevented them from revealing the information. (CJR defended BuzzFeed’s

decision at the time, but in 2021, with the dossier’s credibility crumbling, Kyle Pope,

CJR’s editor, said that was a mistake.)

Wolf Blitzer, a CNN host, said shortly after the story broke that “CNN would not

have done a story about the dossier’s existence” if officials “hadn’t told Trump about

it.” CNN, in its story, also said the sources used by the author of the report,

described as a former British intelligence agent, soon to be outed as Steele, had been

“checked out” over the past few months and found to be “credible enough.”

It turns out that a few weeks after the FBI began checking out the dossier, in the fall

of 2016, it offered Steele as much as $1 million if he could offer corroboration and

he didn’t, according to court testimony by an FBI official in October.

Steele, in response to my questions earlier this year, wrote that his “raw intelligence

reports” were meant only “for client oral briefing, rather than a finished and

assessed written intelligence product,” which would have contained “sourcing

caveats.” Thus, Steele wrote, “the quality of the Dossier reports was fine imo.” He

said only one minor detail had been “disproved,” with the rest either corroborated

or unverified.

In response to follow-up questions, he provided additional corroborative

information, but it was mostly off the record. In a lengthy 2017 interview with the

FBI, Steele attributed a large majority of the dossier to his “primary sub-source,”

according to the FBI report. But, in response to my questions, he declined to discuss

the work of his main source, Igor Danchenko, a Russian living in the US. CNN’s

story claimed “his [Steele’s] investigations related to Mr. Trump were initially

funded by groups and donors supporting Republican opponents of Mr. Trump

during the GOP primaries.” But the sponsors of the dossier, writing in a book in

2019, made clear the dossier came later, as a separate project, and the research

trove commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans was never shared with Steele.

Steele confirmed that in his response to my questions. (Other news outlets made the

same mistake—and CNN repeated it in August 2018—though when the Associated

Press got it wrong in February 2018 the news agency ran a correction the next day.

CNN, in a deep dive into the dossier in November 2021, correctly described the

dossier sponsors. The 2017 CNN story later won the Merriman Smith Award from

the White House Correspondents’ Association; the citation noted how the network

story made the dossier “part of the lexicon.”)

But it would be the fallout from the dossier, even more than the document itself,

that would be the most enduring legacy for Trump. At a news conference the next

day, Trump said “I think it was Russia” that was behind the hacking and Putin

“should not be doing it. He won’t be doing it. Russia will have greater respect for our

country.” After Trump trashed CNN for its report, the network’s correspondent Jim

Acosta interrupted Mara Liasson of NPR to ask a question as part of a response to

Trump’s comments. Trump declined, saying “you are fake news,” the first time he

had publicly labeled an individual journalist using those words. Trump would go on

to make the words a hallmark of his presidency—about once a day in his first year

alone—and the phrase became Collier’s Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2017.

Jonathan Karl, the ABC White House correspondent, in his 2020 book Front Row

at the Trump Show, wrote that “Acosta was, in fact, rudely interrupting Mara

Liasson,” and most reporters saw it that way. More broadly, Karl said the media

coverage of Trump was “relentlessly and exhaustively negative,” rather than

“striving for fairness and objectivity,” and did “as much to undermine the credibility

of the free press as the president’s taunts.” A year later, Karl wrote another Trump

book, Betrayal, that called out the former president’s “lying” and “incompetence,”

culminating in “the betrayal of democracy at the end.” He acknowledged his

criticism could make him “sound like a member of the opposition party,” but the

ABC correspondent was okay with that: “so be it,” he added.

It didn’t take long for Steele’s name to become public as the author of the dossier.

Bradley Hope, then at the Wall Street Journal, said in an interview that he

discovered Steele’s name after talking to two people in the private intelligence

world. They quickly told him the BuzzFeed-published reports contained clues

indicating they were Steele’s, including the “exact style” and “the shoddiness of it.”

Other sources, he said, “verified” Steele’s role.

Steele, in his response to me, accused one of the Journal coauthors, Alan Cullison,

of a “breach of confidence” with Kramer, the McCain confidant who provided the

dossier to BuzzFeed. Steele went on to also attack Hope for what “looks like a post

hoc cover story,” adding, in a subsequent reply, that his explanation “seems

implausible” based on the formatting his company uses. Finally, Steele linked the

story to a “politically partisan line taken against me” and others “by the WSJ to

benefit Trump and the Republicans.”

Hope, in an email, called Steele’s claim “100% false,” adding that Steele’s

“conspiracy speculation” leads Hope “to doubt the whole analytical framework”

Steele “uses to view the world.” Cullison, in an email, said “Kramer did not tell me”

Steele’s identity and “the story of Steele’s identity was born of Bradley’s work.”

Kramer declined to comment after I disclosed all sides of the dispute to him.

The Times quickly weighed in after the Journal disclosure, first with an explainer

that said it would not name the “research firm and the former British spy because of

a confidential source agreement with The New York Times.” Yet hours later, the

paper did just that, publishing another story that identified Fusion as the firm that

hired Steele. (The online version of the explainer was later altered to identify the

parties but the newspaper never disclosed the change to readers.)

The WSJ and the Times stories were not well received by Fusion. At first, they

feared for Steele’s safety. Then they felt the Times’ behavior was “improper,”

because it had “unilaterally” published material “it had learned off the record,” the

founders wrote in their book.

Hours after the Times story ran, the Post upped the temperature on Russia even

more. Columnist David Ignatius disclosed that incoming national security adviser

Michael Flynn had phoned Russia’s US ambassador “several times” at the end of the

year, according to “a senior US government official.” Ignatius noted the talks had

come on the day the Obama administration had expelled Russian diplomats in

retaliation for the country’s hacking activities, so he questioned whether Flynn had

“violated” the spirit of an “unenforced” law barring US citizens from trying to

resolve “disputes.”

Ignatius went on to write that it might be a “good thing” if Trump’s team was trying

to de escalate the situation. But Ignatius didn’t know the substance of the

conversations. Hours before his story went online, Ignatius appeared on MSNBC

and, while not disclosing his upcoming Flynn exclusive, said “it was hard to argue”

against the need to “improve relations with Russia.”

The existence of Flynn’s talks with the ambassador was known by Adam Entous, a

reporter then at the Post, but he held off writing anything because the mere fact of a

contact wasn’t enough to justify a story. “It could have been something innocent,”

Entous, now with the Times, said in an interview, “something he would be praised

for.”

On the heels of the Ignatius column, the FBI’s “investigative tempo increased,”

according to FBI records, and the Senate intelligence panel announced an inquiry

into Russia’s election activities. (The House Intelligence Committee announced a

similar effort later that month.)

Two days after the Senate announcement, Bob Woodward, appearing on Fox News,

called the dossier a “garbage document” that “never should have” been part of an

intelligence briefing. He later told me that the Post wasn’t interested in his harsh

criticism of the dossier. After his remarks on Fox, Woodward said he “reached out

to people who covered this” at the paper, identifying them only generically as

“reporters,” to explain why he was so critical. Asked how they reacted, Woodward

said: “To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the Post

about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that and I didn’t force it on

anyone.”

Trump at the time tweeted a “thank you” to Woodward and asked the media to

“apologize.” That, of course, never happened. Trump’s relationship with the media,

by then, had reached “the point of no return,” according to a former aide.

As Trump prepared to take office, the possibility of another Watergate was on the

mind of some reporters, several journalists told me, intensifying the competition.

“There was a feeding frenzy to try and be first with the story,” Entous explained to

me.

The day before Trump’s inauguration, the Times featured a story: “Intercepted

Russian Communications Part of Inquiry into Trump Associates.” The piece, once

posted, evoked a strong reaction from Strzok, who was leading the FBI inquiry: “no

substance and largely wrong,” he texted, adding “the press is going to undermine its

credibility.”

Hours later, Liz Spayd, the Times’ public editor, posted a column criticizing the

October 31 piece, which reported that the FBI had found no clear link between

Trump and Russia. Spayd wrote that the story “downplayed its significance” and

disclosed that the FBI had asked the paper to delay publication. Spayd also

contrasted the paper’s “relentless” coverage of the Clinton email matter with its

“timid” pursuit of the Russia investigation in 2016. Baquet defended his handling of

the story to Spayd.

After the column came out, Baquet quickly emailed several colleagues, saying

Spayd’s piece was “really bad,” mainly for its disclosure of confidential information

regarding deliberations about whether to publish the Alfa Bank matter. One year

later, Baquet told the Post’s Wemple that “we would have cast that [October] story

differently but it was never meant to give the Trump campaign a clean bill of

health.”

Spayd, in an email to me, complained that the Times had “two standards.” Before

the election, she wrote, the October 31 piece was “downplayed” because the paper

“didn’t know whether the allegations held up,” but after the election, “the Times

produced a steady stream of stories about whether Trump conspired with Russians

to win the election without knowing whether the allegation was actually true.”

Trump told me he noticed the difference in coverage once he took office. Not only

did he have to run the country, he had to fight off “unbelievably fake” stories. Spayd,

a former editor of CJR, left the Times a few months after the column was published,

and the position of public editor was ultimately abolished.

Even as those debates were unfolding in the Times newsroom, the paper was about

to land what it thought was its bombshell. The paper was so sure of itself that it let a

filmmaker capture internal deliberations, which wound up airing in a 2018 series on

Showtime called The Fourth Estate.

As the story is being edited, Mark Mazzetti, an investigative reporter in the

Washington bureau who was also helping edit some of the Trump-Russia coverage,

is shown telling senior editors he is “fairly sure members of Russian intelligence”

were “having conversations with members of Trump’s campaign.” (The story would

say the conversations were based on “phone records and intercepted calls” and

involved “senior Russian intelligence officials.” ) He asks Baquet, “Are we feeding

into a conspiracy” with the “recurring themes of contacts?”

Baquet responded that he wanted the story, up high, to “show the range” and level

of “contacts” and “meetings, some of which may be completely innocent” and not

“sinister,” followed by a “nut” or summary “graph,” explaining why “this is

something that continues to hobble them.”

Baquet’s desire to flush out the details of supposed contacts is similar to his well-

founded skepticism in October 2016 about the supposed computer links between a

Russian bank and the Trump organization.

Mazzetti reports back that the story is “nailed down.”

Baquet asks, “Can you pull it off?”

“Oh yeah,” Mazzetti replies.

So Baquet signs off, adding that it’s the “biggest story in years.”

Elisabeth Bumiller, the Washington bureau chief, adds her seal of approval:

“There’ll be hair on fire.”

As for the specific details Baquet asked to be included in the story, the reporters

simply wrote that their sources “would not disclose many details.” The piece did

contain a disclaimer up high, noting that their sources, “so far,” had seen “no

evidence” of the Trump campaign colluding with the Russians.

But in the next paragraph it reported anonymous officials being “alarmed” about

the supposed Russian-Trump contacts because they occurred while Trump made his

comments in Florida in July 2016 wondering whether Russia could find Hillary’s

missing emails.

The story said “the FBI declined to comment.” In fact, the FBI was quickly ripping

the piece to shreds, in a series of annotated comments by Strzok, who managed the

Russia case. His analysis, prepared for his bosses, found numerous inaccuracies,

including a categorical refutation of the lead and headline; “we are unaware,” Strzok

wrote, “of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence

officials.” Comey immediately checked with other intelligence agencies to see if they

had any such evidence, came up empty, and relayed his findings to a closed Senate

briefing, according to testimony at a Senate hearing months later.

In the article’s discussion of the dossier, it described Steele as having “a credible

track record” and noted the FBI had recently contacted “some” of Steele’s “sources.”

Actually, the FBI had recently interviewed Steele’s “primary” source, a Russian

working at a Washington think tank, who told them Steele’s reporting was

“misstated or exaggerated” and the Russian’s own information was based on “rumor

and speculation,” according to notes of the interview released later. The day the

Times piece appeared in print, Strzok emailed colleagues and reported that Steele

“may not be in a position to judge the reliability” of his network of sources,

according to Justice Department documents released in 2020.

CNN quickly followed the Times story with a more modest account, noting Trump

advisers had been in “constant communication during the campaign with Russians

known to US intelligence.” The White House, a few days later, told reporters that

the two top FBI officials, Comey and McCabe, had privately told the White House

that the Times story was inaccurate, with McCabe calling it “bullshit.” This was

consistent with Strzok’s analysis, but the FBI, following custom, stayed silent,

according to the pool report for White House correspondents and a former

government official. The White House had told the FBI it was getting “crushed” on

the Times story, according to the pool report, which most media outlets ignored.

Strzok, in an interview, said his analysis was done for senior FBI leadership,

including “Comey, Andy, and Bill” Priestap, his supervisor, “to say there were

problems there.” I emailed Comey’s lawyer and a close associate seeking an

interview. Comey never responded.

Trump allies put out a similar message about the Times piece. Devin Nunes, then

the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, repeatedly reached out to

reporters to try and knock it down, noting his investigation, which included access

to FBI and other intelligence material, had seen no such evidence as cited by the

Times. But reporters were skeptical. One asked Nunes if he was working with the

White House in “some sort of coordinated effort to push back,” according to a

transcript.

Nunes, at one briefing in the wake of the Times piece, seemed to toss in the towel: “I

can’t control what you guys write,” the transcript shows. It wasn’t until June, after

there was a public rebuke of the story by Comey, that news outlets saw fit to

question its reliability.

The Times piece “was the peak of the frenzy” over Trump and Russia, Cullison, the

Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the issue, told me. “It’s kind of like the

Watergate burglary,” Woodward said, because it helped “launch the issue.” The day

after the story appeared in print, Trump held a press briefing where he called the

Times story “a joke” and “fake news.”

He was asked whether his use of “fake news” wasn’t “undermining confidence in our

news media.”

“No, no,” he replied, he just wanted a more “honest” press. “The public doesn’t

believe you people anymore,” and “now, maybe I had something to do with that.”

After his contentious, seventy-seven-minute press briefing in the wake of the Times

story in February 2017, Trump left for Florida, believing that the Times story was

“the final nail in the coffin,” according to an aide who went with him.

Soon after his plane landed, he turned to Twitter and called the “FAKE NEWS

media” the “enemy of the American people,” citing several news organizations,

including the Times and CNN.

The phrase was coined more than a decade ago by Pat Caddell, a Democratic

pollster going back to the 1970s. Caddell, who died in 2019, became disillusioned

with the party, and became an analyst on Fox News. He explained to The New

Yorker in 2017 why he wound up in Trump’s orbit:

“People said he was just a clown,” he told the writer Jane Mayer, “but I’ve learned

that you should always pay attention to successful ‘clowns.’” Mayer reported that

Trump met with Caddell in South Carolina, on his way to Florida, and hours before

the “enemies” tweet. It was a few days before the 2016 election when Caddell,

appearing on a now defunct conservative podcast, Media Madness, said the media

was on a “political jihad against Trump” and “they’re making themselves the

enemies of the American people.”

It went unnoticed. But once Trump adopted, and turbocharged, Caddell’s slogan,

the war between the president and the media had been officially declared and

chances of a truce were slim.

Marty Baron, the executive editor of the Post at the time, thought then that going

forward, Trump “would vilify” the press, “actually dehumanize us,” he told the

newspaper in 2021 upon his retirement. Just after the 2017 tweet, Baron offered a

strong response from the press, even though Trump had not included the Post in his

list of enemies: speaking at a conference, he said, “We’re not at war with the

administration, we’re at work.”

The Times had its own take on the tweet’s “escalating rhetoric” and Trump’s

relationship with the Washington press corps. A story published one week later,

coauthored by the paper’s White House correspondent, explained how Trump “has

stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master

an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent

government.”

That echoes how NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, described the

leak of the dossier on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, hours after it was posted in

January. The “intelligence community,” Engel’s “senior intelligence source” had told

him, had decided to “drop” the dossier “like a bomb” on Trump because they were

“angry” and wanted to “put him on notice” that they needed answers to the Russia-

related questions swirling around him.

For Trump and his allies, Engel’s remarks and the Times account describe what they

saw as a “Deep State” out to get the president. In the days after Trump’s declaration,

the Times surveyed its new digital subscribers, millions of whom flocked to the

paper during his presidency, to better understand their motivations: the

administration’s “vilification of the press,” one subscriber replied, in a typical

response, according to “New Digital Subscribers Survey” data provided to me by a

Times staffer.

Trump would often call the Times “failing,” including the day after the controversial

story about Russia-Trump ties, but in fact the soaring digital-subscriber base

throughout his presidency offset the steady fall in revenue from print subscribers

and advertising.

On March 1, 2017, the Times stood by the accuracy of its explosive story about

Trump’s Russia connections but tried some clarification. Whereas the first story

cited four anonymous sources, now the Times had found “more than a half dozen

officials” said to have “confirmed contacts of various kinds.” Then, however, the

story muddied the original question of whether Trump associates had contacted

“senior Russian intelligence officials” by noting that “the label ‘intelligence official’

is not always cleanly applied in Russia.”

FBI officials thought the story was a mess. Messages later made public from that

day indicated the bureau thought the Times would try to “correct” its mistakes from

a few weeks earlier and “save their reputation.” But, as Strzok saw it, the paper was

“doubling down on the inaccuracies.”

Strzok met with reporters from the paper the next day, according to FBI records.

When I asked him about his dealings with them he said that “anytime I talked to the

media it was at the direction of and with the participation of members of the FBI’s

Office of Public Affairs.”

Baquet’s original concerns in mid-February, about distinguishing between

“innocent” and “sinister” contacts, were not addressed in the March 1 story. Then,

two days later, another Times story—“Trump Team’s Links to Russia”—addressed

the problem, while referencing the disputed February story. The article noted it

would have been “absurd and contrary to American interests” to avoid meetings

with Russians before or after the campaign and that the repeated Trump-related

contacts involved “courtesy calls, policy discussions, and business contacts” and

“nothing has emerged publicly indicating anything more sinister.” One of the

writers interviewed Konstantin Kilimnik, the former Ukrainian business partner of

Manafort’s, who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign for a few months and whose name

appeared in the February story about Trump aides overheard talking to senior

Russian intelligence officials.

Kilimnik was described in the article as having been under investigation in Ukraine

in 2016 “on suspicion of ties to Russian spy agencies,” but, the article said, no

charges were brought. Kilimnik, born in Russia, told the Times that he had never

been questioned. If he did have any such ties, “they would arrest me.” Kilimnik, in

an email to me, said his interaction then with the Times arose because two Times

reporters joined a “background talk” at a “dinner with a friend.” As was often the

case, the news cycle shifted within hours. Early on a Saturday morning, Trump

tweeted that his predecessor, Barack Obama, “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump

Tower” before the election. The claim was quickly denied by spokespersons for

Obama and the federal government, and a new line of attack against Trump was

opened.

Trump says he based his tweet on something he saw on Fox News that morning. “I

was watching Bret Baier Saturday morning,” he said in an interview, referring to an

episode that ran the night before, “and he had used the words spying on my

campaign.” Trump thought the tweet “was innocuous” until an aide told him, “Sir,

the lines are lit up.”

A transcript of Baier’s show, Special Report, has him talking about a “wiretap at

Trump Tower with some computer and Russian banks,” adding that “the Obama

administration was pretty aggressive with a couple of FISAs.”

Most media went big on the wiretapping flap. The next day, James Clapper, the

former Director of National Intelligence under Obama, went on Meet the Press to

say “there was no such wiretap activity.” He also said that during his time in office,

which ended January 20, “we had no evidence of such collusion,” speaking of

Trump’s campaign and Russia.

The Post put the collusion denial at the end of its story, while the Times ignored it.

On March 20, Comey appeared before the House Intelligence Committee and gave

official blessing to the collusion narrative running rampant in the media. He

testified that the FBI was “investigating the nature of any links between individuals

associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether

there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

Before Comey’s testimony, Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat, read an opening

statement in which he quoted from the dossier’s unsubstantiated allegation about

Carter Page meeting with a sanctioned Russian official close to Putin in 2016 to

discuss an extraordinarily lucrative business deal in exchange for the lifting of

sanctions. The California Democrat would go on MSNBC two days later to state that

there was “more than circumstantial evidence now” of collusion. He offered no

substantiation. Schiff declined to comment through his press aide, Lauren French,

who said, in an email, “this isn’t something we’re going to move forward on.”

The Post did a major story a week later that seemed to burnish the dossier’s main

conspiracy allegation.

It didn’t hold up. Two weeks after that the Post followed with the disclosure of the

Carter Page FISA surveillance, a story that turned out to have significant omissions.

The Post landed a long story about Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American

businessman, on March 29. The top of the piece identified Millian as the source

behind the dossier’s most serious allegation, a “well-developed conspiracy” between

the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, the same ground covered by the Wall Street

Journal and ABC in January. The claim that Millian was a key informant whose

information was “central to the dossier” was stated without any attribution or

sourcing. In 2021 the Post retracted the parts of the story describing Millian as a

dossier source after John Durham, a special counsel looking into the origins of the

Trump-Russia investigations, indicted Steele’s main source for lying to the FBI.

Durham alleged the fact of Millian being a source had been “fabricated.” The Post

editor’s note explained that Durham’s indictment “contradicted” information in the

March story, and additional reporting in 2021 further “undermined” the account.

The Post also deleted parts of a few other stories that repeated the allegation that

Millian was a dossier source.

After the retractions, the Post editor who replaced Baron, Sally Buzbee, said to the

Times that the paper had been “very skeptical about the contents of the dossier.”

Some Post reporters—though not the authors of the piece—had called the contents

“garbage” and “bullshit.” Buzbee and other Post journalists declined my requests for

an interview. A Post spokesperson said that the piece was part of an effort “to

scrutinize the origins of the dossier” and that the paper had “made it clear how hard

it was to verify the dossier.”

In early April, the Post story on Page landed, calling the surveillance “the clearest

evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential

campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents. Such

contacts are now at the center of an investigation into whether the campaign

coordinated with the Russian government to swing the election in Trump’s favor.” It

noted Page’s “effusive praise” for Putin and mentioned Schiff’s congressional

recitation of the Page allegations in the dossier. Relying on anonymous sources, it

gave a vague update on the dossier’s credibility: “some of the information in the

dossier had been verified by US intelligence agencies, and some of it hasn’t.”

At the Times, the newsroom was irked about getting beaten by the Post. “Times is

angry with us about the WP scoop,” Strzok texted to an FBI colleague, a few days

later.

But the Post scoop was incomplete. Its anonymous sources mirrored the FBI’s

suspicions but left out the bureau’s missteps and exculpatory evidence, as

subsequent investigations revealed. It turns out that the secret surveillance of Page

was an effort to bring in heavier artillery to an FBI inquiry that, in the fall of 2016,

wasn’t finding any nefarious links, as the Times reported back then. Agents were

able to review “emails between Page and members of the Donald J. Trump for

President Campaign concerning campaign related matters,” according to an inquiry

in 2019 by the Justice Department Inspector General. FBI documents show the

surveillance of Page targeted four facilities, two email, one cell, and one Skype.

Still, even with the added surveillance capability, the investigation had not turned

up evidence for any possible charges by the date of the Post piece, which came four

days after the secret surveillance, called FISA, for the Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act, was renewed for the second time. (Page was never charged.)

The IG review also found that the FISA warrant process was deeply flawed. It relied

heavily on the dossier, including the fabricated Millian allegation of a conspiracy,

the IG found. Furthermore, the report said the warrants contained seventeen

“significant errors and omissions,” such as leaving out exculpatory information

about Page, including his previous work for the CIA and comments he made to an

undercover FBI informant. And by the time of the Post piece, the dossier’s

credibility was collapsing; the FBI knew the CIA called it “internet rumor,” and on

its own the FBI “did not find corroboration for Steele’s election reporting,”

according to the IG report.

The Post spokesperson, who would only speak on background, said the article on

Page was “fair and accurate” and meant to reflect “how deeply the FBI’s suspicions

were about Page.” They acknowledged the story was incomplete, noting that “at that

time there was a lot that was not publicly known.”

Trump, by the spring of 2017, was more than uneasy with Comey. In one of his

chats, he told the director his policies were “bad” for Russia because he wanted

“more oil and more nukes” and the FBI inquiry was creating a “cloud” over his

dealings with foreign leaders, according to Comey’s notes.

Finally, he had enough. Trump met with senior officials, and his deputy counsel told

him that firing Comey would prolong, not curb, the FBI investigation and possibly

result in the appointment of a special counsel, according to lawyers briefed on the

meeting.

“The president acknowledged” the dire prognosis in the meeting, according to

William Barr, who, as attorney general in 2019, oversaw the end of the Mueller

inquiry. But the president didn’t care, declaring, according to Barr: “I’m still going

to fire the son of a bitch.”

He did just that.

A note on disclosure

In 2015 16, I was a senior reporter at ProPublica. There, I reported on Hillary

Clinton, Donald Trump, and Russian oligarchs, among other subjects. I helped

ProPublica decide whether to collaborate with a book that was critical of the

Clintons’ involvement with Russia; the arrangement didn’t happen. Another of the

projects I worked on, also involving Clinton, was published in the Washington Post

in 2016, where I shared a byline. Some of my other Clinton related work was used