A Steeley Media Silence

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

When the movie of the Trump-Russia conspiracy is made, I once suggested, it won’t be the 2006 “Casino Royale,” with Daniel Craig as James Bond. It will be the 1967 version with Woody Allen, played for laughs.

One scene will feature top Democrats and Brookings Institution officials who would be flattered if you ended up thinking of them as Steele dossier conspirators as some now wish to portray them. The truth implies rather less competence. These people include Strobe Talbott, a former Clinton official and arms-control expert and until 2017 Brookings’s president, and Fiona Hill, a Russia expert last seen working for the Trump administration; then there’s Victoria Nuland, a senior official in the Obama State Department who has worked at Brookings and is married to one of its scholars.

In the runup to the 2016 election, all were to be seen busily and importantly circulating a dossier of allegations about the Trump campaign drawn up by former British agent Christopher Steele, presumably unaware that Mr. Steele’s source was merely a former analyst in their own shop along with his drinking buddies.

All the above had far more legitimate ties to top Russian leaders and intelligence figures than any they were encouraged to believe had been exploited to wring out gobsmacking revelations about Russia and Donald Trump. Mr. Talbott even phoned Mr. Steele to conspire furtively over the dossier, about which Mr. Talbott’s interest would instantly have vanished had he known its true provenance.

What we’ve learned thanks to popular dissection of a heavily redacted FBI interview with Mr. Steele’s “primary sub-source,” made public by Senate investigators: The source was Igor Danchenko, product of a regional Russian undergraduate legal education. At 16, he was an exchange student in Louisiana, later studying at Louisville and Georgetown. Aside from a three-year period writing legal documents for Russian trading firms, he made his career in the U.S. as an itinerant writer of business and political reports, including at Brookings.

Until now, his claims to fame were second-fiddle authorship of a study exposing Vladimir Putin’s plagiarism of his own dissertation and two arrests in suburban D.C. for public intoxication. He boasts no real connection to any knowledgeable source in Russia. He was aghast, according to his FBI interview, at the use Mr. Steele made of liquid speculations that he and friends ginned up in response to a Steele-dangled fee.

On such a foundation was a global furor built, and largely at the hands (let’s admit) of people like Mr. Talbott, Ms. Nuland, Ms. Hill and many, many others, including many in the press.

As he did with journalists, Mr. Steele played on their willingness to confuse his seeming credibility as a former British agent with credibility for the things he was saying, even though he did not actually vouch for the things he was saying and refused to reveal his source. Often people in authority have little real idea what they are doing. It wouldn’t be the first case of journalists and others lending credence to unsourced, unsupported claims simply because they were written on paper.

The surface scandal here is the FBI’s knowing use of the bogus Steele dossier to spy on an extraordinarily minor Trump campaign associate.

The deeper scandal, of course, is the Obama administration’s promotion of the myth that Mr. Trump was a Kremlin agent.

So how did the New York Times handle the outing of Mr. Danchenko this week? As if somebody definitely did something wrong, and it was whoever brought Mr. Danchenko’s identity to light.

“Trump Allies Help Expose Identity of F.B.I. Informant,” went a headline over a 2,200-word story, exuding disapproval that Congress and members of the public were holding a previous administration to account when the Times had chosen not to.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say. The paper’s coverage of the Danchenko outing is everything a Freudian slip should be-a full-blown Technicolor revelation of neurosis. But that doesn’t mean the newsroom is not full of curious, persistent and hardheaded people who are trying to find out things. You can see it in much of their reporting. But in the perfumed ranks of senior editors, where this story was likely reshaped to meet institutional and political needs, something else prevails: fear. Fear of the loss of status, fear of being thrown to the wolves in the next social-media eruption.

I might even be tempted to say that everyone involved in the paper’s pathologically revealing treatment of the Danchenko story should be frog-marched out of journalism on principle. Except for one thing: At least the Times reported the story, and even confirmed Mr. Danchenko’s identity after it was exposed by diligent volunteers on the web. Other news outlets almost uniformly ignored the latest revelation despite its centrality to the melodrama that engulfed the country for three years. If you think something is wrong with American journalism, you’re right.