In a nearly unprecedented action, the Washington Post has heavily corrected the copy and removed sections of two stories relating to the discredited Steele Dossier. What makes the corrections unprecedented was that the Post has republished the stories in their entirety but with the corrections and deletions included.
Businessman Sergei Millian had been used as a source in the stories — the “unnamed” figure who passed on the most salacious allegation involving prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. Millian apparently fed Steele a lot of false information. But after the arrest of Igor Danchenko on Nov. 4 for lying to the FBI, the Post reassessed Millian’s role and decided to make the corrections.
Buzbee said the indictment and new reporting by the newspaper has “created doubts” about Millian’s alleged involvement. The new reporting included an interview with one of the original sources in its 2017 article, who now is uncertain that Millian was Source D, she said. “We feel we are taking the most transparent approach possible” to set the record straight, she said.
The March 2017 Post story carried the headline, “Who is ‘Source D’? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier’s most salacious claim.” It said Millian had been identified in different portions of the dossier as Source D and Source E. The article included Millian’s repeated denials that he had helped Steele.
The newspaper removed references to Millian as Steele’s source in online and archived versions of the original articles. The stories themselves won’t be retracted. A dozen other Post stories that made the same assertion were also corrected and amended.
The Post may be claiming transparency, but they refuse to remove all reporting that used the Steele Dossier in any way, shape, or form. The Dossier was based on tips given to a British intelligence agent of questionable integrity — tips by Russian informants who themselves were not known for their veracity. It was then used in a federal investigation of a sitting president. The entire Dossier’s credibility hasn’t been shattered — it never existed in the first place.
The Post said they changed the headline and several sections identifying businessman Sergei Millian as the source of the Steele dossier were removed. An editor’s note attached to the 2017 article clarified that while The Post originally believed Millian was the source of the dossier, “that account has been contradicted by allegations contained in a federal indictment filed in November 2021 and undermined by further reporting by The Washington Post.”
The Post said the original story was published because two individuals who spoke on the condition of anonymity but one of the sources “now says the new information ‘puts in grave doubt that Millian’ was a source for parts of the dossier.”
The 2019 article referenced the 2019 report and those references have since been removed, per the editor’s note.
Prosecutor John Durham isn’t finished yet, so we are likely to see additional indictments related to the false Russian collusion case. But what about the people whose lives were ruined by these allegations based on a Dossier the FBI knew wasn’t true but used anyway to secure surveillance wiretaps from the top-secret FISA court? Where do they go to get their lives back?
They could start by draining the bank accounts of Hillary Clinton and her aides who engineered this smear campaign against Donald Trump in which people like Carter Page were caught up and destroyed.
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