Another anti-Trump Dossier – But with One Big Difference

One of these is not like the other one.

Well, what do you know. Timed for (almost) the October surprise, we have another anti-Trump dossier. Hard-left journalist Ken Klippenstein has released a “dossier” on JD Vance that was supposedly created by the Trump campaign. There is no confirmation that’s true. Klippenstein was suspended by X for leaking the document, which contains personal information about Vance. There are allegations that the document was stolen by Iran and handed over to anti-Trump elements.

Nearly eight years ago, the infamous Steele Dossier was birthed into the world. Much like the Vance dossier, the Steele dossier was published without any corroboration of its authenticity. In 2017, Buzzfeed decided to take a break from cat videos and listicles to engage in election interference by publishing the document we now know to be a lie.

Despite this, that lie spread — and spread and spread. It was a variegated, multi-faceted lie. Like a propaganda monster, it spawned dozens of false storylines that got “reported” by the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Vox, and hundreds of others. None of them disclosed in their breathless reporting that, all along, they were being fed these lies by FusionGPS, the black-ops version of a PR firm hired by Clinton to manufacture then push this era-defining piece of fake news.

What we got on the back side of the publication of the dossier was seven years of nearly wall-to-wall coverage about about Trump colluding with the Kremlin to spread “Russian disinformation.” Yet now, with the publication of the Vance document, possibly stolen by Iran, the storyline is not “IRANIAN DISINFORMATION!” but “X suspends journalist who leaked Vance document.” This is the dominant headline we’re seeing about this situation.

There is no mention of “foreign election interference,” “DNC Iranian collusion," or leading questions like, “What Did Kamala Harris Know about the Leaked Vance Document.” Instead, the media is pointing at what they want readers to believe is Musk’s hypocrisy on free speech for banning a journalist from the platform.

When, five years after the Steele Dossier was released, a former New York Times investigative reporter named Jeff Gerth did a four-part series in the Columbia Journalism Review detailing the mass-level failure of the media (or, depending on your viewpoint, its mass-level success), the press was eerily, creepily silent. As Gerth noted in his series, not a single newsroom made one of its leaders available to talk to him. After years of screaming about disinformation, the media was suddenly silent on this very topic.

Three years after the Steele Dossier was published — which was stolen by a Buzzfeed “reporter” who illicitly snatched it off a lawyer’s desk when the lawyer left the room — another major story on leaked documents broke with massive political import. This time it was Hunter Biden’s laptop, stuffed with (literally) incriminating material. Once again “RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION!” was trotted out as a way of making the laptop issue simply go away weeks before the election. The New York Post’s laptop story was censored by our freshly minted libertarian Mark Zuckerberg and born-again free speech activist Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter.

But another excuse was offered by the media for its non-coverage: the emails on the laptop were, they argued, uncorroborated. Brian Stelter launched into a jeremiad on how the contents of the laptop could not be trusted: “For all we know, these emails could be made up,” he said.

Today, however, neither of these objections have been raised. The initial reporting about X suspending the journalist is an initial feint — a way to sidestep both the Iranian involvement and the fact that the material was stolen. Next will come a long, drip-drip-drip process of unpacking the Vance documents for the public, while the authenticity of the materials is taken as a foregone conclusion.