Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith has an article out in The Atlantic magazine, advertising his new book Traffic, while making the tantalizing admission that the infamous Russia “pee pee” Dossier published by hit outlet actually aided President Trump. Smith defends its publication, saying in the article’s headline, that he would do it again.
He begins the story:
One of our reporters, Ken Bensinger, received an unusual invitation to a small gathering at a hilltop mansion in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco. He’d been invited by an acquaintance, Glenn Simpson, a onetime journalist who had become a kind of private investigator and co-founded the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Ken got lost and showed up late, finding a boisterous, all‑male affair: plenty of booze, hunks of meat on the grill, some weed being smoked outside. Simpson drew him into a conversation about a mutual acquaintance, a former British spy named Christopher Steele. Simpson then told Ken something he didn’t know: Steele had been working the case of the president-elect, Donald Trump, and he’d assembled evidence that Trump had close ties to the Kremlin—including claims that Michael Cohen, one of his lawyers, had held secret meetings with Russian officials in Prague, and that the Kremlin had a lurid video of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in the Ritz-Carlton Moscow that would come to be known as the “pee tape.”
Smith’s recollection of events places Buzzfeed at the heart of an international conspiracy to knowingly attempt to unseat then-elected President Donald J. Trump, with British spy Christopher Steele acting as the conduit amongst Washington’s journalist class:
I heard about the report again over lunch in Brooklyn, when a peculiar character in Hillary Clinton’s orbit passed through town. David Brock had been an anti-Clinton journalist in the 1990s. Now he was Hillary’s fiercest ally, a genius at raising money for Democratic groups. He showed up at a café a couple of days before Christmas wearing a coat with a lavish fur collar, and stashed full shopping bags beside the table. Brock was consumed with the mission of stopping Trump, manic; he was headed, it turned out, for a heart attack that landed him in the hospital. He wanted to spread the word about a dossier of allegations involving Trump’s ties to Russia. Brock didn’t have the document, he said. But he knew The Washington Post did, and so did The New York Times. Politicians had it too, he told me, and spies; as far as I could figure out, so did everyone, except the reading public. And me.
Smith goes on to detail how the McCain Institute facilitated his outlet’s first hard evidence of the document, through their chief executive David Kramer. Kramer, a neoconservative war-hawk who has never himself served in a military position, left the documents unattended in the presence of Buzzfeed’s reporters.
On December 29, the Republican foreign-policy expert David Kramer invited Ken to his office at the McCain Institute. He then did something careful Washington insiders do: He left Ken alone in the room with the document for 20 minutes, without, in Ken’s view, giving clear instructions about whether he could make a copy. Ken took a picture of every page. (Kramer later denied that he’d allowed Ken to copy it, though I believed the denial was a fig leaf.
Frustrated by the refusal of traditional D.C. media outlets to publish the salacious, unconfirmed, and ultimately untrue rumors being peddled by a foreign intelligence officer, Smith says he decided to do it himself, in an effort to unsettle the recently elected Commander-in-Chief:
We stood around Mark’s laptop as he started typing. Ken, on speakerphone, warned that we could get sued; I too-curtly told him that I wasn’t asking him for legal advice. Then we turned to writing. “A dossier making explosive—but unverified—allegations” had been in wide circulation, we wrote. The allegations were “specific, unverified, and potentially unverifiable.” Miriam had noticed a couple of odd, minor false notes in the discussion of Russian specifics. She took a turn at the laptop. “It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors,” we said. I sent a copy of our story to our in-house lawyer.
