Steele Yourself
Thoughts on "Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy," the important new book by Christopher Steele
Ultimately, the war on reality is a war of attrition. The totalitarian invents his own reality, and then forces the rest of us to live by the internal logic, such as it is, of the fantasy world he has created. To achieve this goal, he is relentless. He will never stop. Because he knows that, sooner or later, our resistance will fall away, and we will all love Big Brother. It is a war of attrition, and it is a battle of will.
As Hannah Arendt wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
In both of my books about Donald Trump, the first chapter examines his insatiable compulsion to lie. In Dirty Rubles, that chapter is called “The Russia Lie”:
Trump has employed the Big Lie technique for years—lying regularly about his wealth (he lied his way onto the Forbes wealthiest Americans list), his fitness (he coerced his physician to lie about how healthy he was), his sexual prowess (a tabloid headline allegedly from ex-wife Marla Maples, saying Trump was the best sex she’d ever had), and so forth.
But this was different. This wasn’t about the size of his bank account, his good cholesterol levels, or his penis. This was about national security, about cozying up to an enemy. And yet still, Trump and his minions went on TV, took to Twitter, stood behind the podium in the White House Press Room, and lied egregiously to the American people, over and over and over and over.
“Dishonest Abe: Lies, Damned Lies, and Stuff Donald Say” is the title of the first chapter of Rough Beast:
The Trump presidency began with an assault on the truth.
The first time that Sean Spicer, the newly-minted press secretary, addressed the White House press corps, he lied about the size of the crowd at the Inauguration—and he did so at the new president’s stubborn insistence. . . But few imagined that this pathetic spectacle was merely the opening salvo in a four-year onslaught against reality. . .
[T]he annihilation of truth is Trump’s greatest achievement as president—his lone success. During those miserable four years, reality was not the winner.
So many lies! So much gaslighting! So much B.S.!
The lies didn’t stop when Trump left office, of course. If anything they got worse. No longer fettered to the presidency, Donald could lie with impunity. He established his own social media platform, with the Orwellian name “Truth Social,” to disseminate his lies. When that platform proved insufficient, he had his allies—via their wallet, the contemptible Elon Musk—buy him a new one: Twitter, then the most effective mass communications network going, which Apartheid Clyde slowly turned into a safe space for Nazis, and where Trump’s bullshit could find more purchase (as predicted in this space). Already enjoying the full-throated support of the propagandists on Fox News, he forced the “liberal” legacy media to bend the knee—as in the first debate with Joe Biden, when Jake Tapper declined to call Trump out on what he personally knew was a lie about General Kelly. All year long, and especially since Election Day, said legacy media has tripped over itself normalizing all the crazy, and ignoring all the lies. The result: we non-MAGA are all wandering around, dazed, muttering “What the fuck?” under our breaths.
The war on reality is a war of attrition, and we are losing.
Twenty twenty four has set a new standard for gaslighting. We are asked to ignore Trump’s convictions, indictments, fraud rulings, rapes, and obvious footsie with Putin; to laugh off JD Vance’s history as an NRx, Red Caesar fascist; to take seriously Trump’s egregiously awful picks for cabinet and staff positions; to consider mass deportation, which is merely a euphemism for genocide, as a reasonable position. Trust-washing, truth-washing, sane-washing, normalizing: small wonder that 2024’s entry into the popular lexicon is “brain rot.”
And then comes Christopher Steele, the British intelligence officer turned intelligence professional turned target of MAGA wrath, to our rescue one more time, with his first book, Unredacted: Russia, Trump, and the Fight for Democracy, published on October 8th. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not only does Steele provide his own account of the so-called dossier—a much-needed supplement to the historical record—but the book is like the houselights coming on full blast, overwhelming the gaslighting. In the fever dream of Trump/Russia lies in which we must now make our febrile way, Unredacted is a bracing splash of cold water.
Even before I wrote Dirty Rubles in 2018, I sensed that it was going to be important to keep going back and reviewing what happened: to remember, to get the facts straight, but also to counter the constant stream of lies—to fend off the Steve Bannon firehose of shit. Unredacted does this as well or better than anything I’ve read these last eight years. And with his background in intelligence work, his intimate familiarity with methods employed by the Kremlin, his low-key and quiet personality, and, of course, his own experience going through the MAGA meatgrinder, Steele is uniquely suited to provide this account. It’s a welcome dose of hard truth: a reality check.
For example, Steele writes about a meeting he had in 2008, after Russia invaded Georgia. He was adamant in his view that Putin was a shit and would only be emboldened when there were no consequences for his actions:
I saw Putin as an enemy of the UK and the West—and I was convinced his policies and behavior would worsen. I was not sure how much evidence we needed of this after the apartment bombings of 1999, which we firmly believed were ordered by then prime minister Putin, a man prepared to kill 307 of his own citizens in order to secure his control over the country; after Putin described, in 2005, the end of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”; after the prosecution of the dissenting oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the seizure of his gas and oil company by the state; after the shooting and killing of Anna Politkovskaya and other journalists and critics of Putin; after the Litvinenko assassination; after Putin brought his black Labrador to a public meeting in 2007 with then German chancellor Angela Merkel, who he knew had a phobia of dogs, at a time when Germany and Russia were in dispute about energy supplies; and now after the attack on the pro-West state of Georgia. I felt the West, and certainly the British government, should have long since moved on from President George W. Bush’s assessment of Putin in 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
See? Reality check.
“Putin,” Steele continues, “was a generational threat, and an ever-worsening one, and we needed to treat him as such.”
But Putin was not treated as such, by Britain or the United States. Instead, prime minister after prime minister, and president after president, appeased him. One takeaway from Unredacted is that Putin is a monster, and has always been a monster, and the fact that any Western government has made nice-nice with him at all, certainly since his 2014 annexation of Crimea, is pure folly, if not outright madness. The likes of Tucker Carlson treating the guy like anything other than a homicidal despot just contributes to the gaslighting. The clear-eyed assessment of Putin made me even more angry at our government for not batting an eyelash when Donald Trump 1) openly called on Russia to release the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails, and 2) capitulated to Putin in Helsinki, to the point where he explicitly stated that he valued the Russian dictator’s word more than that of his own Intelligence Community.
Steele doesn’t say that Trump is a Russet asset. But he does offer this assessment, from which we can draw our own conclusions:
Glenn [Simpson, of Fusion GPS] said that Fusion’s work so far had unearthed numerous connections between Trump and Russia, including his links with alleged Russian organized crime figures. And he said that Trump had made many trips to Russia, starting during the Soviet era, in apparent attempts to build or open or license hotels there. None of these projects had materialized. That was a lot of work, and a lot of travel to Russia over a period of about two decades, for apparently nothing—for a man whose own bestselling book was called The Art of the Deal.
In Unredacted—which I devoured in two settings, and which can be read in an afternoon—Steele takes us through all of it: who he is, where he came from, how he came to be tasked with gathering intelligence about Trump’s Russia connections, how he went about gathering that intelligence, what the intelligence reports that came to be known as the “Steele dossier” actually were, why what he learned freaked him out, how he tried multiple times to get the reports to the relevant authorities in the United States and Great Britain, how both of those governments mistreated him shamefully and failed to heed his warnings, and what happened to him in the aftermath.
Reading Unredacted crystalized my understanding of Trump/Russia, reminded me of things I’d forgotten, supplied me with details I did not know, and, more than anything, infuriated me. Not only was the FBI’s treatment of Chris Steele a travesty of justice and a personal betrayal of a valuable resource, it also comprised an enormous risk to national security for the U.S. and the U.K. alike. Jim Comey’s failure to alert the American public about the deathly serious investigation into Trump, while simultaneously hipping us to the reopening of the Bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton because [checks notes] another laptop had a few more emails on it that (oh no!) might have inadvertently been misclassified, may yet prove fatal. The United States as we know it may not survive this.
That was another takeaway from Steele’s book: if I was worried before about what a second Trump term would mean for our democracy and the rule of law—and, like, I was worried enough to write a book about it—I am now even more concerned.
On two occasions that we know about—there were doubtless many more—sources died because of Trump apparently revealing intelligence to the Russians. The first time was when he was laughing it up with Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office in May 2017. “The information,” Steele writes, “was about a person working as an asset inside the terrorist group ISIS for the Israeli government. Our sources believe the Russians then informed Iran, and they in turn tipped off ISIS and the Israeli asset was killed.”
The second time was right before Biden’s inauguration. Steele writes:
On his last full day in office—January 19, 2021—Trump ordered the declassification of a binder of documents that had been part of the FBI’s [Russia] investigation. Among those documents was a transcript of our September 2017 interviews with [FBI agents] Amy and Auten. And in that transcript was unredacted information about our sources.
Soon after that two of our sources in Russia—who were named in the transcript—went silent. We have not heard from them since, nor have we received any information about them.
As I have covered on these pages, Trump remains obsessed with re-acquiring that lost binder of documents. In 2022, he went so far as to designate two representatives to fight with the National Archives and Records Administration to retrieve them. One of those designees was Kash Patel. In light of this, one wonders if Trump wants to install Patel as FBI Director just to get information about Russian sources so he can deliver them to his Kremlin whoremasters.
Another cause of infuriation is how easily Trump was able to craft disinformation about the so-called Steele dossier, and how greedily his media lapdogs ate it up. When I am working on a novel, I keep a notebook, in which I jot down ideas: character concepts, plot points, snippets of dialogue, and so forth. The notes are not meant to be published. No one is supposed to read them but me. Now imagine someone tore a few pages out of one of my notebooks, and those pages were put up on the internet, and not only was everyone reading them and commenting on them, but my entire literary output was judged solely on those notes. It’s not a perfect analogy, but that’s what happened to Chris Steele with his intelligence reports. I can’t even imagine how frustrating it must have been for him, not only to have complete idiots weighing in on his work and his career, but to be sued, repeatedly, for things he wrote in a private communication he never wanted to have published. (Lawfare, which is the use of the judicial system to attack enemies, is a favorite tactic of the Kremlin and Trump—and the new pick to head the FBI, Kash Patel. Fun times!)
The last chapter of Unredacted is Steele’s assessment of the state of the world. It is not an intelligence report that wasn’t intended for publication. It’s something he wants everyone to read, in a format of his choosing. He talks a lot about the relationship between Putin and Xi, about North Korea, about Taiwan. He indicates that France is a potential place where fascism might next rear its ugly head (and a gander at what happened in France this week indicates he is probably right). And he says that Trump is a greater danger than Putin or Xi: “I would put a reckless, isolationist, autocratic, volatile, and impulsive Donald Trump ahead of them both.”
We are now in what Steele calls “a new historical era of strategic chaos, a ‘new world disorder.” I hope he’s wrong. But, given that he’s been correct about pretty much everything Trump related for the last eight and a half years—and everything Putin related for this entire century—I have, as they say in intelligence, a high level of confidence that he’s right.
Christopher Steele suffered mightily because he believed in democracy and freedom, because he trusted the United States government, and because, especially having lived in Moscow, he knew well what Putin’s continued ascension would mean for the world. He put his neck out—and he paid the price. What that means, sadly, is that the next guy in his position probably won’t.
NEW PODCAST
S8 E12: The Fascism Episode / America the Stupidful
Many times in the last two years, we have warned about the grim consequences of allowing a wannabe dictator–who attempted to overthrow the government on his way out the door four years ago–back into the White House. What we warned about has happened. We are 45 days away from Donald Trump’s second inauguration. And based on who the Mussolini of Queens has picked for his cabinet and staff positions, it looks like he was dead serious about being a dictator on Day One.
This week, I will replay clips of some of my past guests talking about American fascism. We must now listen not as a warning, but as a way to be prepared. This episode features clips from interviews with the defense analyst Brynn Tannehill, author of AMERICAN FASCISM; historian Manisha Sinha, author of THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC; True North Research executive director Lisa Graves; and strategic communications expert Robbie Harris. Plus: chapter 5 of ROUGH BEAST, and a new patriotic anthem for our times.
Follow Greg on BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile/gregolear.bsky.social
Subscribe to The Five 8:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0BRnRwe7yDZXIaF-QZfvhA
Check out ROUGH BEAST, Greg’s new book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D47CMX17
ROUGH BEAST is now available as an audiobook:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Rough-Beast-Audiobook/B0D8K41S3T
Greg, I’m 75 years old. I’ve lived in the US from Eisenhower to Trump, a time of relative stability and prosperity. I’m deeply saddened that my grandchildren will not have that experience, and that we didn’t seem able to provide that for them. My hope is that dangerous times will allow courageous leaders to step forward. We will need them.
This may be Greg's most important post and that's really saying something. Thank you for reminding me about the book. Too caught up in the election to pay attention. Thank you, too, for remembering it's always been Russia. Always.