We now have not one but two ‘secret’ dossiers on the Russian campaign to support Donald Trump. One of them is an unverified and probably unverifiable 35-page collection of rumors and gossip put together by a former British spy. Dumped on the Internet by BuzzFeed, the report is filled with small mistakes and some puzzles (for instance: how could salacious Russian ‘kompromat ,’ or compromising material, be used to blackmail someone as shameless as Trump?) and mixes the plausible with the implausible without giving real answers.
The other is the declassified version of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on Russia’s role in the U.S. election campaign. Carefully hedged and printed on official stationery, it sticks almost entirely to information that was already in public domain, including straight-faced analysis of programs broadcast on RT, the Russian state propaganda channel, which are available to anybody who owns a television.
