emptywheel

This first link is the dossier, itself. I’m asking you where your timeline is coming from, given your allegations that this information was public “months” before the details in the dossier.

The second link (Daily Beast) is incredibly vague, and hardly constitutes “widespread coverage of Russian hacking.” It seems to me are you trying really hard to connect dots that aren’t necessarily correlated — or weren’t at the time.

The other one, btw, is what FBI expected DNC to find when they told them, around the time report came out and was widely reported, to Google "the Dukes."

But you realize you're now saying, "Golly, that crack MI6 agent shouldn't be expected to do as thorough a job as using The Google or asking actual cybersecurity experts"?

I’m not saying that at all and that is an obvious strawman. Obviously, any intelligence agent or journalist should be held to incredibly high standards. My point is merely that I see little to no evidence refuting anything substantial in the dossier.

Remember: You are trying to prove that SOMETHING, some one thing (things that weren't publicly reported, like Page's trip) has proven true.

Yes. The dossier was the first mention of widespread Russian meddling in the election. That has been proven true. Steele couldn’t have known about that through public sources prior to June of 2016. Russia’s efforts to undermine NATO in this manner was not publicly known.