Jane Mayer hits a foul ball on Steele and Russophobia

I'm surprised, given how much good stuff she's done, but ... it's true. Her piece on Christopher Steele could have been written by one of the "insider" foreign policy staff at the New York Times.

First, she talked to nobody from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, nor Robert Parry at Consortium News. They could tell her that evidence to date has her proven wrong on the spring 2016 DNC emails, that international download speeds are too slow to be a Russian hack.

Second, she ignores, or is ignorant of, and I'll be less charitable and say the first, that her claims about Dutch intelligence telling US intelligence about 2014 Russian hackery has been thoroughly refudiated.

Third, she uncritically repeats claims about Russian meddling on social media without talking about the drop-in-the-bucket dollar value, and also appears to swallow wholly Mueller's indictment of the Internet Research Agency, which I've already discussed.

There's other stuff, as noted in this long Twitter thread of mine, where Mayer comes close to looking like she's throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks.

I mean, from someone who wrote "The Dark Side" and "Strange Justice," this is B-grade material. Given that both of these books questioned official or quasi-official narratives, both of which had at least partially bipartisan support, that's the strangest part of this. What she's writing now is stuff the likes of which she criticized in the past.