Who Knows the Truth About Spying?

My observation is that there is a tremendous amount of disagreement about the truth with regard to who has coordinating with the Russians, who has been coordinating with the British spy agencies, and what the various U.S. spy agencies know.  Nobody really knows the truth, perhaps not even the president.  I suppose the master spy agencies know the most, because they have access to enormous amounts of information including phone and email records.

There are a few facts we do know:

• A former British spy, Christopher Steele, was contracted by the Democrats to investigate possible misdeeds by the Trump campaign, including collusion (conspiracy) with Russia to release Democratic campaign emails.
• The Mueller investigation had broad authority to investigate such claims, but failed to find any evidence of such conspiracy.
• There is considerable circumstantial evidence that the retired British spy Christopher Steele and his associate Pablo Miller fed incorrect information regarding Russia-Trump conspiracy to the FBI and to US and UK reporters -- specifically Mother Jones magazine, Luke Harding of the Guardian, and Mark Urban of the BBC.
• Harding and others continued to produce false reports, obtained from MI6 sources, during the course of the Mueller campaign.  One example was the report that Paul Manafort met several times with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.  
• MI6, the UK spy agency associated with Steele and Miller, was also the source of incorrect reporting regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
• Sergei Skripal was a former double agent working for the British in Moscow and imprisoned by the Russians.  He was freed and sent to Britain as part of a spy swap many years ago.  In March 2018 he was attacked in Salisbury England and hasn't been seen since, although he is was treated by UK doctors presumably under the authority of the UK intelligence agencies investigating the case.  The UK was quick to blame Russia for assassination attempt, although the case has many inconsistencies and intelligence blackouts.  It became a western cause for expulsion of Russian diplomats and international condemnation.
• Skripal was a close associate of Pablo Miller, and apparently the source of much of the Steele dossier as well as of BBC and Guardian reporting, which the Mueller investigation was unable to verify.  British intelligence authorities moved immediately after the assassination attempt to squelch any public reporting of these relationships.
• The British military-intelligence complex has been funding a publicity effort called the Integrity Initiative which was quick to jump on the Skripal assassination attempt with a narrative described far previous to the event itself.

Many will dispute these facts, include the U.S. mainstream media.  The common refrain is that the Mueller report did not contradict the Steele dossier.  But the contentions in the Steele dossier are very specific and extreme; i.e.

1) Vladimir Putin had a five year (later stated as eight year) plan to run Donald Trump as a “Manchurian candidate” for President and Trump was an active and knowing partner in Putin’s scheme.2) Hillary Clinton is so stupid and unaware that she held compromising conversations over telephone lines whilst in Russia itself.3) Trump’s lawyer/adviser Mr Cohen was so stupid he held meetings in Prague with the hacker/groups themselves in person to arrange payment, along with senior officials of the Russian security services. The NSA, CIA and FBI are so incompetent they did not monitor this meeting, and somehow the NSA failed to pick up on the electronic and telephone communications involved in organising it. Therefore Mr Cohen was never questioned over this alleged and improbable serious criminal activity.4) A private company had minute by minute intelligence on the Manchurian Candidate scheme and all the indictable illegal activity that was going on, which the CIA/NSA/GCHQ/MI6 did not have, despite their specific tasking and enormous technical, staff and financial resources amounting between them to over 150,000 staff and the availability of hundreds of billions of dollars to do nothing but this.5) A private western company is able to run a state level intelligence operation in Russia for years, continually interviewing senior security sources and people personally close to Putin, without being caught by the Russian security services – despite the fact the latter are brilliant enough to install a Manchurian candidate as President of the USA. This private western company can for example secretly interview staff in top Moscow hotels – which they themselves say are Russian security service controlled – without the staff being too scared to speak to them or ending up dead. They can continually pump Putin’s friends for information and get it.6) Donald Trump’s real interest is his vast financial commitment in China, and he has little investment in Russia, according to the reports. Yet he spent the entire election campaign advocating closer ties with Russia and demonising and antagonising China.

I agree that the Steele Russia dossier seems extremely unlikely.  Moreover, years of examination, including the Mueller probe have failed to confirm any of this.  Media companies wouldn't release the dossier in 2016 because it couldn't be validated.  Yet it was released to the FBI and Mother Jones before the 2016 election, and to the general public in early 2017 and used as the basis for much of what is dividing our country today.

Now my sources on this could be all wrong and the mainstream media (establishment Democrats) right on all this.  The fact is that we cannot know the truth because we are relying on spy agencies who are in the business of secrecy and, often, deception.  So perhaps we should not be so quick to jump on each other.  No one has proof.  We are all at the mercy of the spy agencies, and who amongst us can claim to know what information that they are providing is true, and what is not.

Yet the discourse today is dominated by various groups claiming to be sure that they are right and the others are wrong.  

• The mainstream media and Dems claim there is good reason to believe that Trump conspired with Russia.
• The Republicans claimed that the Dems paid for dirt on Trump, and the dirt produced in the Steele dossier is unverifiable, yet has served as the basis for several years of investigation by the FBI and the media, including wiretapping, FBI interviews, and other forms of harsh investigation.
• The populists believe that the intelligence agencies are not to be trusted.

Further issues include the release of DNC and Podesta emails by Wikileaks, and intelligence agency assertions that this information was provided by Russians hackers, and the finding by the Mueller report that Russian agents did in fact approach members of the Trump campaign to discuss the possibility of sharing this information.

Thus, all U.S. groups have a legitimate reason to be upset:

• The establishment Democrats are upset because their private email conversations were released during the 2016 presidential campaign.
• The anti-establishment Democrats are upset because said email conversations confirmed accusation of bias in the Democratic primary, as evidenced by the resignation of the DNC chair and accompanying apologies.
• Republicans are upset because extreme and unverified opposition research has dominated the national conversation ever since Trump was elected president, and that the Trump administration has been under investigation by the FBI on the basis of unjustified suspicion of a Russian conspiracy.

Almost by definition, the mainstream media has done the most to whip up the mutual distrust based upon unverified spy reports.  Easily verifiable Trump lies and malfeasance has been conflated with Russia conspiracy relying upon intelligence agencies.  Rachel Maddow on MSNBC took this to an extreme, becoming very popular among the establishment Democrats.

In my opinion, the best course of action for all concerned is to dismiss the spy agencies and rely on what is more open and verifiable.  If we become pawns in the spy vs spy battle, we turn on each other, promulgate hate and dysfunction without end.