Is the Washington Post playing rope-a-dope with the Trump Russia dossier?

| 1:38 pm EDT October 25, 2017
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The Washington Post has consistently been one of the leading investigative news outlets in uncovering Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. It also published a story about the Trump-Russia dossier yesterday that was complete and intentional bullshit. By misrepresenting old information as if it were new and scandalous, the WaPo tried to spin the dossier as being some kind of Hillary Clinton scandal. It was jarringly bad journalism. Or was it something else?

The article in question was so disingenuous that even Republican strategist Rick Wilson ripped it to shreds, tweeting that “there’s little NEW in this piece. EVERYONE knew that Clinton/DNC took over the funding stream after the Republican donor dropped it when his candidate was out. That’s ancient history.” So why would the Washington Post run this crap? Why smear its own reputation just for one day’s worth of clicks, before everyone figures out that there’s no story here? Maybe that’s the entire point. Bear with me here.

In the day since this WaPo story ran, we’ve seen Trump’s apologists trip over themselves to push the Trump-Russia dossier front and center, just so they can attack it. Although the dossier has quietly become a crucial jumping off point for the actual Trump-Russia investigation, it had become a tired story in the media, because there hasn’t been any recent movement on the publicly available verification of its contents. But now Trump’s own side is suddenly making the dossier relevant again, as it tries to invent a Hillary Clinton scandal around it. This next week would be the perfect time for a major news outlet to drop a bombshell confirming a key aspect of the dossier, now that everyone’s talking about it again.

So just maybe, the Washington Post assembled yesterday’s non-story out of pieces from the scrapheap because it was counting on it motivating Donald Trump and his people to push the dossier into public relevance again, just so it can drop the dossier story it really wants people to pay attention to. Either that, or the usually laudable Washington Post published a piece of inexcusably misleading tabloid garbage yesterday for no particular reason.