The contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people, which is a contentious topic. Please consult the procedures and edit carefully. |
Before requesting any edits to this protected article, please familiarise yourself with reliable sourcing requirements. Before posting an edit request on this talk page, please read the reliable sourcing and original research policies. These policies require that information in Wikipedia articles be supported by citations from reliable independent sources, and disallow your personal views, observations, interpretations, analyses, or anecdotes from being used. Only content verified by subject experts and other reliable sources may be included, and uncited material may be removed without notice. If your complaint is about an assertion made in the article, check first to see if your proposed change is supported by reliable sources. If it is not, it is highly unlikely that your request will be granted. Checking the archives for previous discussions may provide more information. Requests which do not provide citations from reliable sources, or rely on unreliable sources, may be subject to closure without any other response. |
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Steele dossier article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources:聽 Google ( books聽路 news聽路 scholar聽路 free images聽路 WP聽refs)聽路 FENS聽路 JSTOR聽路 TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27Auto-archiving period: 30聽days聽 |
The contents of the List of Trump鈥揜ussia dossier allegations page were merged into Steele dossier on March 2, 2018. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
This article was nominated for deletion on 14 January 2017. The result of the discussion was Snow keep. |
While the biographies of living persons policy does not apply directly to the subject of this article, it may contain material that relates to living persons, such as friends and family of persons no longer living, or living persons involved in the subject matter. Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about living persons must be removed immediately. If such material is re-inserted repeatedly, or if there are other concerns related to this policy, please see this noticeboard. |
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
Interesting mentions of dossier:
Dolan denies being a source for the pee tape.
I provided one piece of information about the 2016 campaign to a person, who unbeknownst to me was working on the Dossier 鈥 a publicly sourced analysis of atmospherics within the Trump Campaign over Paul Manafort鈥檚 firing, from POLITICO and Fox News that was arguably the most accurate item of information in the entire Dossier.
After citing no evidence Durham falsely pronounces that, 鈥淚n light of these facts, there appears to be a real likelihood that Dolan was the likely source of much of the Ritz Carlton 鈥nformation in the Steele reports.鈥 That鈥檚 just an unmerited supposition couched in vaguely conditional language but illustrates how Durham stretches to reach preconceived conclusions that are not supported by any evidence. As such, after reading the entirety of Durham鈥檚 report, it seems more reasonable to conclude its title should be changed to 鈥淕rasping at Straws.鈥
Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 02:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
References
The last two sentences in the opening paragraph are as follows: 鈥淲hile Steele's documents played a significant role in initially highlighting the general friendliness between Trump and the Putin administration, the veracity of specific allegations is highly variable. Some have been publicly confirmed,[7][11][6][8] others are plausible but not specifically confirmed,[12][13] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.[14][15][16]鈥
All but one of those sources is from the 2010鈥檚. Perceptions have since changed, per CNN and NYT:
We should update accordingly, to something like this: 鈥淢any of its central allegations have been discredited, its sourcing was thin and sketchy, it was an unreliable source of information, and Trump denied its claims.鈥 Anythingyouwant ( talk) 05:18, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Anythingyouwant, you may benefit from reading the recent RfC about adding general opinions and controversial, imprecise, unclear, and contentious labels like "discredited" to the lead. (We already mention them in the body where such opinions and labels can be dealt with much better.) There was no consensus to do so. See Talk:Steele_dossier/Archive_27#RFC_on_lead. Unless you can provide some other arguments and better sources, you are unlikely to get a different result. AFAIK, nothing new has popped up to change the situation, but we're always open to the possibility, and if it happens, the article will be revised again, as has happened many times.
These are the opinions of some writers, not facts, and the lead isn't the best place to highlight such controversial and disputed opinions. Also, the addition of Trump's denial is counterproductive to attempts to add wording like "discredited" to the lead as his denials lend credence to the oft-proven fact that any misdeed he denies usually turns out to be true. He is the ultimate unreliable witness. It's often best not to bring up his denials. His multiple denials and lies to Comey about the pee tape changed Comey from a skeptic who thought the allegation was BS to a "maybe peeliever"(!) who now believes it's possible the pee tape allegation is true.
When one accepts the fact that the dossier is not a perfect, finished, and fully vetted report, but "an unfinished 35-page compilation of unverified raw intelligence reports鈥"not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation"," the "discredited" description is revealed to be a misjudgment based on false expectations.
The more accurate thing to do, as we have done using myriad RS, is to examine each allegation and evaluate it. In that light, the last sentence of the first paragraph summarizes the more elaborate analyses of each allegation in the body most accurately. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 07:32, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
People forget that "failure to corroborate" an allegation does not mean it is "discredited" or "disproven". It just means the allegation remains uncorroborated. It may be true or untrue. We just don't know for sure. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 07:46, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Valjean states that "The more accurate thing to do, as we have done using myriad RS, is to examine each allegation and evaluate it."
However, this approach is fundamentally flawed (and a core problem with our article), because the bulk of the allegations in Steele's dossier have not been discussed in any detail by major journalistic or academic sources. For example,
"While The New York Times and many other news organizations published little about the document's unverified claims, social media partisans and television commentators discussed them almost daily over the past two years." As a result, the sources that are used in this article are mostly not reliable, at least not for the content in question.
"not generally reliable."
At 452,680 bytes as of the
latest revision,
Steele dossier is nearly twice the size of
World War II (252,175 bytes at the time of writing), yet unlike
World War II, nearly all of its sources fall into the "generally unreliable" or "marginally reliable" camp of opinion articles/tabloids/blogs (with some day-to-day news reportage for good measure), and the vast majority of all article text has just a single author (Valjean at
79.1% according to the latest estimate).
It would be difficult for any person to manually review all 546 (!) individual citations to determine how many of them could be disqualified as opinion articles alone (which "are reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author, but are rarely reliable for statements of fact"
per
WP:RSEDITORIAL), but it could easily be in triple digits.
"Most editors consider The Daily Beast a biased or opinionated source. Some editors advise particular caution when using this source for controversial statements of fact related to living persons.")?
"There is no consensus on the reliability of Salon. Editors consider Salon biased or opinionated, and its statements should be attributed.")?
"There is no consensus on the reliability of Insider.")?
"Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article.")?
Is "Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart 鈥 Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion" from New York's Intelligencer blog a "news," "analysis," or "opinion" source鈥攁nd how well does it hold up more than five years later? What about this "analysis" article by Luke Harding in The Guardian (especially in light of Harding's debunked report on a closely related topic)? Is Rachel Maddow's opinion talk show a reliable source? The examples are endless...
One might also wonder how these sources were collated, in the sense of using neutral search criteria to generate a representative sample of high-quality sources. Valjean regularly mentions his use of Google Alerts (e.g., "I'm creating more Google Alerts for this."; "My Google Alerts tell me so."; "I have several Google Alerts for this topic."), but, based on the examples above (and others cited by critics on this talk page over the years), it seems like these alerts may be generating a considerable amount of content that is WP:INDISCRIMINATE, and thus an example of What Wikipedia is not. This problem is particularly pronounced in the Steele dossier#Allegations section.
Furthermore, contrary to Valjean's statement above, it is not the role of volunteer editors "to examine each allegation and evaluate it," as this often results in original research by way of synthesis. This problem is particularly pronounced in the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section.
Although top-level sources, such as The New York Times, unequivocally state that "the dossier ended up loaded with dubious or exaggerated details," Valjean and others have long actively pushed back against including similar language in our article, in part to avoid conflict with the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section, which can be interpreted as presenting many allegations in the most sympathetic light possible.
Notably, even the
Steele dossier#Kompromat and "golden showers" allegations subsection spends eight paragraphs on the putative "pee tape" and ultimately weighs the "evidence" for and against its existence more-or-less equally, allowing Steele to evaluate his own work as follows:
"As for the likelihood of the claim that prostitutes had urinated in Trump's presence, Steele would say to colleagues, 'It's 50鈥50'." I submit that, in a normal encyclopedia article with less
tunnel vision, this collection of OR/SYNTH (largely supported by a skewed sample of low-quality and/or biased sources) would be replaced with a mere sentence or two, such as "No 'pee tape' has yet surfaced, and mainstream sources consider it to be a likely hoax."
While I support Anythingyouwant's proposal, bringing Steele dossier into compliance with Wikipedia's sitewide content policies would require a vast WP:TNT, particularly of the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section and the huge proliferation of marginal (if not WP:FRINGE) sources. However, there appears to be WP:LOCALCONSENSUS to veto a major overhaul at this time. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 22:01, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
I'm reading through the history section and there's a few places where the article goes into more in depth than necessary, basically reaching WP:NOTNEWS. I removed a couple of them and also added some subsections.
Right now there are a lot of segments in the article, not all of them are necessary or well divided, which is overall causing size bloat and readability issues. There's a bunch of sections that are just too detailed and should be cut down, summmarised or split off into separate articles. I'm also not convinced by some of the sections decided ("Two research operations and confusion between them", "What the DNC, Clinton campaign, and Steele knew" etc), so thinking about a reorganisation might be good Soni ( talk) 21:57, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
The agents "raised the prospect of paying Steele to continue gathering intelligence after Election Day",[83] but Steele "ultimately never received payment from the FBI for any 'dossier'-related information".[55] In October 2022, during questioning from Special Counsel John Durham, Brian Auten, a supervisory counterintelligence analyst with the FBI, testified that, shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered Steele "up to $1 million" if he could corroborate allegations in the dossier, but that Steele could not do so.[84][85] Steele has disputed this description: "And to correct the Danchenko trial record, we were not offered $1 million by the FBI to 鈥榩rove up鈥 our Trump-Russia reporting. Rather, we were told there were substantial funds to resettle sources in the US if they were prepared to testify in public. Understandably they were not."[86] The Inspector General's report later confirmed that the FBI had initially offered to pay Steele $15,000 for his trip to Rome, but when the FBI dropped Steele as a confidential human source because he had shared information with a third party "in late October 2016" (Mother Jones magazine), the payment was halted
Okay, I found "did not like the idea of helping Hillary Clinton". It is part of the evidence of how neither Steele nor Simpson originally had anything against Trump or for HRC. Steele didn't even know the client was Clinton until later. Steele was a friend of Ivanka's, and it was only after he learned what Trump was doing that he turned against him. Simpson didn't really like HRC. This is about the bias of the creators of the dossier. Is that important or not? The accusations against Steele and the dossier are considered important enough to include, so why not this? We usually cover both sides of such issues. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 04:12, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I have looked at the "As Nuland later shared,..." and agree it's no longer very important. It's gone. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 04:16, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
This diff shows the changes made from the version right before you started your edits. You'll see that several of your changes are now in place. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 04:22, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I have made a copy of the lede at User:Soni/sandbox4 to show edits before I make them live.
I have moved a few more sentences of the lede around to make it flow better. Right now the lede seems to start off coherent and clearcut, and then starts repeating itself without any clear cut direction.
There's a paragraph in the middle that serves no purpose other than "facts that didnt fit anywhere else" so removed the bit about Orbis as it was not really relevant to rest of lede or helping with context enough. The line about DNC and Steele saying they didnt know is kinda UNDUE, kinda WP:MANDY but I can see some plausible worlds where we might want to rephrase and include it in some form. The line about US/British intelligence, I moved to another paragraph
The first paragraph is quite long and has no natural breaking points if you plan to keep the structure of that extremely long sentence listing all allegations in a row. I think that sentence could be split into 2 just before namely anyway, but I couldnt see how to. Otherwise the rest of paragraph (veracity of dossier) started being repetitive with the other paragraphs by trying to summarise the documents authenticity twice. Instead now the last paragraph solely focuses on the accuracy of the dossier and segues into the overall impact it had, borrowing the sentence from 1st para and discarding the repeated shorter line in last para.
Finally, now each para of this lede serves a clear purpose and direction, with intro/what were claims + how it was made/when it was public + how seriously was it taken + how correct it is/what impact it had.
I think all of these changes combined make a significant impact making the lede more understandable to a regular reader. Soni ( talk) 04:26, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
The contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people, which is a contentious topic. Please consult the procedures and edit carefully. |
Before requesting any edits to this protected article, please familiarise yourself with reliable sourcing requirements. Before posting an edit request on this talk page, please read the reliable sourcing and original research policies. These policies require that information in Wikipedia articles be supported by citations from reliable independent sources, and disallow your personal views, observations, interpretations, analyses, or anecdotes from being used. Only content verified by subject experts and other reliable sources may be included, and uncited material may be removed without notice. If your complaint is about an assertion made in the article, check first to see if your proposed change is supported by reliable sources. If it is not, it is highly unlikely that your request will be granted. Checking the archives for previous discussions may provide more information. Requests which do not provide citations from reliable sources, or rely on unreliable sources, may be subject to closure without any other response. |
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Steele dossier article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources:聽 Google ( books聽路 news聽路 scholar聽路 free images聽路 WP聽refs)聽路 FENS聽路 JSTOR聽路 TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27Auto-archiving period: 30聽days聽 |
The contents of the List of Trump鈥揜ussia dossier allegations page were merged into Steele dossier on March 2, 2018. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
This article was nominated for deletion on 14 January 2017. The result of the discussion was Snow keep. |
While the biographies of living persons policy does not apply directly to the subject of this article, it may contain material that relates to living persons, such as friends and family of persons no longer living, or living persons involved in the subject matter. Unsourced or poorly sourced contentious material about living persons must be removed immediately. If such material is re-inserted repeatedly, or if there are other concerns related to this policy, please see this noticeboard. |
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
Interesting mentions of dossier:
Dolan denies being a source for the pee tape.
I provided one piece of information about the 2016 campaign to a person, who unbeknownst to me was working on the Dossier 鈥 a publicly sourced analysis of atmospherics within the Trump Campaign over Paul Manafort鈥檚 firing, from POLITICO and Fox News that was arguably the most accurate item of information in the entire Dossier.
After citing no evidence Durham falsely pronounces that, 鈥淚n light of these facts, there appears to be a real likelihood that Dolan was the likely source of much of the Ritz Carlton 鈥nformation in the Steele reports.鈥 That鈥檚 just an unmerited supposition couched in vaguely conditional language but illustrates how Durham stretches to reach preconceived conclusions that are not supported by any evidence. As such, after reading the entirety of Durham鈥檚 report, it seems more reasonable to conclude its title should be changed to 鈥淕rasping at Straws.鈥
Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 02:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
References
The last two sentences in the opening paragraph are as follows: 鈥淲hile Steele's documents played a significant role in initially highlighting the general friendliness between Trump and the Putin administration, the veracity of specific allegations is highly variable. Some have been publicly confirmed,[7][11][6][8] others are plausible but not specifically confirmed,[12][13] and some are dubious in retrospect but not strictly disproven.[14][15][16]鈥
All but one of those sources is from the 2010鈥檚. Perceptions have since changed, per CNN and NYT:
We should update accordingly, to something like this: 鈥淢any of its central allegations have been discredited, its sourcing was thin and sketchy, it was an unreliable source of information, and Trump denied its claims.鈥 Anythingyouwant ( talk) 05:18, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Anythingyouwant, you may benefit from reading the recent RfC about adding general opinions and controversial, imprecise, unclear, and contentious labels like "discredited" to the lead. (We already mention them in the body where such opinions and labels can be dealt with much better.) There was no consensus to do so. See Talk:Steele_dossier/Archive_27#RFC_on_lead. Unless you can provide some other arguments and better sources, you are unlikely to get a different result. AFAIK, nothing new has popped up to change the situation, but we're always open to the possibility, and if it happens, the article will be revised again, as has happened many times.
These are the opinions of some writers, not facts, and the lead isn't the best place to highlight such controversial and disputed opinions. Also, the addition of Trump's denial is counterproductive to attempts to add wording like "discredited" to the lead as his denials lend credence to the oft-proven fact that any misdeed he denies usually turns out to be true. He is the ultimate unreliable witness. It's often best not to bring up his denials. His multiple denials and lies to Comey about the pee tape changed Comey from a skeptic who thought the allegation was BS to a "maybe peeliever"(!) who now believes it's possible the pee tape allegation is true.
When one accepts the fact that the dossier is not a perfect, finished, and fully vetted report, but "an unfinished 35-page compilation of unverified raw intelligence reports鈥"not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation"," the "discredited" description is revealed to be a misjudgment based on false expectations.
The more accurate thing to do, as we have done using myriad RS, is to examine each allegation and evaluate it. In that light, the last sentence of the first paragraph summarizes the more elaborate analyses of each allegation in the body most accurately. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 07:32, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
People forget that "failure to corroborate" an allegation does not mean it is "discredited" or "disproven". It just means the allegation remains uncorroborated. It may be true or untrue. We just don't know for sure. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 07:46, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Valjean states that "The more accurate thing to do, as we have done using myriad RS, is to examine each allegation and evaluate it."
However, this approach is fundamentally flawed (and a core problem with our article), because the bulk of the allegations in Steele's dossier have not been discussed in any detail by major journalistic or academic sources. For example,
"While The New York Times and many other news organizations published little about the document's unverified claims, social media partisans and television commentators discussed them almost daily over the past two years." As a result, the sources that are used in this article are mostly not reliable, at least not for the content in question.
"not generally reliable."
At 452,680 bytes as of the
latest revision,
Steele dossier is nearly twice the size of
World War II (252,175 bytes at the time of writing), yet unlike
World War II, nearly all of its sources fall into the "generally unreliable" or "marginally reliable" camp of opinion articles/tabloids/blogs (with some day-to-day news reportage for good measure), and the vast majority of all article text has just a single author (Valjean at
79.1% according to the latest estimate).
It would be difficult for any person to manually review all 546 (!) individual citations to determine how many of them could be disqualified as opinion articles alone (which "are reliable primary sources for statements attributed to that editor or author, but are rarely reliable for statements of fact"
per
WP:RSEDITORIAL), but it could easily be in triple digits.
"Most editors consider The Daily Beast a biased or opinionated source. Some editors advise particular caution when using this source for controversial statements of fact related to living persons.")?
"There is no consensus on the reliability of Salon. Editors consider Salon biased or opinionated, and its statements should be attributed.")?
"There is no consensus on the reliability of Insider.")?
"Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article.")?
Is "Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart 鈥 Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion" from New York's Intelligencer blog a "news," "analysis," or "opinion" source鈥攁nd how well does it hold up more than five years later? What about this "analysis" article by Luke Harding in The Guardian (especially in light of Harding's debunked report on a closely related topic)? Is Rachel Maddow's opinion talk show a reliable source? The examples are endless...
One might also wonder how these sources were collated, in the sense of using neutral search criteria to generate a representative sample of high-quality sources. Valjean regularly mentions his use of Google Alerts (e.g., "I'm creating more Google Alerts for this."; "My Google Alerts tell me so."; "I have several Google Alerts for this topic."), but, based on the examples above (and others cited by critics on this talk page over the years), it seems like these alerts may be generating a considerable amount of content that is WP:INDISCRIMINATE, and thus an example of What Wikipedia is not. This problem is particularly pronounced in the Steele dossier#Allegations section.
Furthermore, contrary to Valjean's statement above, it is not the role of volunteer editors "to examine each allegation and evaluate it," as this often results in original research by way of synthesis. This problem is particularly pronounced in the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section.
Although top-level sources, such as The New York Times, unequivocally state that "the dossier ended up loaded with dubious or exaggerated details," Valjean and others have long actively pushed back against including similar language in our article, in part to avoid conflict with the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section, which can be interpreted as presenting many allegations in the most sympathetic light possible.
Notably, even the
Steele dossier#Kompromat and "golden showers" allegations subsection spends eight paragraphs on the putative "pee tape" and ultimately weighs the "evidence" for and against its existence more-or-less equally, allowing Steele to evaluate his own work as follows:
"As for the likelihood of the claim that prostitutes had urinated in Trump's presence, Steele would say to colleagues, 'It's 50鈥50'." I submit that, in a normal encyclopedia article with less
tunnel vision, this collection of OR/SYNTH (largely supported by a skewed sample of low-quality and/or biased sources) would be replaced with a mere sentence or two, such as "No 'pee tape' has yet surfaced, and mainstream sources consider it to be a likely hoax."
While I support Anythingyouwant's proposal, bringing Steele dossier into compliance with Wikipedia's sitewide content policies would require a vast WP:TNT, particularly of the Steele dossier#Veracity and corroboration status of specific allegations section and the huge proliferation of marginal (if not WP:FRINGE) sources. However, there appears to be WP:LOCALCONSENSUS to veto a major overhaul at this time. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 22:01, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
I'm reading through the history section and there's a few places where the article goes into more in depth than necessary, basically reaching WP:NOTNEWS. I removed a couple of them and also added some subsections.
Right now there are a lot of segments in the article, not all of them are necessary or well divided, which is overall causing size bloat and readability issues. There's a bunch of sections that are just too detailed and should be cut down, summmarised or split off into separate articles. I'm also not convinced by some of the sections decided ("Two research operations and confusion between them", "What the DNC, Clinton campaign, and Steele knew" etc), so thinking about a reorganisation might be good Soni ( talk) 21:57, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
The agents "raised the prospect of paying Steele to continue gathering intelligence after Election Day",[83] but Steele "ultimately never received payment from the FBI for any 'dossier'-related information".[55] In October 2022, during questioning from Special Counsel John Durham, Brian Auten, a supervisory counterintelligence analyst with the FBI, testified that, shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI offered Steele "up to $1 million" if he could corroborate allegations in the dossier, but that Steele could not do so.[84][85] Steele has disputed this description: "And to correct the Danchenko trial record, we were not offered $1 million by the FBI to 鈥榩rove up鈥 our Trump-Russia reporting. Rather, we were told there were substantial funds to resettle sources in the US if they were prepared to testify in public. Understandably they were not."[86] The Inspector General's report later confirmed that the FBI had initially offered to pay Steele $15,000 for his trip to Rome, but when the FBI dropped Steele as a confidential human source because he had shared information with a third party "in late October 2016" (Mother Jones magazine), the payment was halted
Okay, I found "did not like the idea of helping Hillary Clinton". It is part of the evidence of how neither Steele nor Simpson originally had anything against Trump or for HRC. Steele didn't even know the client was Clinton until later. Steele was a friend of Ivanka's, and it was only after he learned what Trump was doing that he turned against him. Simpson didn't really like HRC. This is about the bias of the creators of the dossier. Is that important or not? The accusations against Steele and the dossier are considered important enough to include, so why not this? We usually cover both sides of such issues. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 04:12, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I have looked at the "As Nuland later shared,..." and agree it's no longer very important. It's gone. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 04:16, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
This diff shows the changes made from the version right before you started your edits. You'll see that several of your changes are now in place. -- Valjean ( talk) ( PING me) 04:22, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
I have made a copy of the lede at User:Soni/sandbox4 to show edits before I make them live.
I have moved a few more sentences of the lede around to make it flow better. Right now the lede seems to start off coherent and clearcut, and then starts repeating itself without any clear cut direction.
There's a paragraph in the middle that serves no purpose other than "facts that didnt fit anywhere else" so removed the bit about Orbis as it was not really relevant to rest of lede or helping with context enough. The line about DNC and Steele saying they didnt know is kinda UNDUE, kinda WP:MANDY but I can see some plausible worlds where we might want to rephrase and include it in some form. The line about US/British intelligence, I moved to another paragraph
The first paragraph is quite long and has no natural breaking points if you plan to keep the structure of that extremely long sentence listing all allegations in a row. I think that sentence could be split into 2 just before namely anyway, but I couldnt see how to. Otherwise the rest of paragraph (veracity of dossier) started being repetitive with the other paragraphs by trying to summarise the documents authenticity twice. Instead now the last paragraph solely focuses on the accuracy of the dossier and segues into the overall impact it had, borrowing the sentence from 1st para and discarding the repeated shorter line in last para.
Finally, now each para of this lede serves a clear purpose and direction, with intro/what were claims + how it was made/when it was public + how seriously was it taken + how correct it is/what impact it had.
I think all of these changes combined make a significant impact making the lede more understandable to a regular reader. Soni ( talk) 04:26, 8 March 2024 (UTC)