Washington Post Posts Significant Corrections to Two Reports on the Steele Dossier
Brendan Smialowski/ Getty
The Washington Post has issued significant corrections to two articles it ran about the Steele dossier.
The infamous dossier compiled by Christopher Steele has received renewed scrutiny after the arrest of Igor Danchenko, an analyst who worked with Steele. Danchenko was indicted by a grand jury in the ongoing investigation by John Durham, who was tasked in 2019 with probing the origins of the Russia investigation.
There was a lot of reporting on information in the dossier back in 2017, perhaps most famously a wild allegation about Donald Trump and “golden showers.” Some of that reporting is now under the microscope following revelations in the Danchenko indictment.
The big detail the Post had to correct was information regarding businessman Sergei Millian. Reports in 2017 and 2019 said he was a source for Steele, but as Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote Friday, executive editor Sally Buzbee concluded they “could no longer stand by the accuracy of those elements of the story.”
You can read both editor’s notes below.
This is the note on a 2017 report profiling Millian.
The original version of this article published on March 29, 2017, said that Sergei Millian was a source for parts of a dossier of unverified allegations against Donald Trump. That account has been contradicted by allegations contained in a federal indictment filed in November 2021 and undermined by further reporting by The Washington Post. As a result, portions of the story and an accompanying video have been removed and the headline has been changed.
The original account was based on two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide sensitive information. One of those people now says the new information “puts in grave doubt that Millian” was a source for parts of the dossier. The other declined to comment.
And this is the note on a 2019 report about Millian’s connection to Trumpworld.
An earlier version of this story published on Feb. 7, 2019, referred to previous reporting in The Washington Post that Belarusan-American businessman Sergei Millian had been a source of information for a dossier of unverified allegations against Donald Trump. In November 2021, The Post removed that material from the original 2017 story after the account was contradicted by allegations in a federal indictment and undermined by further reporting. References to the initial report have been removed from this piece.
