Fox’s Shannon Bream Cites Debunked Steele Dossier as Republican Defense for Using Unverified Allegations Against Biden
Heretofore, we shall call this the “Steele Dossier” defense against using unverified allegations to smear a political opponent, and while Fox News anchor Shannon Bream does not get credit for coming up with it, she did cite it during a Thursday hit on Special Report.
At issue is an internal document recently released by Senator Chuck Grassley that had not been made public because the FBI could not verify the information included. The specific document is a FD-1023s, and contains allegations that Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, hired Hunter Biden as a means of protecting the company through his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden. The document contains descriptions of second-hand discussions of payments made to the Biden family.
According to the FBI, all information in FD-1023s include “raw, unverified reporting from confidential human sources.” To wit:
FD-1023s merely document that information; they do not reflect the conclusions of investigators based on a fuller context or understanding. Recording this information does not validate it, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information known or developed by the FBI in our investigations.
As former Attorney General Bill Barr stated, the Department of Justice investigated these claims and, ostensibly, could not find any merit to the allegations. Again, this was under the Trump administration.
Cut to Thursday night, Fox News guest anchor Gillian Turner noted that Democrats are claiming that “Republicans have now had years, three years to investigate this. And at this point, they’ve not come up with a smoking gun.”
Bream replied, “Republicans will say, well, let people read this and see what they think it is. And now we need to know whether this DOJ, which, by the way, has all of this percolating against the backdrop of, we think, former President Trump about to be indicted again and potentially on another round of federal charges, whether they’re treating all political families the same way.” She then introduced a clip of Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin saying:
The Republicans on the Oversight Committee have been on a wild goose chase since we began. They’ve basically been trying to rehabilitate and revive the completely debunked and discredited charges that Rudy Giuliani began with several years ago about the Bidens being involved in corruption in Ukraine. And nothing has ever come of that.
“So he continues to link this to Rudy Giuliani; Bill Barr says there was no link,” Bream followed. “There’s nothing in this document that mentions his name. But again, as he talks about unverified allegations, Republicans say what was the Steele Dossier?”
There are clear parallels here – the Steele Dossier contained outlandish and unverified information and fueled speculation surrounding the Trump campaign’s coordination with Russian intel officers.
Fox News has long used the media’s eager coverage of the unverified Steele Dossier as evidence of bias against Trump. And if the argument is that the unverified allegations against Biden are effectively the same thing, what does that say about our media’s ever shifting journalistic standards?
Watch above via Fox News.
