gossip and we will be able to verify it but they have a right to publish this book. harris: that s an interesting point about the verification, we will have to read it to see if that s true but what expectation do we have a fact-checking when a book is called anonymous? lawrence: i think that s up to us, think about all the people that came out and it was full of salacious stuff, i m sure this ll be the same thing. the only difference is it s called anonymous. melissa: i m interested in this from a legal perspective because he leave a place of business, you sign nondisclosure that you say you will not do x, y, and z, potentially, can you turn around and do something like this and profit from it anonymously when you have signed an agreement potentially? we don t know that this person signed a nondisclosure. that s why harris: they know that something called anonymous
trustworthy and accurate. and so this relationship, this business relationship, the attempts to build a trump tower in moscow were ongoing. cohen played a crucial role in it. he acknowledged it. he admitted it and, oh, by the way, christopher steele reported on it. let me ask you something. ken dilanian said about the dossier from the very beginning, ignore the sex. follow the money. there s some salacious stuff in there about sex acts that your former colleague jim comey had to brief the president on and describe when i interviewed him at the 92nd street y as awkward. do you think the salacious stuff in there distracted from all the substantive financial ties between trump org and russia? no question. and that s a really important point. the dossier is really sort of 16 mini reports. it s 35 pages. there s dozens and dozens of bullet points. the salacious stuff, which the media focused on, and i guess we re sorry.
officials. chuck joins us now. why did you write this piece? we were curious. we were really curious to see how this thing held up over time. we first learned about it about two years ago. and so lots of stuff has happened between then and now. lots of documents have been made public and so we just wanted to hold them up to a light. what did you find? it was very interesting. so my colleague sarah grant, by the way, is an amazing young woman. third year student at harvard law school. she helped me do that side by side comparison. here s what we found. the dossier holds up well. none of it has been disproven. parts of it are uncorroborated but as more official documents which out, you can hold them next to the dossier and see that they line up. and a source close to christopher steele told me at the time he was at this time in private practice and this is what he did. he was in contact explain
what intelligence is and how it s different from a law enforcement process. so much of the reporting about the dossier missed this really important point. steele was compiling raw intelligence. meaning which is like tips, leads? people tell him stuff and he writes it down. how is that like law enforcement? well, if an fbi agent goes out to interview, let s say, michael flynn. and flynn lies to the agent. that agent writes it down. the stuff that is in the agent s 302, the memorandum of interview, might be false, but it s accurate. i hope that makes sense. it s false because it s what was said or stated in the interview. correct. and so what steele was doing quite simply was compiling information. raw intelligence which he reported in a dossier. he didn t attempt to analyze it. he didn t attempt to corroborate it. he was just simply reporting it. i also think it s abouting
he admitted it and, oh, by the way, christopher steele reported on it. let me ask you something. ken dilanian said about the dossier from the very beginning. ignore the sex. follow the money. there s some salacious stuff in there about sex acts that your former colleague jim comey had to brief the president on and describe when i interviewed him at the 92nd street as awkward. do you think the salacious stuff in there distracted from all the substantive financial ties between trump org and russia? no question. and that s a really important point. the dossier is really sort of 16 mini reports. 35 pages. there s dozens and dozens of bullet points. the salacious stuff, which the media focused on, and i guess we re stoorry. i understand it. it was only a small piece of the 35-page dossier. all the other stuff has to do with business relationships and political interference and russian hacking. the things that mueller is