The sketchy sourcing for the Steele dossier There's an old saying in journalism: You're only as good as your sources. Now, a new federal indictment suggests that the sources for the Steele dossier were not very good at all. In January 2017, BuzzFeed News published a compendium of memos by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, alleging a conspiracy between Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin. Two weeks later, FBI agents sat down with Steele's "primary sub-source" — the key person who had collected information from supposedly Kremlin-connected contacts. This source, Igor Danchenko, was based in Washington, and his contacts were a motley crew: a drinking buddy, a middle school friend working in Cyprus and an anonymous caller. Were any of them plugged in? Danchenko said he rarely kept notes of his conversations. Danchenko's indictment on Nov. 3 for allegedly making false statements to the FBI, part of special counsel John Durham's investigation, lays out new details that cast the Steele dossier in a different light. (Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and called the indictment a "false narrative.") From the start, the dossier included unverified, salacious and conspiratorial allegations. Yet the FBI relied on it in court and defended its reliability in congressional testimony, and in the media, some reporters and TV pundits were perhaps too quick to embrace sketchy opposition research to shape their coverage. For readers who are confused about the latest twists and turns, we wrote a guide with a summary of the dossier and the Russia investigations, details from the new indictment and descriptions of all the major players. But remember: The dossier largely has been a side show to the main event — clear evidence of the Russian government's efforts to intervene in the 2016 election on Trump's side. A bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 confirmed this initial finding from the intelligence community. Moreover, the FBI opened its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government not because of the dossier, but because of a tip from an Australian diplomat. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Japan has a bone to pick In Detroit with President Biden this week, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) made the case for a proposed tax credit that would provide a $4,500 rebate for union-made electric vehicles. The "union-made" requirement would help the Big Three automakers with crews represented by the United Auto Workers — GM, Ford Motor, and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler. But it has been criticized by nonunion companies such as Tesla and foreign companies with U.S. assembly plants. "They do everything they can to stop our American companies from being able to sell in Japan," Stabenow said. "We don't do that to them." We do. In 1962, the European community restricted imports of U.S. chicken products, and President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 decided to target a then-popular German vehicle, the Volkswagen Kombi-Bus, with retaliatory tariffs of 25 percent. Under trade rules, all such "light trucks" needed to be targeted — and this 25 percent tariff, or "chicken tax," has never been repealed. By contrast, automobiles from overseas face only a 2.5 percent tariff. This kind of disparity affects markets, and experts told us the chicken tax has been a boon to light truck manufacturers in the United States for decades. Japanese manufacturers may have found ways around the 25 percent U.S. tariff, but it still exists, and Stabenow earned Three Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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