Veteran Watergate journalist Bob Woodward says he tried to warn Washington Post reporters about the infamous, discredited “Steele dossier” when the RussiaGate coverage first took off — but they weren’t interested, a new report says.
Woodward was among those interviewed for a lengthy Columbia Journalism Review report published this week about the media’s handling of the unproven allegations that Trump colluded with Russia amid the 2016 election.
In the interview, the 79-year-old reporter — famous for breaking the Nixon White House scandal for the outlet in the early ’70s — recalled how he was quick to slam the largely-discredited Trump dossier when it was first published in 2017.
Woodward had dismissed the files, which were funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, as a “garbage document” during a January 2017 Fox News appearance.
He then reached out to unnamed Washington Post reporters — but claims they had no interest in his harsh criticism, according to the CJR report.
“After his remarks on Fox, Woodward said he ‘reached out to people who covered this’ at the paper, identifying them only generically as ‘reporters,’ to explain why he was so critical,” reporter Jeff Gerth writes.
“Asked how they reacted, Woodward said: ‘To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the [Washington] Post about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that and I didn’t force it on anyone’.”
Elsewhere in the CJR report, Woodward also lashed out at the general media coverage surrounding RussiaGate, saying it “wasn’t handled well” and that he thought viewers and readers had been “cheated.”
“He urged newsrooms to ‘walk down the painful road of introspection’,” Gerth writes.
In 2021, the Washington Post took the unusual step of correcting and retracting large portions of two articles that relied on information included in the Trump-bashing dossier.
The outlet’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, said at the time that newspaper was unable to stand by the accuracy of their reporting regarding a source’s allegations, which were later contradicted in an indictment handed Special Counsel John Durham.
Many of the details included in the dossier have since been found to be based on rumors and speculation.
Among them was the claim that Russia had a tape of Trump in a Moscow hotel room with prostitutes who were urinating on a bed where President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama had previously stayed.
