NYT Scoops Up WaPo Reporter Behind Botched Steele Dossier Reports

Russiagate purveyors continue to advance in mainstream media

The New York Times has poached a Washington Post reporter behind many of the embattled newspaper’s botched stories based on the Steele dossier, the salacious report that falsely accused Donald Trump of colluding with Russia.

Rosalind Helderman will join the Times after a 23-year career at the Post, where she currently serves as deputy national investigations editor, according to Semafor. It’s the latest defection from the Post, which has seen several prominent reporters and columnists leave over declining subscriptions and disagreements with owner Jeff Bezos for blocking an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.

Helderman was a core part of the paper’s breathless coverage of “Russiagate,” the debunked conspiracy theory that Trump conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election. Helderman’s reporting on the Russia probe landed her frequent appearances on liberal network MSNBC, and a share of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. The Pulitzer board gave the award to nine reporters from the Post and Times for work that “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”

But many of those stories—Helderman’s and others—withered under additional revelations about the Steele dossier, an opposition research report that the Hillary Clinton campaign commissioned in 2016.

Helderman received her Pulitzer for a Feb. 28, 2017, report that the FBI agreed to pay dossier author Christopher Steele in October 2016 to continue investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. According to the Post report, the proposal to Steele “shows that the bureau considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation.”

The Post added lengthy editor’s notes in November 2021 to at least four of Helderman’s stories that were based on the dossier. In stories from 2017 and 2019, Helderman and fellow reporter Tom Hamburger reported that Belarusian-American businessman Sergei Millian was a key source for Steele. According to those reports, Millian said the Kremlin had blackmail material on Trump and that Trump associates secretly colluded with the Russian government to influence the election.

But an investigation by Special Counsel John Durham revealed that Millian was not actually a source for the salacious documents. Durham found that Igor Danchenko, an operative working for Steele, had fabricated claims he attributed to Millian.

The Post’s corrections for those stories stated the paper “removed” references to Millian as a dossier source after the stories were “contradicted by allegations in a federal indictment and undermined by further reporting.” The paper also edited headlines and removed videos that discussed the original stories. A media reporter for the Post noted the paper’s decision was “highly unusual in the news industry.”

It is unclear what role Helderman will take at the Times. The Gray Lady has hired other Post journalists who advanced its controversial Russiagate reporting. In September, the Times hired Devlin Barrett, who coauthored an April 11, 2017, story that the Obama Department of Justice obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page over his suspected ties to Russia.

That report, on which Helderman is listed as a contributor, was cited extensively by Trump critics as evidence that the FBI had ample evidence to suspect the campaign of colluding with Russia.

But it emerged nearly a year later that the Justice Department and FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to obtain those warrants. In a scathing report released in December 2019, the Justice Department inspector general admonished the FBI and Justice Department for “significant inaccuracies” in its applications to surveil Page.

The Times and Post did not respond to requests for comment.