The Daily - The Outsize Life and Quiet Death of the Steele Dossier

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

This episode contains strong language. The Steele Dossier — compiled by Christopher Steele, a British former spy — was born out of opposition research on Donald J. Trump, then a presidential candidate, and his supposed links to Russia.The document, full of salacious allegations, captured and cleaved America. But now, a main source of the dossier’s findings — Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst — has been charged with lying to federal investigators.Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Mr. Trump and his backers say revelations about the Steele dossier show the Russia investigation was a “hoax.” That is not what the facts indicate.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For years, the Steele dossier captivated and cleaved America. A collection of the most salacious allegations against Donald Trump, it became inextricably linked to the Russia investigation, the Mueller report, and the legitimacy of Trump's presidency itself. Then, just weeks ago, Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst and the dossier's main source, was arrested and charged with lying to the FBI about his sources for the dossier.

with lying to the FBI about his sources for the dossier. Today, my colleague Mike Schmidt returns to make sense of the dossier's outsized life and quiet death. It's Monday, December 13th. Mike Schmidt. How are you? Very well. Sorry I'm late. It's okay.

Is this on? Yeah. Okay. So, Mike, this is truly a blast from the past. You, Trump, Russia, Steele Dossier, being in the studio. And the reason we're bringing the proverbial band back together is because we now have this new information on the dossier, which for the last year or so has remained kind of a loose end in the Trump-Russia story. And this new information feels like it finally ties up that loose end. But in doing so, it very much begs the question of why this dossier ever had the life that it did and why it took so long to get

to this moment. So that's what we want to talk to you about. You're right. I think it's very important that we're doing this. The Trump-Russia story is a chapter in our country's history, and the dossier was treated by many people as a big part of it, in a way that it probably really never should have been. And right now, we have two things. We have new information that helps clarify what this dossier was all along, what this thing was all about. And we're also a year out from the Trump presidency, and we have the ability to see much more clearly how this document affected all sorts of people in the government, government officials, members of the media, the public, and why this had such an impact.

Right. And I think it makes sense to start at the beginning of the dossier, kind of its birth. And I think you should remind us of that story. So Donald Trump was running for president. And that led a lot of people to do a lot of things that they normally would not have done. In a normal political race, it is common for one side to sit down with members of the media and other sort of government watchdogs and say, hey, look, here's some opposition research that we found. I have been through one of these meetings. I actually went through one of these meetings in 2016. I have too.

Where Republicans sat down with me about a Democratic Senate candidate somewhere out in the country and said, look, we have done all of this research about this candidate. We've done it for you. We've done it for you. Here are our receipts in the sense of here is the proof of what we have done. Here is the documentation. Usually, like it was in this meeting that I had, it's about what I would call old school political corruption, stuff around campaign finance,

stuff around shady donors, stuff about whether the candidate paid their taxes, Stuff around shady donors, stuff about whether the candidate paid their taxes. All sort of in that genre. Public records based controversies. Correct. Scandals. And they say, look, here's what we think happened with this candidate. Here's the documentation why we think it is. Please write about it.

You know, if you need help, give us a shout. It's not painting by colors, but it's a very good roadmap for a reporter to go out and find information. A lot of this goes on. In 2016, something very different happened. These operatives that have been hired by the Clinton campaign are sitting down with members of the media. But the opposition research that they were providing was not about taxes or shady donors. It was that Donald Trump had been co-opted by a foreign power. A very startling claim.

He has been corrupted by an American adversary that is openly intervening in the election. And he's essentially a Manchurian candidate running for president. And that was very, very different. Right. I was not in any of those meetings. And what happens in the summer of 2016 is that the dossier starts to circulate in Washington.

It circulates within the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. You have claims of deals, of business deals that are going to enrich the people around Trump. You have stuff about Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman. His connections to Ukraine. There are specifics in there about Trump's lawyer at the time. Michael Cohen goes to Prague to meet with Russian officials. One of my colleagues looks at the dossier and says, whoa, there's an allegation about something related to Michael Cohen. Let me pick up the phone and try and get it confirmed. Tries to do it, can't get it confirmed. Some of the allegations are things that I would call too difficult to confirm.

Like what? Donald Trump has been cultivated for five years by the Russian government to be an asset of theirs. Like, who are you going to call to get that confirmed? Right. Where are you going to start? There's certain things that are just so salacious that they're so hard to get to.

And in the course of this, I am given a copy of the dossier. And I read it and I'm like, wow, holy shit, this is crazy. But there's only so much you can really do with that. I wasn't sure what to do with it. I put it in my backpack. I went home to see my parents. I read it again there in the late summer, early fall of 2016. I left the dossier there.

I forgot about it. That's the value you attached to it. You left it at your parents' house in Virginia. I only realized weeks later that it was sitting in my parents' apartment in Richmond, Virginia. It was this thing that was sort of floating around and forgetting it somewhere just sort of demonstrates how we looked at the document. somewhere, just sort of demonstrates how we looked at the document. Right. So Mike, how was it that this opposition research report, which you don't seem to put a lot of stock into, came into being? So you may remember that this document's origins predate the Clinton team picking it up. This was a document they sort of inherited. It actually started during the Republican primaries. It may seem really hard to fathom now,

but Donald Trump was scaring the heck out of the Republican establishment at the time. Trumpism. He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. A toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness that will lead the Republican Party to perdition. Mr. Trump's language is divisive. A cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded. and discard it. And it was during that period of time that a wealthy Republican donor

began paying these private investigators to start developing information on Trump. Right, to try to undermine his candidacy. Correct. That Donald Trump, having received a majority of these votes... That doesn't go anywhere. Donald Trump wins the nomination. Has been selected as the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States.

And a lawyer for the Clinton campaign picks up essentially that contract and begins paying those private investigators to do the research on Trump. Right, because now he's the Democrats' problem. Correct. And what happens next? As part of this research operation, Fusion GPS, this firm that has been started by two former Wall Street Journal reporters, hires Christopher Steele. former Wall Street Journal reporters, hires Christopher Steele. He's a former British spy with expertise in Russia. And he's someone that the FBI has used in the past for information

about European and Russian corruption. This process, this endeavor, is bringing on a former spy for a foreign country to aid in the process. Now, maybe this has gone on before in American history. Maybe there are other examples of that. But in modern political times, that's a pretty extraordinary move. But Donald Trump was a great threat, Democrats thought.

Right. And of course, it's Christopher Steele who, through his process and his sources, writes down all these salacious claims about Trump, that he's a foreign asset, that he's, as you said, a Manchurian candidate, and submits those reports eventually to the Democratic candidacy of Hillary Clinton. And we now know these reports to be the Steele dossier after his name. He's the author for the client, the Clinton campaign. Got it. So what happens to this research at this point?

As the dossier circulates with the media, reporters are talking to each other about it because Donald Trump is behaving on the campaign trail unlike any other recent candidate that we've seen. But it would be interesting to see. I will tell you this. And he's saying, Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. Help me in my campaign. Right. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next. Yes, sir. And he's basically asking the Russians who are already intervening in the election to help him. Right. And if you're a reporter who has read this report, even if you're dismissive of it, like Mike Schmidt, you're probably recognizing

some linkage there. What the report did was it provided, while reading it, immense clarity to this problem. It was unclear why Donald Trump was behaving this way. Why is he saying that? Why is he saying that about Vladimir Putin? I thought he was our enemy. It was very odd. I thought he was our enemy. It was very odd. And in front of you is a document that says, here's the answer. It doesn't necessarily prove it. But in a world where you're trying to make sense of this abnormal presidential candidate, you look at the same time that members of the media are looking at this and going, hmm, Steele is giving the reports to the FBI. With which he has a previous relationship. He has this previous relationship with the FBI. He's providing the FBI with these reports.

And by the way, the FBI is already investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. This is all kind of starting to come together. So what does the FBI do with the Steele research? So the FBI is early in its investigation. It's looking for anything it can to try and understand this abnormal-looking relationship that's been going on. And in the process of that, they're looking at one member of Trump's foreign policy team, a guy who we certainly had not heard of before then, named Carter Page. It's great to be here in Moscow's World Trade Center today.

And they're investigating Carter Page's ties to Russia. For the last 15 years, I've been researching, teaching, and writing about fundamental trends in the world economy. It's given me many opportunities to present outside lectures across Russia, Europe. And the FBI is in the process of trying to determine whether to seek a special surveillance warrant to listen to Carter Page's phone conversations, read his emails, go through anything they essentially want in his electronics. And the dossier comes in with fairly clarifying or apparently clarifying information

about Page's relationship with Russia. And they look at the dossier, and the dossier helps put them over the top in terms of going to apply for that warrant. They use it as evidence? They use part of the dossier to go to a special judge to get a surveillance warrant

on Carter Page. An American citizen? An American citizen. And do they get it? They get it. So, this is important. An opposition research report first funded by Republicans to knock Trump out and then funded by Democrats to defeat him in the general election. That same content is now being used by the Federal Bureau of Investigations to apply for a warrant to eavesdrop to spy on an American citizen and a Trump advisor, Carter Page.

eavesdrop to spy on an American citizen and a Trump advisor, Carter Page. Right. Among the most invasive and greatest tools that the FBI has is to surveil you, is to listen in on your conversations. And this document has already played a role in securing that about a member of a presidential candidate's campaign. Right. But the power and impact of the dossier is just beginning. Okay, what do you mean?

This means that Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States. Donald Trump wins. Investigators are also looking into alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russia and possible meddling in the U.S. presidential election. There are so many questions flying around about what Russia did that Barack Obama tasks the intelligence community to give him an assessment on what happened. What happened? The intelligence community comes up with a classified determination that indeed Russia tried to interfere in the election to help the Trump campaign. The intelligence chiefs, including FBI Director James Comey, say, well, if we're briefing Obama on this, we should probably brief the incoming president, Donald Trump, on it as well. In January of 2017, Comey and the other intel chiefs go to Trump Tower.

And in a room, they brief Trump on the findings of this assessment. Russia tried to help get them elected. Afterwards, in what I think is one of the more consequential moments of Donald Trump's presidency, even though his presidency has not begun, Comey pulls Trump aside. Comey has been told that Carl Bernstein, the legendary Watergate reporter who now works for CNN, has a copy of the dossier and they may publish it soon. Comey knows it's been circulating. He knows it's been attached to the intelligence community's findings. Right. And he says to himself, if I don't tell Donald Trump about this and CNN reports it in a few days, then it's going to look like we're hiding something

from the incoming president of the United States. So he says, to be transparent with Trump, I'm going to tell him about the dossier. In a one-on-one conversation, Comey tells Trump. Just an FYI.

Hey, by the way, there's this thing that's been circulating around about you. Right. In this meeting with Trump, Comey is walking up to the line and dancing around the most salacious allegation in the dossier. Which is? workers to, in front of him, urinate on the bed that Michelle and Barack Obama had allegedly slept on in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow. And what do we know about Trump's response to this information from Comey? Comey says that Trump interrupts and, in a very defensive way, says to Comey, do I look like a guy who needs hookers? This interaction obviously sets Comey and Trump's relationship off in a very distinct direction. distinct direction. Comey realizes it's been a very awkward encounter. And Trump later says that he thinks that Comey was trying to get leverage on him. A complete disconnect between

the two. You don't need to know much of the rest of the story to see the direct line from there to Comey's firing just a few months later. But we have breaking news we're following right now. I want to get straight to Jake Tapper, who's with us. Jake, you've got some major breaking news. A couple of days after this briefing. CNN has learned that the nation's top intelligence officials provided information to President-elect Donald Trump and to President Barack Obama last week about claims of Russian efforts to compromise President-elect Trump. CNN reports that Trump had been briefed on the contents of the dossier.

The allegations were part of a two-page synopsis. These were based on memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative whose past work U.S. intelligence officials consider credible. This is the first significant reporting that this dossier exists and that it has been used at the highest levels of the country's law enforcement agency to brief the incoming president. the country's law enforcement agency, to brief the incoming president. This two-page synopsis that we're referring to, this is an annex. This is an addendum to the intelligence community report. That's exactly right.

Big news. Huge disclosure. That just heightens the questions about what's in the dossier. For those unlike you who haven't seen it. Correct. The public has no idea, but they know that the incoming president has been told about it. It must be very important. And it is in that environment, in that aftermath, literally that same day that BuzzFeed News published the actual documents from the dossier. And then there's the controversial move

by BuzzFeed last night, publishing a dossier sourced to a person who claims to be a former member of British intelligence. The decision to publish it was a highly controversial move. Right. So what it reminded me of is when my brother sends me alien conspiracy theory websites

saying, we have these facts, you decide. We can't verify anything. We can't tell you if this is real or not. But just you decide. Because the dossier, what was the dossier? Why would BuzzFeed end up deciding to publish this? Unverified allegations. Defamatory, potentially. I mean, I read the letter that Ben Smith put out, and I don't know the answer to that. Easily one of the more consequential, controversial journalism decisions of the modern era. And the person who made that decision, the editor of BuzzFeed, was Ben Smith, now the New York Times media columnist. The editor-in-chief of the online news site saying in an email to his reporters,

quote, Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Right, and I actually remember him going on TV, I think it was CNN, and explaining his rationale for publishing it. But then I think when your great scoop puts not just the fact of a document, but claims attributed in your reporting to a source seen as credible, and specific summaries of the claims into public, I think everybody's obligation then is to say,

well, here are the actual claims. We're not just going to summarize them. Basically, if the FBI knows about it, and reporters like Mike Schmidt know about it and the president-elect has just been briefed on it, the public deserves to know what's in it. That was his argument. Right. And to say

you and I have here between us a secret document with explosive, dark claims, and we don't, you guys on the other side of the camera can't see it, but we can, I don't really understand. And in the days that followed, a number of media organizations pick up on this story in a major way. I think it's important for us to note, Mike, that The Times did not. I remember talking to you guys about this.

We covered BuzzFeed's decision to publish, but not the contents of the dossier itself. Right. Ever since we had first tried in the summer of 2016 to verify it and been unable to do so, we had made the decision not to use it or quote from it in our reporting, not to disseminate the information we had not ourselves been able to verify. That was our philosophy, but other media organizations followed the logic of BuzzFeed. There's these troubling allegations that Russia has compromising information on Donald Trump, and for reasons I can't explain, some are calling it a golden gate. It's all... The director of national intelligence has come out and said,

we don't know if all that stuff in that dossier is true. If the FBI, in fact, had assessed that stuff and found it to be untrue, if they had found it to be false, the FBI could say so. But they're not saying anything. When you're in this room, I don't know how to describe it. It's soaked in history.

It just washes over you. It's not even like it's in the past. You're in history. You're in it. This story has been sort of a nebulous, more or less nebulous worry cloud since Russia hacking the DNC became evident this past summer. But with these developments today, all of a sudden this is starting to feel like a life and death story.

All of a sudden this is starting to feel like the most important political story, certainly, in the world. And then, in March of 2017, Mr. Schiff, Mr. Chairman, I thank you, and I also want to thank... as the Russia story about Trump is picking up in his front- page news every day. Here are some of the matters drawn from public sources alone, since that is all we can discuss in this setting, that concern us and we believe should concern all Americans. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the committee that's in charge with overseeing all the intelligence

agencies and of investigating Trump's ties to Russia, reads portions of the dossier into the congressional record. According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, who is reportedly being embraced by these folks that have large megaphone for large swaths of the country. According to Steele's Russian sources, Page has offered brokerage. That are skeptical of Trump. Right. Also, according to Steele's Russian sources, the campaign is... And embraced, we should note, uncritically.

They're embraced as confirming the questions out there about Trump. I thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I yield back. We'll be right back. Okay, so Mike, you have taken us up to 2017, and we've seen this tremendous impact from the dossier, its use in this wiretap, its concern to the FBI director and impact that it has on his relationship with President Trump,

its prominence on cable television, it's being read into the congressional record. Where are we as we head into 2018? In the meantime, as you may remember, there was a live, full-blown investigation going on by Robert Mueller that had nothing to do with the dossier. And that investigation is looking at what Russia did in the election and did was it gave the right a way to sort of conflate the two. Explain that. What we see is that as much as the left leaned into the dossier for its political narrative, the right begins to do the same. Mueller's investigation is bad news for Trump. It's putting out, as it moves forward,

embarrassing, damaging details about what Russia did and how the Trump campaign openly embraced it. And what the right is able to do is they're able to make the dossier the Russia problem. This entire case as we know it is based on this dossier, this spurious, nonsensical dossier. This dossier that we know was unverified and largely nonsense about Donald Trump.

But if you'll remember back to the beginning, all of this was justified in part by the publication of a dossier, a totally unverified dossier. There is this nonsense document that is at the heart of this Russia question. And they sort of ignore all of the more substantiated things that we're learning from the Mueller investigation. In the end, the Mueller report has 400 pages, none of it based on the dossier. But the Republicans were able to elevate the dossier to the point that it confused the public. to the point that it confused the public. If Mueller's supposed to be investigating Trump-Russia collusion, why would he ignore the bought and paid for Russian dossier?

And it allows them to cast doubt on the entire Russian narrative. The dossier is based on Russian lies paid for by Hillary. This was a document that was produced by the president's enemies, paid for by them. True. Hiring a foreign national, Christopher Steele. Who hired this foreign spy to dig up dirt that turned out to be a bunch of nonsense that has defamed the president. So you think about this when you turn on these other networks or pick up a newspaper. There's no Trump-Russia collusion. And it gives them fodder to help Trump try and put the Russia question behind him, to cast as much doubt on it as possible.

And in the midst of trying to make this argument, the Republicans are given a huge gift. Breaking news out of Washington here. A long-awaited report by... The Justice Department's inspector general puts out a report. The report did find a number of errors when the Bureau applied to conduct surveillance of a Trump campaign aide. That reveals how the FBI relied on the dossier improperly

in how it obtained the surveillance warrant on Carter Page. Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz was harshly critical of the FBI finding, quote, significant inaccuracies and omissions in the four surveillance warrant applications for Trump campaign aide Carter Page. At this point, Carter Page hasn't been charged

with any wrongdoing. And it's become clear that the investigation into him has fizzled. This was intentional to violate Carter Page's civil liberties and constitutional... And Republicans, who up until this point, in sort of a pre-Trump world, were huge defenders of the surveillance court and the process for obtaining these. This is an extreme violation of our civil rights, of our liberties. These are serious civil liberty issues,

and there's no lipstick that you can put on this pig that's going to make it look good the morning after. Become huge civil libertarians. The Steele dossier was at the heart and soul of the intrusion into the civil liberties of Carter Page. And the Democrats, who during the Bush administration of the intrusion into the civil liberties of Carter Page. And by the way... And the Democrats, who during the Bush administration were the biggest critics of the surveillance court

and the surveillance state. And champions of civil liberties. Champions of civil liberties are fairly muted in their outrage. So the political dynamics of this great power that the federal government has in surveillance are turned on its head. Right. And so yet another way that the dossier is reverberating is that it kind of turns the political world upside down. And it also obscures a hugely consequential finding by that Justice Department inspector general, which is that the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, the origins of that had nothing to do with the dossier. But at the same time,

because the Carter Page warrant does have something to do with the dossier, it gets very confusing. Right. And the larger importance of what that inspector general is saying is that the foundation of that Russia investigation was solid. The FBI had every right to look into what it did about the campaign's ties. But this part about the dossier is far, far flimsier. The right was already dismissing this document. Now, the dossier has had these significant holes blown in the side of it, and Trump's critics are quietly moving away from it. in the side of it, and Trump's critics are quietly moving away from it. And it is in that environment that the dossier begins to dissipate into the background and fade away.

Right, which is peculiar given the enormous impact of a dossier that you have just laid out for us, that it kind of just dies this very quiet unfinished death no one has come through and given it that true final blow that lays out for us why this document should not be given great credibility no one has done that it's just kind of dangling out there waiting for someone to come through and provide that clarity. And a few weeks ago, almost a year after Donald Trump has left office, that happened. Following some breaking news this morning, everybody, from the Justice Department, a senior DOJ official. A special investigator. Here we go.

Who had been appointed by the Trump administration. Prosecutor tasked by Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr with investigating the Russia investigation itself to try to prove the whole thing was a hoax. Brings a detailed series of charges against the primary source that Steele had relied on in the dossier. Federal authorities have arrested this man this morning. His name is Igor Danchenko. He's a Russian-born analyst living in the United States. Indicting the principal source for the Steele dossier with five counts of lying to the FBI and creating a false narrative during the Trump-Russia investigation in 2017. If this sounds like big news, you're absolutely right.

What had happened is, is that when the FBI, back in 2016, got the dossier, Comey and the other investigators said, we have to get to the bottom of this dossier. We have to find out whether this is true or not. this dossier. We have to find out whether this is true or not. And they went out and in that process found out the sources that Steele had relied on. They interviewed those sources and one of them, Igor Denchenko, lied repeatedly to the FBI about where he got his information from. What he told the FBI was that he provided raw intelligence to Christopher Steele about things that were essentially rumors, including that salacious allegation about a sex tape in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow.

Danchenko maintains his innocence. He's pled not guilty. And he says that he did not understand that the information he was providing to Steele was going to be used as opposition research, or that the information he had obtained from his sources would be represented somehow as conclusive. And the indictment lays out a pretty damning picture of how the information that Danchenko gave to Steele for the dossier was in fact second, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh hand. The FBI found that his information was unverified and was portrayed

with more confidence in the Steele dossier than it actually deserved. This was the secret source who Steele had used in making the allegations, these salacious allegations, is indicted for lying to federal investigators. So at this point, we can say that the Steele dossier is a profoundly flawed document? Correct. And now we can see inside the anatomy of how this document came to be, and it's troubling. And like, looking back, it seems we can clearly see now

that the Steele dossier should never have had the life and the impact that it did. It should never have been used in the wiretap warrant for Carter Page, should never have been read into the congressional record or featured on primetime segments on cable news. It probably should have stayed the kind of document that you forget at your parents' house in Virginia. Yes, that is clear. But what the Steele dossier does is it reflects the fever pitch of the moment. The left was terrified about Donald Trump. They were terrified about what a Donald Trump presidency could do. So they grasped for anything that they could.

So they grasped for anything that they could. The right thought that the left was trying to undo a Democratic election of 2016 by using these allegations to how Donald Trump was being unfairly tainted by this. So it was this thing that everyone tried to grab onto as they both thought they really had very little to grab onto on something that really, really, really they thought mattered. The dossier became a tool, an instrument for each side to use as they waged all but physical war against each other, an information war for the direction of the country. Mike, I want to ask you a difficult question. Given this newest development in the story of the dossier, I'm sure you know this, Republicans are once again using the dossier to call into question the entirety of the Russia of your career journalistically, I'm going to venture to say, do you think there's anything to do with Trump's first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador? Did they have anything to do with Paul Manafort's relationships with Russian oligarchs who had leverage over him and polling data that he shared with a Russian intelligence officer during the campaign? Did it have anything to do with the convictions of Roger

Stone? Do the Steele dossier have anything to do with the 10 acts of obstruction that are laid out in the Mueller investigation? Do any of those things have anything to do with the dossier? I'm going to guess the answer is no. Putting the Steele dossier aside, the number of allegations and incidents that reveal troubling ties to Russia or criminality that stand alone, it's not even comparable. in the way the Steele dossier was handled by many people, many powerful people in media and in the government, was to overreach in such a way that everything you just described was obscured. Sure. We're almost a year out from Trump leaving office.

We're starting to get some historical clarity on what this was about. This story, the Trump presidency, felt one way. In the moment. In the moment. And the facts turn out to be different than those feelings. And the difference between those two is what history turns out to be. And we're wading through that.

And we're only a year out. In 10 years, we're going to have even greater clarity about all of this. minute-to-minute or second-to-second journalism like there was in the Trump era, there's not a lot of this retrospective sort of looking back, trying to sift through what was what, what was not, and what still stands. Well, Mike, it's been really good to have you back to do just that. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

This has been the most devastating tornado event in our state's history. A series of devastating tornadoes has killed dozens of people after ripping through six states on Friday night, including Kentucky, where Governor Andy Beshear called the destruction, quote, indescribable. The level of devastation is unlike anything I've ever seen. You see parts of industrial buildings, roofs or sidings in trees, if trees are lucky enough to stand. Huge metal poles bent in half, if not broken. Buildings that are no longer there, huge trucks that have been picked up and thrown. One of the tornadoes struck a candle factory in western Kentucky, where employees were working the night shift, injuring and killing scores of them. My ears start popping, and then the building, it was like we rocked back and forth, and then boom, everything just fell out on us.

And it was like we rocked back and forth, and then boom, everything just fell out on us. Meteorologists blamed the outbreak of tornadoes, in part, on unusually warm temperatures, which reached into the 70s and 80s on Friday in the states where the storm system struck. And European leaders are warning that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus could overtake the Delta variant to become the dominant strain in their countries within weeks. British health officials said that the variant would become dominant there by mid-December and predict a million infections from it by the end of the month. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon-Johnson, Sydney Harper, and Lindsay Garrison. It was edited by Lisa Tobin, engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music from Marion Lozano and Dan Powell.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilbaro. See you tomorrow.