Wikipedia’s Steele Dossier Page Is Laced With Lies
The article criticizes Wikipedia for allegedly presenting a biased and misleading account of the Steele Dossier, a document central to the Russia collusion controversy involving President Trump.It highlights that Wikipedia’s page falsely claims the dossier did not influence the 2017 intelligence community assessment (ICA) or trigger the Russia examination, despite declassified documents and expert reports proving or else. The piece points out that former CIA Director John Brennan included the dossier in the ICA over experts’ objections, despite its questionable credibility. Wikipedia’s editing process for the Steele Dossier page is under “semi-protection,” limiting who can make changes and raising concerns about restricted clarity. The article also discusses wider issues of Wikipedia’s susceptibility to manipulation, citing examples such as paid edits to Hunter Biden’s page, and stresses Wikipedia’s meaningful influence as a top source for search engines and AI training data. Ultimately,it argues that Wikipedia’s portrayal of key political events can be distorted due to editorial controls and external influences.
Wikipedia has long established itself as a website controlled by a coalition of partisan hacks. The latest example of the online encyclopedia’s attempt to literally rewrite the narrative appears on its article titled “Steele Dossier.”
Five paragraphs into Wikipedia’s detailed description of the document that fueled the Russia collusion hoax, the article claims that British spy Christopher Steele’s manufactured evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow “did not play any role in the January 6, 2017 intelligence community assessment of the Russian actions in the 2016 election.”
The article even went so far as to deny that the Steele Dossier was the “trigger for the opening of the Russia investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.”
These were verifiably false claims years ago. A new batch of Russiagate documents recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard further confirmed that the debunked Steele Dossier not only made the ICA cut, but played a role in the plot to take down President Donald Trump.
Wikipedia’s entry on the bogus Steele dossier is still lying about its inclusion in the ICA.
Despite the fact that we have direct evidence that Steele dossier material was included and cited in the main body of the 2016 ICA, the Wiki entry falsely claims the dossier “did not… pic.twitter.com/7Uy9Y7kl6N
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 30, 2025
In fact, former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan included the dossier in the 2017 ICA despite intelligence experts’ warnings that it “failed to meet basic tradecraft standards.”
The 2020 House Permanent Select Committee report focused on that ICA additionally noted that the dossier “would normally not have passed first-line supervisor review at CIA, FBI or other IC agencies.” Yet, Brennan demanded it be kept in because, even when “confronted with the dossier’s many flaws,” he said, “but doesn’t it ring true?”
As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway accurately noted, the ICA’s “key judgment” was that “Russia had interfered in the election specifically because Putin and the Russian government ‘aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.’”
Wikipedia’s entire model is built around a peer-review process that allows room for corrections by “anyone with Internet access.” Edits to the Steele Dossier page, however, are limited by the website under its “semi-protection” lock.
Edits to articles under lock are limited to a specific group of Wikipedia users.
“Semi-protection should not be used as a preemptive measure against vandalism that has not yet occurred or to privilege registered users over unregistered users in (valid) content disputes,” Wikipedia’s rules state.
Yet, the Steele Dossier has been under semi-protection for years.
Wikipedia is often one of the first results someone using a search engine like Google, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri will encounter. Additionally, Wikipedia is used to train artificial intelligence models like Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT.
“To date, every LLM is trained on Wikipedia content, and it is almost always the largest source of training data in their data sets,” the Wikimedia Foundation brags.
The information represented by Wikipedia, however, can often be a twisted retelling of an important incident.
Some of Hunter Biden’s emails uncovered in 2023 suggested that the information displayed on Wikipedia pages can be bought. The son of former President Joe Biden allegedly paid thousands of dollars to a public relations firm to scrub his Wikipedia page of several unflattering details about his personal life and overseas business affairs.
As I reported at the time, Wikipedia, which has an effectively unenforceable paid edit disclosure policy, does little to stop paid propagandists and outside influences from altering its articles to achieve their political aims.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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