For months, there have been rumors of an investigation by someone into Donald Trump's

ties to and behavior in Russia.

It finally emerged in full on BuzzFeed, all 35 salacious, unverified pages of a dossier,

the work of a British intelligence sleuth.

I think it's a disgrace. That information that was false and fake and never happened

got released to the public. As far as BuzzFeed, which is a failing pile of garbage,

writing it, I think they're going to suffer the consequences. They already are.

This week in Slate, which also hosted the full dossier, writer Will Oremis, examined the sticky

ethics of BuzzFeed's decision. Will, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So, as you noted in your piece, intelligence agencies and media organizations have been

sitting on this dossier for a while. Mother Jones alluded to it, but didn't quote extensively

from it. The Guardian has written about it. We even had Tim Weiner on the show a few weeks ago

who's written books about the FBI and the CIA, a long-time Times reporter in the past.

And he hinted about it, but we didn't run it because we were uncomfortable with the suggestion that there might be some sexual compromise in Trump's past, and we didn't have any backup for that.

So, here we go.

Why did those organizations that had it, including the Times, not release it in full?

Well, I think a lot of people sat on this information for the same reason that you were uncomfortable with publishing it,

which is that in journalism,

you want to be extremely careful about running with information, especially explosive

allegations about someone when you don't know them to be true. No one has been able to verify

a lot of the key facts in this dossier, And just publishing unverified allegations, especially allegations

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