The nation argued for five years over the infamous Steele dossier, the document on which the FBI relied to investigate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. It should have been called the Clinton dossier.
Special counsel John Durham this week obtained an indictment of Igor Danchenko, a Russian who provided information for the dossier. Danchenko is charged with lying to the FBI, but the bigger story of the indictment is Democrats’ central role in every aspect of the dossier and the FBI investigation.
Never forget the original claim. According to the FBI, Democrats and the media, Trump harbored secret and nefarious ties with Russia. We knew that because — as Mother Jones explained in a 2016 article that became the reigning storyline — Christopher Steele was a “credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive and important information to the US government.” He had come across “troubling” evidence of Trump collusion and brought it to US law enforcement.
It took a year for congressional investigators to reveal the dossier had in fact been commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It took two more years for Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to expose that Steele had relied on a Russian source who said he had never expected Steele to present his info as facts, since most of it was “hearsay.”