If the only damage done by the Steele dossier had been to inject disinformation into American political discourse, there would only be a medium-level scandal. But Comey and the FBI took the dossier seriously, despite never verifying it. Comey himself, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, personally lobbied — over the objections of CIA analysts — to include allegations from the dossier in a US intelligence assessment of Russia’s influence over the 2016 election. And when Comey briefed congressional leaders and the Justice Department in March 2017, we know from recently declassified FBI talking points, it was claimed that some of the dossier had already been corroborated and that it derived from a Russia-based source, when in fact Danchenko was a US resident at the time. By that point, the FBI had already conducted one interview with Danchenko — and he had begun to walk back some of the dossier’s claims. In other words, Comey presented the Steele dossier as credible information to Congress, just as lower-level agents were learning it was not to be trusted.
Savor the irony. Clinton has claimed that Comey’s October email surprise cast a cloud over her campaign that cost her the election. Meanwhile, Clinton’s agents fed the bureau enough thinly sourced dirt on Trump and Russia to cast doubts over his whole presidency. Comey only let the fog linger over Clinton until November 6, when he announced that a review of Weiner’s laptop revealed nothing incriminating. The miasma over Trump’s presidency lingered for two and a half years, until Mueller announced he had found no evidence of conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. To this day, most Democrats still don’t believe that and ignore how that conspiracy theory was first whispered by their party’s own lawyers and operatives.
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