MARC THIESSEN: The Durham report is a damning indictment of the FBI — and the media.

Igor Danchenko, who was responsible for 80 percent of the information in the dossier, had a “long history with Russian intelligence officers,” Durham reports. While working at the Brookings Institution, he asked a colleague he thought was about to join the Obama administration whether he would “be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.” The colleague reported it to the FBI, which launched a full investigation after discovering that Danchenko “had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects” and “known Russian intelligence officers.” That investigation was left unresolved because the FBI incorrectly believed Danchenko had returned to Russia.

The FBI never “attempted to resolve the prior Danchenko espionage matter” before hiring him as a paid informant in the Trump investigation, Durham writes. Indeed, the Trump investigators brushed off concerns raised by officials vetting Danchenko that he was connected to Russian intelligence and falsely claimed that there was no “derogatory” information about him and that he “had not been a prior subject of an FBI investigation.” They gave him a letter of immunity, paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars and kept that information from the FISA court. It was possible, Durham writes, that “the intelligence Danchenko was providing … was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation.” (Durham attempted to prosecute Danchenko for lying to investigators about his sources, but Danchenko was found not guilty.)

In other words, the FBI knowingly relied on a source who had been under investigation as a possible Russian spy to investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. You can’t make it up.

Think of what that means: It was the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that funded the Steele dossier, which relied on a Russian with suspected ties to Russian intelligence. The FBI then included the dossier as part of the materials it used to investigate Trump, paralyzing our country, undermining a newly elected president for two years while costing tens of millions of dollars — all over what ended up being a conspiracy theory.

You might think journalists would want to get to the bottom of how they were duped so that they could repair the reputational damage to themselves and their industry. Apparently not.

Not surprisingly, David Frum is BenSmithing the whole thing:

Which isn’t surprising; as Charles Cooke wrote yesterday in a post titled, “How Can Anybody Take Them Seriously?”, “Frum was insisting emphatically on TV and in the Atlantic that the theory ‘wasn’t a hoax’ in December of 2021 — ten months after Joe Biden had taken office.”

As Steve noted earlier today about Adam Schiff, “Just because a narrative is completely discredited doesn’t mean it isn’t still useful to those who don’t mind lying and those who enjoy being lied to.”