WASHINGTON D.C. IS ONE OF THE WEALTHIEST REGIONS IN AMERICA. IT DOES NOT PRODUCE CARS OR COMPUTERS OR SOFTWARE. IT PRODUCES PUBLIC POLICY, FOR A PRICE, ON BEHALF OF NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CLIENTS.
The Russia Lie is the story of how federal agencies, pundits, lobbyists, big money donors, and politicians, crossed party lines to defend themselves against an outsider, Donald J. Trump.
The sordid mess is difficult to describe in full detail, partly because in the expensive inquiry that followed, the important details were mostly hidden. Ridiculously, as can only happen in clique like Washington, the investigation merged into the political operation that caused the investigation.
Enough has been ferreted out, though, that a complete picture is finally emerging.
In 2016, a Democratic Party-funded political research firm, Fusion GPS, hired a London-based former British spy by the name of Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s connections with Russia. Steele produced a dossier that said Trump was working with Russian President Vladimir Putin to undermine candidate Hillary Clinton.
The dossier suggested Putin’s leverage on Trump was Kompromat: Russian intelligence had secretly recorded Trump hiring prostitutes in a Moscow hotel and paying them to pee on a bed in which President Obama had once slept.
This schlock was sold to the FBI which in turn opened an investigation into the Trump campaign and used the dossier to obtain warrants to go through sensitive emails. There were illegal leaks, and a false narrative was injected into the election (and its aftermath) that Trump was a Manchurian candidate.
That really happened.
In late July 2020, a redacted version of the FBI’s 2017 interview with the Steele dossier’s primary sub source (PSS) was released, and it was a game changer. The interviewing agents took pains to prop up the fan-fiction of Russian intrigue even as the PSS was pretty much laughing it off.
Completely missing from the interview, as always with the Russia hoax, was anything from...