Ever since the infamous Christopher Steele dossier was revealed to the public in January 2017, Democrats have pinned their partisan hopes on that collection of salacious and unverified memos in the hope that it would lead to the downfall of President Donald Trump.
More than two years after the dossier was first exposed, however, Trump is still standing strong, the dossier has been all but entirely debunked, and anti-Trump Democrats are left looking more foolish than usual for wholeheartedly believing the now-obvious package of lies.
The infamous Steele dossier
The Epoch Times recently published a rough timeline of the rise and fall of the dossier in the public and noted how any remaining credibility left for those who compiled and perpetuated and pinned their hopes on the dossier was at long last shattered by Robert Mueller’s final report.
The anti-Trump dossier itself was put together during the run-up to the 2016 election by a former British spy named Christopher Steele at the behest of a liberal-leaning opposition research firm named Fusion GPS. That firm had itself been hired by a law firm working on behalf of then-candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.
The dubious dossier of unverified opposition research asserting speculative links between Trump and Russia was subsequently used by the FBI to open investigations and obtain at least one Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on then-candidate Trump’s campaign, as well as to fuel leaks to the media that were intended to be damaging to Trump.
Dossier underpinned anti-Trump investigations
When the bulk of that FISA warrant was declassified, it was confirmed to have been focused on a marginal Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page, a central figure in the dossier, who despite the numerous allegations of links to Russia, has never been charged with any actual crime.
The declassification of the FISA warrant also exposed how the top tier of the FBI utilized the dossier to obtain the warrant without first verifying or substantiating the questionable claims it made.
The warrant application based in large part on Steele’s dossier relied on mainstream media reporting to support the claims contained therein. However, those media reports were themselves based on Steele’s dossier, resulting in a decidedly uncredible brand of circular sourcing.
To top it all off, Steele himself admitted in legal filings with the British courts that not only was his dossier unverified but that it was specifically commissioned by Clinton and Democrats to be used to smear Trump in the event that Clinton lost the election.
Mueller report debunks dossier’s claims
It is unclear if Mueller was tasked with verifying or debunking the dossier’s claims as part of his two-year investigation into Russian interference and alleged “collusion” with Trump in the 2016 election, but in the end, that’s what his final report ended up doing to a significant extent.
The Epoch Times also noted that it cross-referenced no fewer than 103 specific claims from the dossier with the 400-plus-page report from Mueller, and found that the Mueller report left the Steele dossier almost entirely unsupported.
In the end, though the dossier put forward the explosive assertion that Trump had conspired and coordinated with Russia to win the 2016 election, the Mueller investigation found no real evidence to support those claims, and anybody who bought those incredibly dubious allegations from the dossier should be ashamed of themselves.