We Are Finally Uncovering the Center of the Scandal of the Steele Dossier…

by Roger Kimball at The Epoch Times

“Those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.”

I have always liked that mot from the English essayist William Hazlitt.

I’d wager Hillary Clinton and her minions, very much including the discredited spook Christopher Steele, like it too.

For how long did “the Steele dossier,” that rancid pile of anti-Trump lies, rumors, fantasies, and fabrications monopolize the public’s attention?

Remember, it took more than a year before we learned that the dossier was not a dossier, i.e., a collection of basically verified information about a subject, but merely opposition “research,” i.e., completely unsubstantiated stories, covertly paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Thousands of news stories were published about the Steele Dossier. Journalists picked over its every allegation, pretending to weigh each charge and track down every outlandish story.

The entire apparat of the FBI, aided by our so-called “intelligence” agencies wheeled into action.

Poor, doddering Robert Mueller, who claimed at a Congressional hearing not to be familiar with “Fusion GPS,” the group that siphoned money from the Clinton campaign, via the Perkins Coie law firm, to Steele, was the titular head of an investigation that lasted for well nigh two years.

Mueller’s extended inquiry, which came up with no evidence of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians, cost the American taxpayers some 40 million dollars.

It also destroyed the lives and careers of several Trump allies.

But speaking of lacking delicacy, just a few weeks ago Christopher Steele sat for a highly touted interview on Hulu with the Clinton apparatchik George Stephanopoulos.

That embarrassing performance was billed in advance as finally, at last, vindicating the dossier.

It did nothing of the kind.

Had Steele, had Stephanopoulos, had Hulu had any delicacy, they would not have engaged in that farce.

But they lacked delicacy, and so television audiences were treated to another overproduced sack of lies and misrepresentations.

Now the painstaking John Durham, of whose investigation into corruption surround the Russia Collusion investigation I had despaired, has begun to deliver the goods.

In September, in a 27-page document, Durham indicted Michael Sussmann, a Clinton confident and lawyer for Perkins Coie, for lying to the FBI.

At the time, people commented on the length and detail of the indictment, speculating that it was merely “the tip of the iceberg” in Durham’s investigation.

Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian who provided Steele with most of the dirt he complied in his dossier, marks a whole new chapter in the Trump-Russia phantasmagoria.

Like many journalists, I have written scores of articles on the long-running anti-Trump entertainment.

Several times, I compared it to an onion, since no sooner had we peeled back one layer to expose new actors than another layer would be peeled back to expose yet newer characters hitherto unknown to the public.

Remember when we first learned about the FBI love birds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page? Remember when Joseph Mifsud’s name first surfaced? Or Stefan Halper’s?

For a nano-second…