Buying a dossier

What is that old saying about “even paranoids have real enemies.”

So it looks like there is real evidence that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee did help finance that now infamous dossier which purported to show Donald Trump’s Russia connections.

In fact, it appears the Clinton folks took over financing the project when a Republican donor — as yet unidentified — stopped funding the effort as the Republican primary season wound down, according to an account in the Washington Post.

The sequence of events, according to the Post, was something like this: Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and for the DNC, retained the Washington-based Fusion GPS to do the opposition research. Fusion in turn hired Christopher Steele, an ex-British intelligence agent, who tapped his sources in Russia for any dirt they might have on Trump that might make him vulnerable to Russian blackmail efforts or indicate any Russian efforts to help the Trump campaign.

The latter is now a matter of public record, long since confirmed by U.S. intelligence. But the rest of the dossier is a hodge-podge of conjecture and fairly salacious gossip. Bits and pieces of the dossier began to leak in the summer of 2016 — at which point the FBI launched its own investigation and Steele shared some of his findings with the agency.

The entire dossier was published in January by BuzzFeed News. But days earlier thenFBI director James Comey gave Trump a two-page summary of the dossier.

Now oppo-research is part of the political game — although extending the research field to the Kremlin is rather unprecedented. And, of course, the Clinton team handled this as it handled just about everything during the campaign.

“Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted after the Post story broke.

Kenneth Vogel, also a Times reporter, tweeted: “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’ ”

So that was the choice voters faced last November — the liar they knew vs. the liar they didn’t know. No wonder many opted for the latter.