(Media) Scandal of the Century

We’ve known for some time that the Steele Dossier was a Clinton-camp fabrication. Now we know why the allegations it contained were so lurid, clumsy and obviously fake.

A Wall Street Journal deep dive reveals that Steele’s central charges were based on idle gossip. Not from intel-community insiders, but from a trio of unremarkable hacks with zero insight into covert affairs.

The nonentities were: the primary “researcher” on the dossier, Igor Danchenko, his college buddy Olga Galkina and Dem stalwart and PR man Charles Dolan Jr.

Dolan was shocked that some of his chatter (like the tale of Donald Trump cavorting with hookers at a Moscow hotel) was published as fact. “I’m hoping that this is exposed as fake news,” he reportedly wrote hours after the dossier saw the light of day

Galkina came up with the totally bogus storylines about first Carter Page and then Michael Cohen serving as Donald Trump’s Kremlin cutouts.

Danchenko, now under indictment for lying to the FBI, passed on these “findings” orally to British ex-spy James Bond Christopher Steele (who’d forbidden him to write notes). Steele’s dossier then claimed it all came from high sources in Russia or ones close to Trump. (Steele doesn’t speak Russian, by the way.)

Top FBI officials used this as the basis for spying on the Trump campaign. This, when National Intelligence chief John Brennan briefed President Barack Obama in July 2016 of Clintonite plans to fake a TrumpRussia scandal. They didn’t warn the FBI?

And breathless scribes at The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed and elsewhere hyped this nonsense for months, all taken in (most, willfully) by the equivalent of catty junior-high whisper campaigns. Some still can’t let go.

Russiagate, in short, was the scandal of a generation — a media and government one.