Steele makes 'Russian stooge' claim all over again

Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed that the debunked dossier compiled by Christopher Steele and funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign was a primary source of false claims that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. Oddly enough, prior to the British election Thursday, Hillary Clinton was among the leading figures implying…

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Christopher Steele

Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed that the debunked dossier compiled by Christopher Steele and funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign was a primary source of false claims that Donald Trump was a Russian agent.

Oddly enough, prior to the British election Thursday, Hillary Clinton was among the leading figures implying that Conservative Party Prime Minister Boris Johnson also was a Russian agent.

At it turns out that a source of the claim is none other than Christopher Steele, points out Willis Krumholz in a column for The Federalist.

The campaign began last month when the left-wing Guardian newspaper cited a secret report that claimed Russians spent five years "cultivating leading Tories including Johnson."

The "dossier" from the U.K.'s intelligence and security committee is "based on analysis from Britain’s intelligence agencies, as well as third-party experts such as the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele," Krumholz wrote.

He noted that it was Hillary Clinton operatives who circulated the anti-Trump dossier at high levels within the State Department and FBI.

And prior to the British election, Clinton told the British press that it was "shameful" that the U.K. government wouldn't publish Steele's report.

Britain's intelligence outfit, the counterpart of the U.S. National Security Agency, had been raising red flags about Trump and Russia all the way back to 2015, when he was running for president.

"Were these concerns generated by Steele? And what were these concerns, beyond foreign policy differences and the fact that Donald Trump was bucking the D.C. foreign policy establishment?" Krumholz asked.

"And if Steele started to plant these concerns in late 2015, while Trump was rising in the GOP primaries and before the Democratic National Committee was allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence, what does this say about the origin of the Russia investigation?"

Krumholz wrote that the "consequence of crying 'Russia' is power being taken away from the people and consolidated in the hands of faceless bureaucrats in Washington, for whom wide bipartisan swaths of America neither voted, relate to, nor agree with."

"That's why the 'Russia' hysteria will certainly surface again in 2020 and beyond, partly because of the growing disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country," he said.

"If labeling someone a 'Russian asset' gets the national security apparatus behind you, gets your opponent spied on, and counts as an excuse for losing an election, why not keep doing it?"

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