Echoes of 2016 as left-wing newspaper trots out a discredited MAGA foe.

Perhaps nobody should be surprised that, just weeks before the 2024 presidential election, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele has once again shuffled onto the media stage. The author of the infamous Trump dossier, also known as the Steele dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and shopped around to the media, recently spoke to the most prominent newspaper in Washington, DC. Steele discussed his soon-to-be-published anti-Trump book and his insistence that the salacious allegations he cobbled together against former President Donald Trump were probably, possibly, at least partially true – despite no verifiable evidence to back them up. Steele also claimed that there is likely a lot of compromising information about Trump still out there, possibly in the hands of Russians.

It was bad enough that the left-wing media took this man seriously the last time around without doing any investigative journalism to establish the truth – or lack thereof – in his allegations. Then again, Steele admitted back in 2016 that he was “desperate” to prevent Trump from becoming president, and so was the political left in America. The last thing Trump-hating journalists wanted to do was risk finding evidence that would cast doubt upon some unsavory rumors and stories about the candidate they despised.

Most outlets declined to publish excerpts from the Trump dossier, but they still reported on it again and again. In a cowardly way, they were telling the American public, we don’t know for certain if any of this is true, but we are going to tell you about it anyway because Orange Man Bad.

Just Can’t Let the Trump Dossier Go

The newspaper in question has apparently not learned its lesson. That it is once again trotting out the author of the Trump dossier smacks of desperation – another attempt, perhaps, to sow the seeds of debunked allegations that the Trump campaign conspired with Russians to steal the 2016 election. After all, if Trump wins in November, it is almost certain that at least a few prominent Democrats and their media stenographers will claim, once more, that the 47th president’s victory is illegitimate because Moscow aided him.

In his new book, Steele defends the Trump dossier, saying that “original intelligence was obtained from credible sources” to compile the collection. After a years-long investigation, the FBI and then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded otherwise. In truth, the memos that made up the dossier were compiled from media stories and gossip obtained by Steele through various third parties. The irony of it all was that much of this gossip originated in Moscow. Trump’s political opponents are forever claiming the Russians are enemies who cannot be trusted – yet they were willing to trust, without question, the anti-Trump opposition research that came straight from Russia.

Steele’s interviewer writes that the former MI-6 official says about his book, “[H]e has weighed the risks – including the risk of harm to Trump – and concluded that it’s in the public interest to publish, even ‘if the allegations I reference in the work are untrue.’”

The very people who constantly claim that spreading “disinformation” is dangerous and a threat to democracy have no qualms about doing so if it could possibly hurt Trump.

To this day, Steele believes the Russians have compromising intelligence on the Republican presidential nominee, including a much-talked-about sex tape. Strange that they never leaked out any of this intelligence to the US media during the four years that Trump was in the White House, even though he did nothing to accommodate Moscow’s ambitions. In fact, quite the opposite.

One could speculate that Steele believes Trump will emerge victorious in November and return to the White House. The timing of his book release and his sit-down with one of the most prominent national US newspapers suggests as much. If Trump loses, who’s going to want to read this book? If he becomes the 47th president, however, every left-wing journalist and political operative in the country will buy it, hoping they can scour its pages for some juicy anti-Trump articles. Perhaps one or two of them will even be hoping they can produce a kind of Trump dossier redux.