Let the clutching of pearls commence.

President Trump ruffled a lot of feathers with yesterday’s impeachment victory lap. The unfiltered speech covered all manner of topics, obviously including the impeachment farce itself, but also going back to Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller investigation. One of the things he touched on was the usage of the now famous Steele Dossier as a evidentiary standard within the aforementioned investigations. We know that, for example, that Carter Page warrants were deemed illegal and that they made heavy use of allegations from the dossier.

Here’s Trump on the matter via The Daily Caller.

Trump blasted the dossier as “fake” during a White House speech on Thursday.

“So we had a campaign, little did we know we were running against some very, very bad and evil people with fake dossiers with all of these horrible, dirty cops that took these dossiers and did bad things,” Trump said.

Christopher Steele and his outfit were not too happy that the President singled out and trashed their work.

Yesterday @realDonaldTrump made false claims about us. He wildly exaggerated our fees and, contrary to his claims we have never stated any of our reporting is "fake". We stand by the integrity of our research on Kremlin interference in the 2016 election and support for Trump. 1/3

— Orbis Business Intelligence (@OrbisBIOfficial) February 7, 2020

If they’ve never admitted that the dossier was full of fake and false allegations, then that’s not really a good thing. Orbis Business Intelligence is a dumpster fire group that’s probably done more to damage the United States than Russia has managed in the last several decades. They’ve driven divisions deeper than an any point since the 1960s and did it with a work product that was objectively trash.

Of course, they are still clinging to the idea that the dossier wasn’t actually garbage.

Or this from former senior FBI officer Chuck Rosenberg:https://t.co/uAb3PUX5ua

3/3

— Orbis Business Intelligence (@OrbisBIOfficial) February 7, 2020

It should be noted that both of the above sites are intel apologists who spent years insisting things that were proven false were actually still true. This goes for the Mueller investigation to the dossier itself. Lawfareblog is especially guilty, with it’s editors still to this day insisting the dossier is “mostly verified.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ironically, the second article they cite above as vindication actually had to be corrected because it contained a major falsehood.

In an early version of the article, Sipher falsely claimed that a Sept. 23, 2016 news article at Yahoo! News provided independent verification of Steele’s work. The Yahoo! piece, written by Michael Isikoff, said that U.S. law enforcement officials were investigating whether Carter Page met with Kremlin insiders Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin during a trip to Moscow in July 2016.

Sipher, a former CIA officer, asserted that the article bolstered the dossier’s credibility. But Sipher corrected the article after The Daily Caller notified Just Security that Isikoff’s article was based on information he obtained from Steele.

In other words, it was a circular back-slapping session where each party claimed the other verified their information. That was a common theme throughout the Russia investigation, especially involving allegations in the dossier itself.

Here’s more information on how badly the dossier whiffed.

In the dossier, Steele alleged that Page was a key player in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russian government. He also claimed that the Kremlin had cultivated Trump for years, and that the campaign was involved in and aware of the hack of Democrats’ emails released through WikiLeaks.

Steele’s Trump-related claims were all but debunked by the special counsel’s report and the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s surveillance of Page.

There was also no peeing hookers, no FBI consulate in Miami, and no massive conspiracy between Trump and Russia. The only things the dossier got right were 1) common knowledge or easily ascertainable and 2) ancillary matters that didn’t actually prove any grander conspiracy.

You want to know what really happened here? A bunch of “intel experts” who think they are God’s gift to national security got suckered by a Russian misinformation campaign and were used as a conduit to funnel a bunch of Putin invented crap into the U.S. political sphere. Instead of just admitting their error, they now defend themselves with righteous indignation, still pretending they are the smartest people in the room.

Steele should be prosecuted for lying to the FBI (something we know he did in relation to media contacts), not crying on Twitter about the President rightfully bashing his dossier.