FILE – In this March, 1974 file photo, Hiroo Onoda, wearing his 30-year-old imperial army uniform, cap and sword, walks down a slope as he heads for a helicopter landing site on Lubang Island for a flight to Manila when he comes out of hiding in the jungle on the island, Philippines. Onoda, the last Japanese imperial soldier to emerge from hiding and surrender after World War II, has died. He was 91. Onoda died Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014 at a Tokyo hospital. (AP Photo)

The release of the report by the Department of Justice IG, Michael Horowitz, has left the left adrift. It has been conclusively proven that not only was Devin Nunes 100% accurate in his January 2018 memo, he was overly kind to the FBI. The IG report shows that the Steele dossier was central to the Russia probe. It shows there was literally no other evidence intimating a connection between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. And it shows the FBI was well aware that anything in the Steele dossier that had not appeared in newspapers was utterly false.

The problem with this is that the left and NeverTrump — to the extent that there is even any difference between the DNC, The Bulwark, The Dispatch, and most of the Washington Examiner these days — invested heavily in the Steele dossier, they gave a childlike trust to the assurances of FBI shills on CNN that the FISA process was without flaw, and they got played. As far as I can tell, just about none of these people have retracted and done a mea culpa, and quite a few have claimed that their reporting has been vindicated. The saddest case, though, is some former CIA types who now are playing the role of Japanese soldiers who know the war is over but feel duty bound to continue on doing what they do: lie to the American public.

First up is former CIA employee Steven Hall who, at least on Twitter, ran CIA’s “Russia House” as chief of Russia operations and who now makes extra income slinging bullsh** on CNN. When The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway tweeted this:

It's not just that these "journalists" were blatantly lying. It's how smug they are while lying and how much they mock those who pushed back on their false and republic-threatening propaganda. STUNNING to watch. There must be accountability. https://t.co/ff37r8yc3F

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) December 13, 2019

responded with a rather textbook example of the Dunning Kruger Effect

Which part of the Steele dossier is false? https://t.co/t3vfWoskJy

— Steven L. Hall (@StevenLHall1) December 14, 2019

The arrogance of this comment FIVE days after the IG report was released was stunning…and the responses were epic:

Per the IG report, the CIA dismissed the Steele dossier as “internet rumor.”

That was in 2016. https://t.co/aXirRZDOwY

— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) December 14, 2019

5) Page did not author or suggest the changes to the Republican platform
6) Cohen did not travel to Prague
7) The pee tape was just BS some people said while in a bar drinking beers
Etc etc etc
For your edificationhttps://t.co/tBUeX6FhKQhttps://t.co/SwDzQOLuRj
Read both

— Chris Manning (@Manning4USCong) December 14, 2019

The idea that much of the information was reliable or confirmed by Steele's sub-sources was false. pic.twitter.com/yYvOZReUVd

— Myrddraal (@HandOfTheDark) December 14, 2019

Steele also lied or "misremembered" in an interview about his sources. His sources contradicted him. pic.twitter.com/OuQpYCLvtE

— Myrddraal (@HandOfTheDark) December 14, 2019

Mostly just the part with letters, numbers, symbols, punctuation, and spaces.

— Jeffrey Kofsky (@JeffreyKofsky) December 14, 2019

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1205895261131812866

Another CIA guy who claims he was Chief of Station in Moscow, spent years flogging the Steele Dossier and the whole Russia Hoax, and who now is sucking at the CNN teat is John Sipher. When Sean Davis called him out on his relentless pimping of a pack of lies…

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1205614491423199234

…he responded by going to the Dunning-Kruger standby, pompously digging in:

No need to dig thru all my tweets. Here is the article I wrote on it in 2017. Enjoy.https://t.co/0xuNtBW4Yg

— John Sipher (@john_sipher) December 14, 2019

The problem is that Sipher seems to think his resume and snotty attitude will scare people off. Most of it is written with Sipher wearing his dork-professor hat and lecturing us schlubs on how things are really done. If you take the time to read the article you wind stuff like:

We learned that when Carter Page traveled to Moscow in July 2016, he met with close Putin ally and Chairman of the Russian state oil company, Igor Sechin. A later Steele report also claimed that he met with Parliamentary Secretary Igor Divyekin while in Moscow. Renowned investigative journalist Michael Isikoff reported in September 2016 that U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that Page met with both Sechin and Divyekin during his July trip to Russia. What’s more, the Justice Department obtained a wiretap in summer 2016 on Page after satisfying a court that there was sufficient evidence to show Page was operating as a Russian agent.

Of course, none of this was true and Carter Page was actually reporting to another US intelligence agency at the time. And this:

I think it is fair to say that the report is not “garbage” as several commentators claimed. The Orbis sources certainly got some things right – details that they could not have known prior. Steele and his company appear serious and credible. Of course, the failure of the Trump team to report details that later leaked out and fit the narrative may make the Steele allegations appear more prescient than they otherwise might. At the same time, the hesitancy to be honest about contacts with Russia is consistent with allegations of a conspiracy.

He also falsely claims that Steele was impossibly prescient in claiming the Russians had hacked the DNC because the “official” assessment wasn’t published until after the election. In fact, it was widely assumed the Russians were in some way involved in the hack from June 2016 when the emails were leaked because the source, Guccifer 2.0, is widely assumed to be controlled by Russia. There was nothing here more prescient than Steele reading the newspapers.

By the time Sipher had written this article, the CIA, Sipher’s own agency, credited the Steele Dossier as an “internet rumor.” So either Sipher has zero contacts inside the CIA…which calls into question why he’s often called upon to write and opine about what the CIA is doing, or he’s just another malicious liar on the CNN payroll.

It's worth restating: The fmr CIA staton chief in Moscow is a gullible buffoon, according to the MOST FAVORABLE interpretation of his conduct. How many more John Sipher-like ppl are out there in the field now? For the sake of the USA, I hope # is limited.https://t.co/O9PajtHVM1

— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) December 13, 2019

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1205615042802130946

So, if you want to understand how a Third World kleptocracy with the GDP of New York State ran circles around the United States during the Obama administration, you now have your answer. The CIA employs highly partisan idiots, lots of them, and apparently has an extraordinarily effective affirmative action program for them to ensure they get promoted to positions of responsibility.

this fuckwit leading our operations in Russia certainly fills in a lot of gaps in why a lot of bad stuff happened.

— streiff (@streiffredstate) December 14, 2019