I’ve been saying for a while that the Trump/Steele Dossier is the Rosetta Stone to the “collusion” hysteria and related “fake news” with which we have been inundated since the 2016 election, all leading to the special counsel investigation engineered by former FBI Director James Comey to remove Trump from office. As I implied in “McCabe remembers to forget,” the dossier is rather obviously the key to the surveillance of the Trump campaign conducted by the Obama administration. Contrary to the New Critical stylings of the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, the dossier represents the “insurance policy” to which G-Man Peter Strzok referred in his text message to FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

In his weekly NRO column Andrew McCarthy turns directly to the question of the use to which the FBI put the dossier. Near the top of his column he cuts to the chase, as he puts it: “Because of their confidence in Steele, because they were predisposed to believe his scandalous claims about Donald Trump, they made grossly inadequate efforts to verify his claims. Contrary to what I hoped would be the case, I’ve come to believe Steele’s claims were used to obtain FISA surveillance authority for an investigation of Trump.”

Of the many commenters on the issues raised by the dossier, Andrew McCarthy is the one who knows what he is talking about. Attend to his review of of the case so far in “Was the Steele dossier the FBI’s ‘insurance policy’?” His column more than repays its length with understanding of the momentous questions at issue here.

Quotable quote: “[W]hile there is a dearth of evidence to date that the Trump campaign colluded in Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, there is abundant evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign — and to fuel a pre-election media narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Trump was scheming with Russia to lift sanctions if he were elected president.”