The Steele dossier has come to define one of the most infamous political dirty tricks in American history. Though sold to the press as high-grade intelligence from a crack British spy, the dossier was nothing more than opposition research raw, uncorroborated, and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the law firm Perkins Coie. From the start, it was engineered not to inform the public but to wound a political opponent. Former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, the report’s author, relied heavily on a single, unidentified “primary subsource,” and the FBI would later fail to corroborate his claims before deploying them as the centerpiece of surveillance warrants against Trump campaign affiliates.
Crucially, President Obama was briefed on the origins of this scheme while it was still in motion. On July 28, 2016, CIA Director John Brennan laid out for Obama an intelligence report in which one of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy advisors had allegedly “approved a proposal … to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service”. Present in the Oval Office for that briefing were Vice President Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. In other words, the top national-security principals of the Obama administration knew months before the election that the Clinton camp was generating what Brennan’s own notes described as a plan to frame Trump with Russia.
Manufacturing “Intelligence” at Obama’s Direction
Despite knowing that the claims were politically manufactured, Obama did not shun the Clinton-bought dirt. Instead, on December 9, 2016 after Trump had already won the presidency Obama convened a White House meeting of the National Security Council principals. The group included Clapper, Brennan, national security adviser Susan Rice, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Immediately following the meeting, Clapper’s executive assistant sent an email to intelligence community leaders tasking them with creating a new intelligence-community assessment (ICA) “per the President’s request” that would detail the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election”.
The directive represented a sharp U‑turn. In the run‑up to the election, the intelligence community had consistently assessed that Russia aimed to sow discord but was “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means”. After Obama’s request, those earlier assessments were discarded. On January 6, 2017, a new ICA materialized an assessment that, as later declassified documents have shown, was built on the very claims the Obama team knew to be unverified and politically sourced. DNI Tulsi Gabbard later called the document “politicized intelligence” used as the basis for “the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US‑Russia tensions, and more”.
The Cast of Characters
Each senior official played a distinct role.
- John Brennan:
As CIA Director, Brennan was the conduit between the Clinton campaign’s scheme and the White House. He personally briefed Obama on the Clinton‑approved plan and, after the election, led the CIA’s contribution to the new ICA. Brennan later lied to Congress when he “denied using this dossier in the intelligence assessment that President Obama ordered”. Gabbard states that Brennan directed senior CIA officials to use the dossier anyway, knowing it was discredited.
- James Clapper:
The Director of National Intelligence formally tasked the intelligence community with producing the new assessment “per the President’s request.” Clapper was present at the pivotal July 28, 2016 briefing and walked the White House talking points out to the media.
- Susan Rice:
As National Security Advisor, Rice was in the room for the December 9 meeting that launched the new ICA and also attended a highly controversial Oval Office meeting on January 5, 2017, at which the Steele dossier and the targeting of General Michael Flynn were discussed. She later memorialized the meeting with a self‑sent email that claimed Obama stressed handling the matter “by the book,” a transparent attempt to create a paper defense.
- Joe Biden:
Then‑vice president Biden was in the Oval Office when Brennan briefed Obama on Clinton’s “vilify Trump” plan. His presence confirms that the entire top rung of the Obama administration was aware of the operation.
None of these officials have faced meaningful accountability for their roles in spinning a discredited tale that would dominate American politics for the next four years.
The Mueller Investigation: A $30 Million Boomerang
The chain reaction set off by the Steele dossier led directly to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017. By the time Mueller’s office closed its doors two years later, the investigation had cost American taxpayers just under $32 million. During the course of the probe, those same taxpayers watched a parade of Trump associates many of whom were never charged with any crime related to Russia collusion have their lives upended.
Carter Page, the former Trump campaign foreign‑policy adviser, became the face of the investigation’s collateral damage. Placed under intense surveillance on the basis of the unverified dossier, Page received hundreds of death threats. He described his situation as a “life or death” nightmare and said, “I can’t walk out on the street because of the threats”. Another aide, Michael Caputo, recounted that anonymous callers vowed to burn his house down while his children were inside. High‑ranking figures such as General Michael Flynn didn’t fare any better. Trump himself summarized the human toll by stating that the FBI “destroyed his life” while Hillary Clinton “lied many times … and nothing happened to her”.
Nor were the costs merely financial and personal. The Russia probe cast a perpetual shadow over Trump’s entire first term. Attorney General William Barr later called the investigation an effort to “sabotage the presidency” that was started “without any basis”. For two years, the spectacle of unproven collusion allegations dominated headlines, paralyzed Washington, and gave Trump’s opponents a cudgel to delegitimize his electoral victory. Congressional Democrats latched onto the Russia narrative to fuel ceaseless investigations and, eventually, two impeachment proceedings. The political turmoil never allowed Trump’s first‑term agenda to proceed unmolested—a crisis manufactured by the very people charged with safeguarding the nation’s institutions.
The Politics of Derangement
The fever that gripped so much of Washington during this period earned its own diagnostic label: Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The term describes a psychological state in which critics media figures, politicians, and career bureaucrats abandon logic and proportion in their animosity toward Donald Trump. The Steele dossier, the ICA, the Mueller probe, and the endless leaks were not isolated events; they were symptoms of this syndrome. As former Fox News host Sean Hannity put it, “Obama and Clinton operatives fed Steele information to try to damage Trump … they were cooked up … and are completely unverified claptrap”.
Congressman Devin Nunes made it his mission to uncover “how far and wide the unverified Russia‑Trump dossier spread inside the U.S. government”. His investigation confirmed what conservatives had charged from the beginning: the FBI used the unverified dossier to obtain FISA warrants on Carter Page, failed to tell the court that the dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign, and then for a year spied on a cooperating member of the Trump campaign.
Conclusion: A Reckoning That Never Came
The full scale of the Obama‑era conspiracy is only now coming into view, two presidential terms later. The Steele dossier, the rigged intelligence assessment, the Mueller investigation, and the Trump Derangement Syndrome that sustained them were not a series of mistakes. They were a coordinated operation designed to strangle a presidency in its crib. The American people spent $30 million, lost faith in their intelligence agencies, and watched innocent citizens have their lives shattered, all to sustain a fiction that the principals themselves knew was false. The men and women who orchestrated this campaign have largely escaped legal consequence, but the historical record their deceptions have left behind will stand as a permanent indictment.
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