Trump, Gorbachev and the Secrets of the 2016 Election

These offers proved fraudulent and delusional (as I expected) but the mystique of “documents” has been a red flag for me ever since. I bring it up because the same meretricious mystique of documents points to a truth today nobody wants to admit: In both its Clinton email and Trump collusion investigations in 2016-17, the FBI knowingly relied on false and easily faked information—which it called “intelligence”—to justify its actions.

Let this sink in. The FBI never would have behaved as it did if it didn’t have written documents to hide behind, however bogus.

Events show the FBI knew the Steele dossier was fraudulent even as it promoted it as valid evidence to a U.S. surveillance court. Unknown to most Americans, the FBI also exploited an equally fraudulent document in the Hillary Clinton email case.

This part of the story is covered in the so-called classified appendix of the Justice Department inspector general’s reports into the FBI’s doings, the only part that remains withheld from the American public. If there’s truth to repeated reporting that Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago stash contained papers related to FBI actions in 2016, the ex-president might yet perform a service if his latest scandal helps bring the withheld facts to light.

We know from official sources only that the document in question was regarded as “objectively false” by Mr. Comey’s FBI colleagues. From press leaks, it contained Steele-like, fanciful, invented stories about skulduggery by named Democrats as well as Mr. Comey in the newsy Hillary Clinton email investigation.

The back story of the Steele dossier is known to the public—its funding by the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party, its assembly by a former British spy who passed off his mostly U.S.-based kibitzers as highly placed Russians.

Known about the Clinton-related document is only that it was reportedly passed along by Dutch intelligence and appears to have had no real validity. The most interesting question has gone all but unasked and unanswered since it was raised publicly in mid-2017 by Clinton backer and former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe: Who made up the false stories about the Clinton email investigation and why? But nonetheless Mr. Comey seized upon this Steele-like flotsam to act as he apparently wished to act in the Clinton case just as he later would in the Trump case using the Steele dossier.

There’s a parallel in the long-ago Gorbachev episode. While I was still typing up my conclusions, Gorbachev’s own flailing government began waving a similar and perhaps identical sheaf of faxes, claiming to have uncovered a Wall Street conspiracy to undermine the Soviet economy. The new “intelligence” was trotted out to justify a botched currency reform that had recently wiped out the savings of millions of Soviet citizens and drained the last dregs of the government’s credibility.

As historian

Peter Reddaway

would later write in a 1994 book (in which I’m delighted to discover I was quoted), these events “to a large extent predetermined the collapse of the USSR.” Six months later came the attempted hard-line coup that Gorbachev narrowly survived, followed in short order by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the rise and then fall of

Boris Yeltsin,

and eventually the rise of

Vladimir Putin.