The news that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for former British spy Christopher Steele’s investigation into Donald Trumpshowed one thing: Rarely have two political candidates been so worthy of each other in terms of cynicism as Clinton and Trump. No wonder Russian President Vladimir Putin, another world-class cynic, dealt himself in.
Democrats were indignant when it turned out that Donald Trump Jr., the candidate’s son, was willing to accept damaging information about Clinton from a Russian source. No dirt was forthcoming in that case, though: Instead, a suburban Russian lawyer fighting for the interests of her client, sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act in the U.S., apparently came to see Trump campaign officials to lobby against the law, not to share intelligence.
In the Clinton case, Fusion GPS, the firm working on the Trump opposition research, paid Steele, a foreigner, with the campaign’s money. Britain, of course, is a U.S. ally; Russia is an adversary. But the information Steele produced came mainly from Russian sources. Unlike lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who once did legal work for the domestic intelligence arm of the Russian spy agency known as FSB in a minor property dispute, these sources were really well-connected, if Steele is to be believed. They included, according to the version of his dossier published by BuzzFeed, “a senior Russian foreign ministry figure,” “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin,” “a senior Russian financial official” and “a senior Kremlin official.”
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