The moment that a story starts hurting the Democrats the media loses interest in it. This explains the media’s ho-hum coverage of the confirmation that Hillary Clinton paid for the notorious “pee tape” dossier a former British spy compiled in an attempt to blow up Donald Trump’s candidacy.

Even the Washington Post seemed embarrassed by its own scoop, nonchalantly reporting the FBI’s role in this sick farce in a few bland paragraphs deep in the story. The Post’s commentators and editorialists quickly moved into action, dismissing the story as insignificant.

The same pundits who pretended to tremble at dark forces outside the country trying to “tip the election” now say it is perfectly normal and even commendable that Hillary paid a foreign source to smear her opponent.

Is it any wonder that the American people don’t trust the ruling class? This squalid net of political espionage, catching in it everyone from Clinton to Comey to CNN (which hyped the fake dossier), captures the corruption and bad judgment of the ruling class perfectly.

Hoist by their own Russian petard, liberals now seek to change the subject, though the more shameless ones are double-downing on the dossier. A few of them still insist that a report Bob Woodward called “garbage” contains devastating information. How do we know? Well, it hasn’t been “disproven,” they sputter absurdly, as if the burden of proof for a charge as outlandish as paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed Obama once slept on in Moscow should naturally fall on the person accused of it.

Another line of defense is to say that Christopher Steele, the British spy who cobbled the dossier together, is “trustworthy.” How do we know? Well, because the ruling class says so and the FBI paid him too. It was that circular reasoning and entitled hysteria — all the right people said that Steele was trustworthy, all the right people were saying that Trump colluded with the Russians, all the right people deemed Trump a menace to be stopped, and so on — that led the ruling class into this debacle.

That Hillary paid for this dirty dossier explodes once and for all her tale of victimhood and exposes her as the “abnormal” candidate in the race. While Trump barnstormed through the Rust Belt in conventional campaign mode, she was holed up in her headquarters, Nixon-like, waiting for a salacious dossier to arrive that she had paid a foreign agent to cook up.

One can only marvel at the depth of her dishonesty during the book tour, whining about the effect of true information on the race (via WikiLeaks and the release of the Podesta emails) while concealing her purchase of false information.

It is even clearer now why the mainstream media and the ruling class were so upset with BuzzFeed for releasing the dossier. Their anger had nothing to do with the “unverified” quality of it, as the phonies at CNN pretended. Obviously, they weren’t worried about Trump’s reputation. No, what upset them about the release of the dossier was that it made all of their heavy-breathing about it and their pompous references to the anxieties of “the intelligence community” over it look ludicrous and dishonest. All of the power and credibility of that whispering campaign vanished the moment people could see the shoddiness of the dossier.

The confirmation that Hillary paid for this sleaze brings Obamagate into sharper focus. It reinforces the chain of political espionage that wove through the White House, her campaign, and the media. The media, remember, had built up Steele as a singularly high-minded citizen of the world, working tirelessly and “without pay” at times (as a UK publication put it in a lionizing story) to alert Americans to Trump’s sinister ties. In reality, he was just a paid gun of the Hillary campaign, whipping together smears that his paymasters were eager to hear and spread.

It was no accident that many of the leaked stories about alleged Trump-Russia ties originated in the British press. Through Steele, the British were coming for Trump.

During the campaign, we were told that it was outrageous to suggest that Hillary’s friends in the Obama administration had outsourced spying to Brits. They had. Christopher Steele, on Hillary’s payroll, and John Brennan, auditioning to be her CIA director, joined forces to tip the election to her.

Steele, a “confirmed socialist” before he entered MI6, according to the British press, and Brennan, a supporter of the American Communist Party during the Cold War (by his own admission) before entering the CIA, had hoped to turn the special relationship sour for Trump. They failed, and now the bill for Hillary has finally come due.