Christopher Steele is the former British spy who compiled the “garbage” dossier on Trump-Russia ties, as Bob Woodward put it. That garbage dossier was cravenly and opaquely hyped by the American press until BuzzFeed released it, at which point the public could see its transparently ludicrous and uncorroborated contents. The release of the dossier exposed the vague, heavy-breathing allusions to it by CNN and the “intelligence community” as nothing more than an idiotic smear against Trump.

Steele had been zealously working to blow up Trump’s candidacy. Such was his anti-Trump fervor that he furnished his late-hit services to the Democrats for free. According to a story planted in the United Kingdom’s Independent, “at the end he was working without pay.”

Written in a style designed to flatter its source, the story said that a deeply worried Steele was shoveling his phony intelligence to John Brennan and British spies, as well as trying to prod FBI director James Comey into accelerating his investigation into Trump (the same investigation that the American press now pretends never happened):

Mr Steele also decided to pass on information to both British and American intelligence officials after concluding that such material should not just be in the hands of political opponents of Mr Trump, who had hired his services, but was a matter of national security for both countries. However, say security sources, Mr Steele became increasingly frustrated that the FBI was failing to take action on the intelligence from others as well as him. He came to believe there was a cover-up, that a cabal within the Bureau blocked a thorough inquiry into Mr Trump, focusing instead on the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. It is believed that a colleague of Mr Steele in Washington, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who runs the firm Fusion GPS, felt the same way and, at the end also continued with the Trump case without being paid… In October a frustrated and demoralised Mr Steele, while on a trip to New York, spoke about what he has discovered to David Corn, the Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones. There was a little flurry of interest that quickly died down.

Some of that flurry of interest came from Senator Harry Reid, who quickly penned an angry letter to Comey, demanding that he release material from his investigation into Trump-Russia ties — again, the same investigation that the Adam Schiffs and his friends in the press now claim is a figment of Trump’s imagination. At next week’s Congressional hearing, Republicans should read to Adam Schiff Harry Reid’s letter to Comey, especially this part that provides yet another confirmation Comey had begun an investigation into candidate Trump:

In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government…

Meanwhile, John Brennan and his circle of anti-Trump radicals were leaking to the British press. To the BBC’s Paul Wood, they leaked that Brennan was the instigator of Comey’s investigation into Trump. Brennan, according to Wood, had received a lead from an intelligence agency in a “Baltic country,” to the effect that the Kremlin was funneling money into the Trump campaign.

At the same time, Brennan was telling the press that he wanted to continue as CIA director under Hillary. Also vying for that job was former acting CIA director Mike Morrell, who wrote a staggeringly unprofessional Op-Ed in the New York Times slobbering over Hillary and endorsing her while calling Trump a pawn in the hands of Putin. (Naturally, the press never asked Brennan or anyone else at the CIA if they were recusing themselves from any investigation into Trump-Russia ties given their hyper-partisanship.)

What other British spies joined Brennan and Steele in their anti-Trump crusade? This is another question for Congress to address next week if it is serious about looking at the interference of foreign countries in our elections. Why is it that many of the leaked stories about an Obama administration investigation into Trump-Russia ties originated in the British press (BBC, the Guardian, anti-Trump British journalist and pol Louise Mensch)? Did the Obama administration outsource some of its spying on Trump to the Brits, who had access to the NSA database?

Yes, says Judge Andrew Napolitano, who claimed on Monday that “three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command” and made use of British intelligence with its “24-hour access” to the NSA’s database.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell at the State Department, is also persuaded that British intelligence was cooperating with John Brennan’s fishing expedition into candidate Trump. He said last Tuesday:

There are a number of events that have occurred in the last 96 hours or so that lead me to believe that maybe even the Democratic party, whatever element of it, approached John Brennan at the CIA, maybe even the former president of the United States. And John Brennan, not wanting his fingerprints to be on anything, went to his colleague in London GCHQ, MI6 and essentially said, “Give me anything you’ve got.” And he got something and he turned it over to the DNC or to someone like that. And what he got was GHCQ MI6’s tapes of conversations of the Trump administration perhaps, even the President himself. It’s really kind of strange, at least to me, they let the head of that organization go, fired him about the same time this was brewing up. So I’m not one to defend Trump, but in this case he might be right. It’s just that it wasn’t the FBI. Comey’s right, he wasn’t wire-tapping anybody, it was John Brennan, at the CIA. And you say, “What would be John Brennan’s motivation?” Well, clearly he wanted to remain Director of the CIA for Hillary Clinton when she was elected President of the United States, which he had every reason to believe, as did lots of us, that she would be.

It was, however, a multi-agency investigation into Trump-Russia ties, according to the leaks to Heat Street and the BBC. So it is entirely possible that both Comey and Brennan were investigating Trump simultaneously, with the FBI seeking warrants or using “traditional investigative techniques” (as Circa News put it) and Brennan using less traditional ones.

But at the very least we know that Christopher Steele and John Brennan, along with the British spies, journalists, and pols to whom they were leaking, were desperately trying to tip the election to Hillary.

What a perversely appropriate duo for this appalling fiasco: 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. The details of their mischief are still coming into focus, but when they do the “relationship” between the two countries will look less special than sour.