On Jan. 10, 2017, a news-and-entertainment website called BuzzFeed published the text of the Steele dossier. Simultaneously, most of the U.S. media began running stories based on anonymous intelligence sources suggesting the possibility of a link during the previous year’s election between U.S. President-elect Trump and Vladimir Putin. This came to be known as “the Russian collusion narrative.” The Steele dossier was the narrative’s Rosetta Stone, the reason to believe all the other stories might be true.

On page 9 of the Steele dossier—if you’ve never read it, now’s the time—the following statement appears:

“Speaking separately, also in July 2016, an official close to Presidential Administration Head, S. IVANOV, confided in a compatriot that a senior colleague in the Internal Political Department of the PA, DIVYEKIN (nfd) also had met secretly with PAGE on his recent visit. Their agenda had included DIVEYKIN raising a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed . . .”

All 35 pages of the Steele dossier read that way. It is almost perfectly analogous to the children’s party game of telephone, when an adult whispers something into a 5-year-old’s ear and it is passed on silently to seven other children, who all laugh at the discrepancy between what went in and what came out.

But the American people aren’t laughing. A children’s telephone game of whispered half-facts played by elites at the highest level of America’s institutions is why the U.S. political system has been in hell from 2017 until the release of the Mueller report.