What’s in a word?

Plenty, especially if you use the word “dossier.”

It is a French word from Latin that has a certain threatening mystery to it, along with a hint of criminality, even though originally it merely meant a bundle of documents.

You can almost hear Police Captain Louse Renault (Claude Rains) in the classic movie “Casablanca” say to Rick Banes (Humphrey Bogart), “We have a dossier on you.”

The dossier we have in mind is the salacious and phony “Trump Dossier” that was designed to ruin Donald Trump by connecting him to the Kremlin.

That 35-page document, which was financed by Hillary Clinton, her campaign and the Democrat National Committee, is so over the top that it is hard to believe that anybody or any institution, including the FBI and the media, could take it seriously.

But they did, seriously enough that U.S. Sen. John McCain sought out a copy and then turned it over to the FBI. Former FBI Director James Comey brought it to the attention of President Barack Obama as well as to Trump — and who knows who else.

But now that it was revealed that Clinton and the DNC paid Fusion GPS $12 million in campaign funds to finance the dossier, the same groups that promoted it when it was damaging to Trump are now downplaying it because it is damaging to Clinton.

It may even be linked to Obama. It was reported that Obama for America, a political group tied to the former president, paid close to $1 million to the same law firm used by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to funnel money to Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS is an opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, to compile a dossier on Trump.

The document, composed by Steele, reads like something a couple of reporters concocted in the back of a cab running late for a flight at the airport. This document is so off the wall that you wonder if Hillary Clinton and the DNC were taken for a ride or simply hoodwinked.

This “dossier” has all the markings of a hoax wrapped up in a hatbox.

But because the document was dressed up by being called a dossier — which is not an everyday word in the U.S. — some people took it more seriously than they would had it simply been called a report or a profile.

Also, Fusion GPS could charge much more for a document called a dossier than it could for one called a folder or a study.

In addition, Fusion GPS, which is run by a couple of former reporters, knew that the word dossier would resonant with the media. Television news broadcasters loved saying the word — “daw-see-yer’.

If you believe the report, Donald Trump, the sophisticated New York billionaire, went on trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg as a businessman not to seek business, but to seek prostitutes.

Even if he were in to it — which there is no evidence that he ever was, or needed to be — a man like Trump going from Manhattan to Moscow to seek out hookers is simply beyond belief.

But the document has Trump not only seeking Russian hookers, but covering up the search.

The document, now suddenly taken down by BuzzFeed, which originally published it, reads, “Two knowledgeable St. Petersburg sources claim Republican candidate Trump has paid prostitutes and enjoyed sexual activities there, but every witness silenced and evidence hard to obtain. Witnesses silenced i.e. bribed or coerced to disappear.”

Not only that, the “dossier” alleges that Trump participated in weird and kinky sexual escapades in Russia, escapades that would make Harvey Weinstein look almost normal.

“According to Source D,” the document says, “where s/he had been present, Trump’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform ‘a golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.”

Who in their right mind would believe that?

Or who would believe that, as the “dossier” says, that Trump never went to Russia to seek business opportunities, but to seek hookers?

On one trip to St. Petersburg, the document says, Trump sought “extensive sexual services there from prostitutes rather than business success.”

Hillary Clinton paid $12 million for this “dossier.”

You can’t blame Fusion GPS or Steele. They gave the customer what she wanted, rubbish. And Hillary not only got conned, she got caught.

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