A former friend and advisor to President Bill Clinton characterizes Cody Shearer, the man allegedly behind the second anti-Donald Trump dossier, as one of the Clintons’ “go-to guys” for dirty tricks.

“I knew Sidney Blumenthal better than Cody,” Dick Morris tells The American Spectator. “Shearer was one of the operatives that Hillary always used. He and Sidney were kind of her go-to guys when dirty tricks and secret ops were called for. I never worked with him on any of them.

“He seemed like a very competent operative. I know that he was very wired to Bill Clinton through Strobe Talbott because his sister married him.”

Shearer figured into allegations in the late 1990s that he intimidated Bill Clinton sexual assault accuser Kathleen Willey. During the 1992 presidential election, Shearer peddled the dubious story of a convicted felon that he sold drugs to Vice President Dan Quayle. In 1989, Shearer pushed stories of drunken, inappropriate behavior by former U.S. Senator John Tower that helped derail the Texan’s nomination as secretary of defense.

Shearer’s résumé depicts precisely the type of operative ideal for digging up, or manufacturing, dirt on a Republican presidential candidate. But it’s precisely that type of résumé that figured to tarnish any information uncovered.

“The reason Hillary hired Fusion [GPS] is because she needed someone more credible than Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer to float these charges,” Morris alleges.

Just as the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee used intermediaries in financing the Steele dossier to keep its fingerprints off a document styled as intelligence and not opposition research, Shearer allegedly used the tactic of laundering to ensure that his information looked as though coming from a clean source rather than a political dirty trickster. Shearer allegedly provided the material to Sidney Blumenthal, who provided it to an official in the very State Department Mrs. Clinton once led, which, in turn, gave it to Christopher Steele, who handed it over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which presented it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant for electronic surveillance. Of course, saying the material came from a respected foreign intelligence officer or the State Department figured to impress more than admitting it came from the likes of Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal.

“My theory is that the first dossier was the second dossier,” Morris tells The American Spectator. “And the second dossier was the basis of Christopher Steele’s dossier. I do not think an MI6 agent would produce a memo that said that the guy was the go-between in Prague who had never been to Prague or would tell the prostitute story. I think that they came from Sidney and Shearer, because that’s the kind of thing they traffic in.”

The heavily redacted Lindsey Graham-Chuck Grassley memo cites a Steele report pointing out that Steele’s company “received this report from [redacted], U.S. State Department,” who received it from a “a friend of the Clintons, who passed it on to [redacted].” The Graham-Grassley memo notes, “It’s troubling enough that the Clinton campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele’s allegations raises additional concerns about his work.”

Did Shearer and Blumenthal produce the preponderance of the Steele “dossier”? Did an ally of the former secretary of state serve as a go-between handing off material from two shady political operatives to Steele? Did the Justice Department knowingly hide the dubious origins of the “dossier” from the FISA court?

Dick Morris firmly believes, “We will find all of this out.”