For weeks after the election, rumors swirled in Washington about the existence of an intelligence dossier that contained a series of explosive, salacious, and partially unsubstantiated claims about president-elect Donald Trump, including allegations that the Russian government had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” him for years. Ten days before Trump’s inauguration, BuzzFeed News published the document, compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, raising questions about the veracity of its wilder claims, as well as speculation about who had funded Steele’s opposition research, and why.

As David Corn, who first reported on the dossier, wrote for Mother Jones in October 2016, the project originally began as opposition research by a U.S. firm (later identified as Fusion GPS) financed by a Republican. Steele (then identified only as a “former Western intelligence officer”) took over the project after its financing switched to a Democrat. As he began to look closer at Trump’s businesses and connections to the Russian government, he said, he grew increasingly alarmed, which eventually led him to bring his findings to the F.B.I. Corn did not name either the Republican or Democratic client.

On Tuesday night, The Washington Post put at least one of those questions to rest, reporting that it was, in fact, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that had bankrolled the research effort. Republicans immediately seized on the revelation to cast doubt on the validity of the ongoing Justice Department probe into whether the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election—an investigation that was fueled, at least in part, by Steele’s reporting.

When Fusion GPS lost funding from its Republican client, the contract for the opposition research project was picked up in April 2016 by Marc Elias, an attorney representing the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C., the Post reports. Through Elias’s law firm, Perkins Coie, the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. continued to fund Steele’s research through the end of October.

On many levels, the Post story merely confirms earlier reports about Steele’s backers. The same day that BuzzFeed published the dossier in its entirety, CNN confirmed much of Corn’s earlier reporting. “The memos originated as opposition research, first commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans, and later by Democrats,” Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein wrote. (As Howard Blum recently reported for Vanity Fair, the funding for the research originally came from a “Never Trump” Republican but not specifically from the war chest of one of Trump’s rivals in the G.O.P. primary, according to a friend of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.)

The involvement of Clinton and the D.N.C. in funding the Steele dossier is not surprising, but it does add fuel to the partisan fire. “I have to say, the whole Russian thing is what it's turned out to be,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday morning. “This was the Democrats coming up with an excuse for losing an election.” Conservative pundits and commentators celebrated on Twitter, seeing in the Post story validation of their arguments that the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia were overblown, if not fabricated.

Democrats tied to Steele’s research haven’t done themselves any favors by obfuscating their involvement. It is unclear, for instance, why the D.N.C. and the Clinton campaign didn’t cop to hiring Fusion GPS—particularly after three employees at the firm threatened to plead the Fifth in response to subpoenas to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Monday. Ken Vogel of The New York Times went as far to suggest on Twitter that Elias had denied his involvement in the funding of the dossier. “When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying, ‘You (or your sources) are wrong,’ ” he wrote on Twitter. (In a statement to the Times, Anita Dunn, a veteran Democratic operative working with Perkins Coie, said Elias “was not at liberty to confirm Perkins Coie as the client at that point,” and “he didn’t have and hadn’t seen the full document, nor was he involved in pitching it to reporters.”) Maggie Haberman, also of the Times, similarly tweeted, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”