Unlike, say, Rick Gates or George Papadopoulos, he certainly wasn't charged with "lying to the FBI" or anything, but double standards abound. All he got was "terminated."

Because he wasn't straight with them about his leaks to the press, FBI asset Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy and the author of the phony "Steele dossier" with its gross hooker-urination fabrications about Donald Trump, got fired.

Now it turns out that, George Smiley-style, he repeatedly got "brought out of retirement" by the FBI.

Seems the FBI couldn't get enough of this guy. Agents went back and bought more garbage from him, again and again, and Judicial Watch caught up with them. According Byron York:

Congressional investigators know that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the Trump dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign, kept supplying allegations to the FBI after the 2016 election – and even after he was terminated as a source by the bureau for giving confidential information to the media. Because he had broken his agreement with the FBI, bureau procedure did not allow agents to keep using Steele as a source. But they did so anyway – by devising a system in which Steele spoke regularly with Bruce Ohr, a top Obama Justice Department official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to search for dirt on Donald Trump in Russia. Ohr then passed on Steele's information to the FBI.

York reports that they did it twelve times, which suggests quite an addiction to Steele's "Get Trump" information, which was repeatedly bad. They "laundered" it through Bruce and Nelly Ohr, one of the famous sets of Trump-hating lovebirds who have been involved in this de facto Deep State coup attempt.

York notes that the bureau seemed to want to keep trying to find out whether the Steele dossier was true or not, even though the agents had already persuaded a FISA judge to issue surveillance warrants for it – which is rather backwards.

Remember: the FBI had already presented some of the dossier's allegations as evidence to the FISA court. After going out on a limb like that, the bureau wanted to know if the allegations were true or not, writing:

In a larger sense, the Ohr-Steele 302s could shed some light on how an effort – it certainly included Steele, but also others – to keep Trump from being elected morphed into an effort to keep Trump from being inaugurated and then morphed into an effort to remove Trump from office. A version of that effort is still going on, of course, even as some in Congress try to find out how it started.

What stands out to me is that they said they got rid of Steele for lying to them and then went right back to him, which must be some sort of perjury problem right there, given their congressional testimony. It's also suggests that the dossier was false as heck, because instead of at least trying to develop other sources to verify what they wanted to verify from the Steele dossier, they just kept going back to the same well because no one else out there had any confirming information. This makes sense, given that the dossier was fabricated.

What a sorry picture this paints of the persistence of Deep State in its Ahab-like quest to Get Trump. These Deep Staters aren't even embarrassed about it. Maybe some legal consequences will get their attention.