ANALYSIS/OPINION:

“Facts really do matter.”

— Former FBI Director James B. Comey, April 26, 2018

President Trump is a stooge of Russia, a puppet of Vladimir Putin, we have been told from the beginning. He is a morally unhinged reprobate unworthy of the White House.

You didn’t just hear this from anonymous bots in the sewer of Twitter or from unwashed hippie protesters clogging traffic in the street.

We heard this from the most powerful perches of our government. It was all sourced directly to the highest offices of our Department of Justice and American intelligence services.

These people were the pristine sources, lustily quoted by the most famous and legitimate political reporters and pundits in the country.

The “Steele dossier,” they called it. I can remember when the first details of the dossier emerged and all the gullible doofuses in Washington snapped it up and whispered it around as gospel.

First in bars, then the green rooms of television studios. And then out in the open in public.

Sure, it was salacious. I mean, hookers urinating on a bed in Moscow?

But we are talking about Donald Trump! Do you really want a guy like that in the White House?

Of course, any remotely thoughtful or skeptical human — let alone a supposed “reporter” — would have balked at the whole sordid thing. And, you pray, so would any cop.

But no. All the experts took every line of it and ran with it like it came right from Moses himself.

Now there were some of us at the time who thought the whole thing was ridiculously stupid — not to mention highly doubtful.

But not the Washington experts. Not only was it entirely gospel, it was also vitally important.

So you, the innocent American citizenry, had to hear about it on an endless loop for going on four years now.

Now we learn — from the same official corridors that took it so seriously in the first place — that the whole thing was entirely made up. Some of it was even made up in an actual bar, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it.

How stupid do you have to be to fall for this kind of ridiculous nonsense? Unfortunately, it says about all you need to know about the most powerful law enforcement officials in our federal government. It also exposes how dumb, rotten and dishonest so much of the media in America has become.

At the same time we officially learn that the Steele dossier was completely made up, we also learn that the most powerful lawmen in the land under the previous administration used the dossier to obtain secret warrants against political opponents at the height of a presidential election.

The FBI’s applications for secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Trump campaign official Carter Page “relied entirely” on information from the Steele dossier, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz told Congress this week.

Among all the government officials and press jackals exposed this week as liars and gullible idiots, perhaps none stands out more than former FBI Director James B. Comey, himself.

In an interview in April 2018 on “Fox News Special Report,” anchor Bret Baier pressed Mr. Comey.

“You called the dossier ‘unverified, salacious.’ Why did you use that to get the FISA court to ask for surveillance for Carter Page? Not only use it, but you led with it. A bulk of that FISA application deals with that dossier. Why?”

“You know, that’s not my recollection, Bret. And I don’t know that the FISA application’s been released,” Mr. Comey replied. “My recollection was it was part of a broader mosaic of facts that were laid before the FISA judge to obtain a FISA warrant.”

Mr. Baier appeared genuinely surprised.

“There was a lot more than the dossier in the FISA application?” he inquired.

“My recollection was there was a significant amount of additional material about Page and why there was a probable cause to believe he was an agent of a foreign power and the dossier was part of that but was not all of it or a critical part of it, to my recollection.”

In poker, we call that a “tell.” Mrs. Comey, you should know that whenever your husband says “to my recollection,” he is lying to you.

Sorry, Mr. Comey, facts REALLY DO matter.

• Contact Charles Hurt at churt@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @charleshurt.

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