By Dan Bongino and Matt Palumbo

For those advancing the myth that the FBI’s investigation into Trump began with the mid-2016 George Papadopoulos tip, please stop the nonsense. IT WAS THE DOSSIER.

It wasn’t even until December 2017 that the New York Times introduced the theory that Papadopoulos was responsible for sparking the investigation. The Times detailed how Papadapoulos allegedly told Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that he possessed dirt on Hillary Clinton, and heard that Russia possessed her hacked emails in a May 2016 meeting (obviously he didn’t possess them). Downer, who is no friend of Trump and once helped broker a $25 million donation from the Australian government to the Clinton Foundation, has since dismissed the contents of the meeting as “banal.”

While the framing of Papadopoulos could fill the pages of a book, the most relevant detail in this article is that the FBI didn’t even interview him until 2017. If they were so concerned that he possessed information that would have proven collusion, why wait? Papadopoulos would eventually be charged with making false statements to the FBI during an interview on January 27, 2017—a minor charge that has led to no indictment relating to collusion.

The evidence for that is undeniable: Nellie Ohr worked for the company that created the dossier (Fusion GPS) and met with her husband Bruce Ohr from DOJ, and dossier author Christopher Steele on July 30, 2016 Bruce Ohr then met with the FBI on the same day, July 30, 2016 and the FBI case is opened the next day, July 31, 2016.

As you already gleaned from the fact that Papadopoulos wasn’t interviewed until the following year after his alleged wrongdoings, it was clearly not he central to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation. The same cannot be said about the dossier:

The FBI’s Dep. Director Andy McCabe has already admitted they wouldn’t have had a FISA warrant without the dossier. According to the Nunes Memo, “McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] without the Steele dossier information.”

The FBI’s Agent Michael Gaeta interviewed dossier author Chris Steele in London weeks before the case was opened.

Both Papadopoulos AND Downer dispute the media’s leaked account of their meeting, specifically the “dirt on Hillary” line

And lastly, when the FBI came to spy on the Trump campaign, they didn’t pick Papadopoulos, they picked Carter Page. Why? Because he’s a key player in the dossier.

The allegations against Page were comical to begin with; that he was offered a 19% in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if Trump became President and lifted sanctions on Russia. Such an offer would imply a number of unlikely occurrences: the Russian government offering Page a stake in their company that would make him wealthier than Donald Trump (Rosneft’s current market capitalization is $41 billion), the Russian government surrendering their controlling stake in Rosneft (they currently own 50% of shares), and this transaction involving a public company somehow going unnoticed.

Carter Page has since been convicted of nothing, and Trump has imposed new sanctions on Russia.