Most news coverage of the Horowitz report has minimized or ignored its most devastating aspects. Granted, the inspector general’s account doesn’t make for easy reading. It’s repetitive to a fault, and its insistent use of vague identifiers—“Case Agent 1,” “Supervisory Intel Analyst,” “Primary Sub-source”—rather than names makes its narrative insistently soporific.

Then again, many journalists seem determined not to explain how the report vitiates the “Steele dossier” and discredits its author, Christopher Steele, a former...