Better late than never?

The day after Attorney General William Barr released the Mueller Report, the Pulitzer-laden scandal sheet known as The New York Times wondered if the salacious and unverified dossier might actually be Russian disinformation. The dossier was created by violent anti-Trumper Christopher Steele and used to spy on the Trump campaign as well as kicking off a massive counter-intelligence operation directed at the president.

Another possibility — one that Mr. Steele has not ruled out — could be Russian disinformation. That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump’s presidency as well.

Steele, a former British spy, was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, who was paid by a law firm serving/hiding Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party. The Steele dossier, which is really several reports turned into the FBI over the span of a few months during the 2016 presidential campaign, was released to the public more than two years ago when one of the numerous media outlets that had a copy actually published it. Steele wasn’t just giving his work to Fusion and the FBI, he was pitching it to as many media outlets as he could to damage Trump. In fact, Steele’s media side hustle was the reason he was discredited and fired by the FBI. The Times musing on the dossier omits that Steele was fired from its story.

The occasion that launched the fantastical dossier into the news cycle was an orchestrated “news hook” by MSNBC star John Brennan and Twitter personality James Comey, who decided to brief Trump on its existence. Previously, the contents were too unreliable to publish but once Comey briefed Trump, there was occasion to tell the world exactly on what Comey was briefing Trump.

So for more than two years, the dossier has been available for review and at no point did the Times wonder if it was loaded with Russian disinformation. Steele, who did not travel to Russia but got his information from various Russian sources orbiting around him, clearly sources his information to Kremlin-connected phantoms in the documents but even that was not enough to pique the curiosity of the Times.

Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. “Russia has huge experience in spreading false information,” he said. Mr. Steele declined to comment for this article. But Joshua A. Levy, a lawyer for Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned the dossier, said the Mueller inquiry substantiated “the core reporting” in the Steele memos — including “that Trump campaign figures were secretly meeting Kremlin figures,” and that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had directed “a covert operation to elect Donald J. Trump.”

No, the “core reporting” of the dossier was that a blackmailed Trump was conspiring with Russia and money was exchanging hands for election help that would be repaid by the future Trump administration’s Putin directed, overly Russia-friendly foreign policy. Such Russia-friendly policies never came to pass. The Mueller Report shows the opposite, that the Trump campaign turned away numerous opportunities the Russians dangled in front of them.

While The New York Times and many other news organizations published little about the document’s unverified claims, social media partisans and television commentators discussed them almost daily over the past two years. The dossier tantalized Mr. Trump’s opponents with a worst-case account of the president’s conduct. And for those trying to make sense of the Trump-Russia saga, the dossier infused the quest for understanding with urgency. In blunt prose, it suggested that a foreign power had fully compromised the man who would become the next president of the United States.

Those social media partisans and television commenters have been saying the dossier was Russian propaganda designed to cause strife in the U.S. for more than two years. An initial reading of the sensational document would raise suspicion among even the moderately alert, so the fact that the Times is just noticing this possibility shows how extremely biased and invested in believing the dossier was true. Here is how the Times described parts of the dossier: