For a man who reportedly worked for British Intelligence at one time, Christopher Steele is a serial bumbler. He spies on the Trump campaign hoping to destroy it. Trump wins. He tries to cover his tracks. He gets caught. He tries to use the FBI to save his bacon. They fire him. He reaches out to Hillary for succor. She ignores him.

Now he’s spinning his tale to Clinton mouthpiece George Stephanopoulos. Not a lot of credibility there either. Her Majesty’s Secret Service would be mortified by an association with Steele. We concur. Gregg Jarrett makes the case for our viewpoint.

 

Jarrett: Christopher Steele should print up calling cards embossed with the words, “Liar For Hire.”  He could do splashy commercials bragging that Hillary Clinton is a happily satisfied customer.

The former British spy pocketed buckets of money from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (not to mention cash from the FBI courtesy of you, the American taxpayer) by conjuring up a phony dossier that was used to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election and trigger an FBI investigation that badly damaged his presidency. When you think about it, it was one helluva grift. Until it was exposed.

Now, five years after Steele began spinning his ludicrous lies, he is trying in vain to resuscitate his wrecked reputation by doubling down on the same shameful fables during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.  It is no coincidence that his interlocutor was once a chummy adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton and served as White House Communications Director (chief flack) for the former president.

The semi-friendly venue notwithstanding, Steele managed only to reinforce his disrepute as a serial fabulist and world-class con artist. This was something the FBI realized, albeit belatedly, in the Fall of 2016 when it fired him as a confidential source because of his audacious deceit.  Shortly thereafter, the bureau tracked down his principle source and thoroughly discredited the dossier as nothing more than a sensational collection of hearsay, innuendo, gossip, and puerile supposition.  It was, in a word, junk.

Unconscionably, James Comey’s FBI kept this a secret from Trump and the American people so that the agency could exploit the dossier as a pretext to maintain and even escalate its unwarranted probe of the new president that they so despised. Even worse, Comey and his nefarious cohorts deceived federal judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by continuing to insist that Steele was reliable and the dossier was credible so that the FBI’s spying on a Trump associate could go on…

And yet, Steele still maintains the veneer of righteousness in the face of his obvious malevolence.  “I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it,” he stated. Only a skilled “liar for hire” could furnish such a fanciful claim.