WHEN ADAM SCHIFF LOVED THE DOSSIER. March 2017 was a heady time for Trump-Russia conspiracy theorists. The collapse of their enterprise lay two years in the future, when Robert Mueller, the special counsel in whom they placed their hopes of bringing down President Donald Trump, announced that after an intensive investigation he could not establish any conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election. Their total embarrassment lay more than four years away when another special counsel, John Durham, would release findings showing that their theory was not only wrong but laughably wrong — if a theory that did so much damage to the American polity could be called laughable. But in March 2017, all that lay ahead. It was a time for Democrats to celebrate the hottest "intelligence" on everyone's mind: the Steele dossier , the collection of anti-Trump allegations compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele, commissioned and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
On March 20, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing on Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The witnesses were James Comey and Michael Rogers, then the chiefs of the FBI and NSA, respectively. Much of the questioning that day ..............
