Max Boot, Washington Post: “In early November, John Durham, a special counsel appointed by the Trump administration, indicted a Russian American analyst who had been a contributor to the Steele dossier of lying to the FBI about where he got his information. The now-notorious dossier, produced by a former British intelligence officer, alleged links between Donald Trump and the Kremlin. The analyst, Igor Danchenko, is accused of concealing, among other things, that one of his informants was a Democratic Party operative with links to Russia. Ever since then, Trump and his right-wing media chorus have been loudly proclaiming that the entire ‘Trump-Russia collusion narrative’ was ‘phony’ and that he was the victim of a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by the Democrats, the media and the FBI. Nice try – but it won’t fly. The Steele dossier is a sideshow. Like many raw intelligence reports, it was full of uncorroborated information – a lot of which doesn’t check out.”

“But the Steele dossier did not launch the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, and discrediting it does not undermine the evidence that the Kremlin helped Trump win the election with his campaign’s eager encouragement and cooperation. You can debate whether this constituted ‘collusion,’ a word with no legal definition. You can’t deny that there was extensive collaboration – at least not without resorting to bald-faced lies. You don’t have to take my word for it. Simply read the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s election interference. The committee, then led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), issued last year its fifth and final volume detailing even more extensive links between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign than had previously been known.”