From The Guardian, Monday, November 4th:

Fresh evidence has also emerged of attempts by the Kremlin to infiltrate the Conservatives by a senior Russian diplomat suspected of espionage, who spent five years in London cultivating leading Tories including Johnson himself….

The committee’s report is based on analysis from Britain’s intelligence agencies, as well as third-party experts such as the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele….

Christopher Steele became famous in the United States as the author of a “dossier” that claimed Russians had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Donald Trump “for at least 5 years.”

Now Steele is back, claiming that the Russians have been cultivating the Tories and Boris Johnson for . . . five years.

Steele first appeared in connection with the Trump story as a “well-placed Western intelligence source” in a 2016 Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff. The piece claimed a Trump aide named Carter Page was discussing the lifting of sanctions with Igor Sechin, chief of the major Russian oil company Rosneft.

Steele, in fact, was a private opposition researcher hired by the “premium research” firm Fusion-GPS, on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Yahoo story came out on September 23th, 2016; it would be more than a year before Steele’s status as a paid Clinton researcher would be made public.

After Isikoff’s piece came out, the Clinton campaign released a statement about how it was “chilling” to learn that “U.S. intelligence officials” were “conducting a probe into suspected meetings between Trump’s foreign policy adviser Carter Page and members of Putin’s inner circle.”

If the merry-go-round trick of commenting gravely about a story you yourself planted sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the tactic used by Vice President Dick Cheney in the early 2000s, when he went on Meet the Press to comment about “a story in The New York Times this morning” regarding Saddam Hussein’s aluminum tubes. Press figures denounced such chicanery then.