Steele’s most boffo-sensational charge was Russians having a tape of Trump getting off to prostitutes peeing on a Moscow hotel bed once slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama. This, he said, “enabled” the Russians to blackmail Trump “if they so wished.” However, per Steele, Putin chose instead to offer a “regular flow” of “lucrative” real estate deals that Trump for “some unknown reason” kept declining, even though Steele simultaneously reported Trump was “exploring the real estate sector in Petersburg as well as Moscow.”

Meanwhile, Trump — who at the outset of the alleged conspiracy was issuing reality-TV challenges to heavyweights like LaToya Jackson, Meat Loaf, and Jose Canseco — was supposedly feeding Putin information about Russian oligarchs in America, through Russian émigrés “living in the U.S. as cover” (read: Russian immigrants). These middlemen were paid through the “mechanism” of Russian pension “disbursements.”

“Tens of thousands of dollars were involved,” wrote Steele, echoing Dr. Evil.

No part of this Clintonian 9/11 Truth tale of a world riddled with plotters united by the same statistically rare urge to treason (and the same strategic instinct to create unnecessary layers of felony witnesses) has ever been proved: not the “moles in the DNC and hackers in the U.S.,” nor any of the sleeper émigré conduits, nor the sophisticated Russian hackers in Prague who for some reason needed the direction of the medallion taxi owner/Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.