MSNBC host Rachel Maddow in December 2017 aired a special report on the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. That document, claimed Maddow, relied on information coming from Steele’s “deep cover sources inside Russia.”

A federal indictment unsealed Thursday has something to say about the quality of those “sources.”

We learn from special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko that “the FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations” in the now-infamous Steele dossier. “Ultimately” is right — but not before it relied on the shoddy document to surveil an American citizen in an investigation that produced the Mueller probe and a two-year-long obsession with Trump and Russian built on a preposterous foundation.

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who compiled the notorious dossier during the 2016 campaign alleging ties between Donald Trump and Russia, made a splash a few weeks back when he gave his first interview about it. Steele described his professionalism as an intelligence-gatherer to George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and then doubled down on some of the dossier’s most salacious allegations, asserting, among other things, that the infamous “pee tape” involving Trump may be still out there, just waiting to be found.

It’s not really clear what the utility is of Christopher Steele speaking out now, long after his dossier of unverified claims about Donald Trump and Russia colored Trump’s presidency — and especially with Trump now out of office. Steele had declined to speak publicly on the situation for most of five years, but he’s now the subject of a Hulu documentary, and ABC News has published an interview with Steele.

Or put more precisely, it’s not clear what the utility is of it beyond Steele trying to defend his good name with the heat now (largely) off.

It turns out Christopher Steele wasn’t 007.

For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. It wasn’t true.

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier. That didn't stop corporate media.

It turns out Christopher Steele wasn’t 007.

For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. It wasn’t true.

The infamous Steele dossier from the Russia probe barely generated any attention from the mainstream media when it was largely discredited last week -- but critics feel the same pundits who once hyped the story are showing bias by ignoring the latest development.

Dossier author Christopher Steele will not cooperate with U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, telling an audience at Oxford University that he believes U.S. investigators have acted in “bad faith.”

Steele, a former British spy, said at the Oxford event on Friday that he and his firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, had already “done our duty” by cooperating with a Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) investigation of the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. Holy God, what a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.

Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.

The Justice Department’s top watchdog blasted the FBI for a series of “fundamental errors” in its probe of a Trump campaign official but said it found no evidence that political bias fueled the investigation.

Less than an hour after the long-awaited findings from Inspector General Michael Horowitz were released, a federal prosecutor conducting a separate investigation of the FBI’s action—and reporting directly to Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed back.