On July 29, 2016, two days after SVR crafted the draft memo falsely claiming Hillary Clinton had a Deep State plan to smear Donald Trump that would stoke investigations for much of the last decade, Christopher Steele reached out to Bruce Ohr, then in charge of transnational crime at DOJ. Steele was going to be in DC on short notice. Would he like to meet for breakfast?

The meeting between the two is one of the most curious details of the right wing conspiracy theory that has animated the right wing since.

According to Ohr’s notes and his subsequent testimony, he and Steele spoke about a number of things: a claim sourced to SVR that Russia had Trump over a barrel, both details about Carter Page from the dossier and notice of it, Russian doping, and Oleg Deripaska’s plan to start pressuring Manafort for the money Deripaska claimed he was owed.

Mr. Ohr. So Chris Steele provided me with basically three items of information. One of them I’ve described to you already, the comment that information supposedly stated and made by the head, former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

He also mentioned that Carter Page had met with certain high-level Russian officials when he was in Moscow. My recollection is at that time, the name Carter Page had already been in the press, and there had been some kind of statement about who he had met with when he went to Moscow. And so the first item that I recall Chris Steele telling me was he had information that Carter Page met with higher-level Russian officials, not just whoever was mentioned in the press article. So that was one item.

And then the third item he mentioned was that Paul Hauser, who was an attorney working for Oleg Deripaska, had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with Oleg Deripaska, had stolen a large amount of money from Oleg Deripaska, and that Paul Hauser was trying to gather information that would show that, you know, or give more detail about what Paul Manafort had done with respect to Deripaska.

[snip]

Q Were there any other topics that were discussed during your July 30, 2016, meeting?

A Yes, there were. Based on my sketchy notes from the time, I think there was some information relating to the Russian doping scandal, but I don’t recall the substance of that.

The right wing has pointed to this meeting as the founding moment of what they call Hillary Clinton’s hoax — Steele’s efforts to find side channels via which to share the dossier, which they claim was part of a Hillary plot to frame Trump, though it was one Hillary didn’t know about or sanction.

But they always ignore the Deripaska part. Indeed, even though most Republican members of Congress who have pursued the dossier concluded it was filled with Russian disinformation, even though the DOJ IG Report says (using the moniker Oligarch-1 for Deripaska) that Deripaska had the knowledge and means to do that by the time of this meeting, Deripaska’s potential role has disappeared from all right wing obsession on the dossier (indeed, at the time it did disappear in 2018, well past the time members of Congress were focused on the SVR documents that included the Hillary memo, multiple right wing propagandists were claiming references to Deripaska was really Trump).

Of course, the right wing really wants to say nothing of the way this founding moment of their imagined dossier operation interacts with Konstantin Kilimnik’s role, including a meeting with Trump’s campaign manager he was setting up on those very days, to discuss how to win, how to get Manafort paid, and how to carve up Ukraine. Or the way that Manafort came back from a meeting with a Deripaska aide the following January and started pushing the attack on the dossier.

Oleg Deripaska was playing a brutal double game, but rather than admit that, Republicans would rather join in the Hillary side of it.

But at that moment in July 2016, Russian spooks had already decided it’d be fun to exploit the tensions caused by the election operation by framing Hillary Clinton, and by doing so, discrediting the investigation and giving a malignant narcissist cause for grievance.

I’m not saying that Deripaska was acting on the memo itself (though I find the addition of the Olympics in the memo, matching Steele’s mention of it to Ohr, to be notable). And his 2018 Daily Caller column stoking dossier grievance reads from the same script.

What has been inelegantly termed the “Deep State” is really this: shadow power exercised by a small number of individuals from media, business, government and the intelligence community, foisting provocative and cynically false manipulations on the public. Out of these manipulations, an agenda of these architects’ own design is born.

There was a larger plan to frame Hillary, as evidenced by the Seth Rich attack that started two weeks earlier and got picked up by Julian Assange and Roger Stone two weeks later.

I’m saying the Hillary hoax was built into the operation from the start.

Nor am I saying that Russia expected it would destroy the United States.

It was just one strand of spaghetti they threw at the wall in 2016.

But boy did it stick.