The supposed anxieties of the ruling class about “foreign interference” in the 2016 election never extended to the most obvious source of it, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump. Steele’s fables had a much greater impact on the race than anything Vladimir Putin might have done. The Democrats used a foreigner to play a dirty trick on their opponent, all the while posing as defenders of the purity of American democracy.

This shameless con continues. Steele is back, recycling his smears against Trump on ABC recently. The interview and the Hulu documentary about him, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” show that the ruling class is still treating him seriously, even after his thorough discrediting.

In the interview, he says that “the problems we identified back in 2016 haven’t gone away, and arguably have actually got worse,” as if the thrust of his report was correct. Never mind that even Robert Mueller rejected it, concluding that Steele’s collusion claims against Trump were meritless.

The “problem” in 2016 was Steele himself. The turmoil to American democracy came largely from him. He sparked an unfounded investigation against Trump that not only undermined his campaign but also hobbled his presidency. Yet Steele, with the media’s help, continues to portray himself as the victim, not the villain, in the story, as if the scandal wasn’t his false report but Trump’s response to it.

Steele is treated by the media not as a failed liberal partisan on Hillary’s payroll, but as a brave intelligence “professional” who had to go into “hiding” after his report appeared. The media also treats Andrew McCabe, the former FBI official who signed off on the bogus investigation into Trump, as a martyr.

The subtext of the sympathetic stories about Steele and McCabe is that they had every right to smear Trump as an agent of the Russians while he had no right to defend himself against that smear.

“I can’t tell you what this has been like going through. What this whole vindictive campaign has put my wife through. My children. My parents,” McCabe said to Politico. “I mean, to know that you essentially have a target on your back from the most powerful person in the world.… It was like upside-down world.”

The Biden administration has restored McCabe’s pension and sanitized his record. Like so many other nefarious players in this sorry saga, McCabe has failed upward. Almost all of them have been rewarded for their misconduct with TV gigs, book contracts, and even, as in the case of Jake Sullivan, a top position in the Biden administration. Congressman Adam Schiff, who pushed false collusion claims more than anyone else, is now on a book tour, pontificating about threats to “our democracy.”

That Steele has popped back up is a measure of the ruling class’s hysteria about another Trump run. Liberals are not “afraid for” democracy; they are afraid of democracy. Hence, their willingness to use undemocratic means, such as Big Tech censorship, to prevent the people from electing Trump again.

Far from fearing foreign interference in our elections, the Democrats welcome it from the likes of Steele and Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who played a role in launching the FBI’s investigation into Trump. Reporters respectfully quote Steele’s musings on Trump, as if he knows America’s interests better than Americans do.

Were Steele working for Republicans against Democrats, the media would cast him as a crackpot of the first order. To this day, he stands by the most outlandish and debunked parts of his dossier.

“One allegation from Steele’s dossier stood out immediately: a claim that the Russians had obtained a compromising video of Trump at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013. According to the dossier, the tape purportedly showed Trump ‘employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him; on a bed where the Obamas supposedly once stayed,” reports ABC. “Steele told ABC News he believes the alleged tape ‘probably does’ exist — but that he ‘wouldn’t put 100% certainty on it.’”

Sounding like a complete lunatic, Steele says that the absence of the tape is due to Russian caginess. “It hasn’t needed to be released,” he said. “Because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president of the U.S.”

These comments alone should finish off his credibility. But they won’t. They will only endear him to the ruling class even more. Come the 2024 election, don’t be surprised if he turns up as an election commentator on CNN.