By Byron York

A new report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is an absolutely damning indictment of the Steele dossier.

The dossier, compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele during the 2016 campaign, was a collection of damaging and unfounded rumors about then-candidate Donald Trump. It was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and overseen by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. It was never verified.

Still, the dossier’s tales were taken seriously by officials in the highest ranks of the FBI — then-director James Comey and top deputy Andrew McCabe. In January 2017, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the dossier’s most sensational allegations. The briefing provided a hook for some news organizations to tell the public of the dossier’s existence, and then, days later, to publish the entire document. The reporting did terrible damage to a new president as he took office. Now, the Horowitz report shows it was all garbage.

The report makes clear the dossier never had even a shred of credibility. Steele had no first-hand knowledge of anything in the document. He got all his information second- or third-hand from sources who themselves heard things second or third-hand.

When the FBI managed to track down one of Steele’s main sources, the source was amazed that Steele took the information so seriously. It was “word-of-mouth and hearsay,” the source said, “conversation … with friends over beers.”

Nevertheless, Steele, along with his Democratic sponsors and the highest levels of U.S. law enforcement, used those conversations with friends over beers to throw American politics into chaos and do irreparable harm to a newly elected president.

Look at three of the dossier’s most incendiary charges:

1. The “well-developed conspiracy” between Trump and Russia. The dossier claimed that Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort used low-level foreign policy adviser Carter Page as an intermediary to the Russians in a plot to weaken Clinton. But when the FBI interviewed Steele’s “sub-source” agents heard an account that was “not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a ‘well-developed conspiracy.’” In a secretly recorded conversation with an informant, Page said he “literally never met” or “said one word to” Manafort and complained that Manafort never responded to Page’s emails.

2. The Carter Page bribe. The dossier reported that during a July 2016 trip to Moscow, Page met with Igor Sechin, head of the Russian energy giant Rosneft and a close associate of Vladimir Putin. Sechin, the dossier said, offered Page a huge bribe, in the form of a multi-billion-dollar brokerage interest, to persuade Trump, should he become president, to end U.S. sanctions. The FBI talked to Steele’s sub-source, who said he got information from another source via text message, and the texts never said anything about a brokerage offer to Page. “We reviewed the texts,” the inspector general report says, “and did not find any discussion of a bribe, whether as an interest in Rosneft itself or a ‘brokerage.’”

3. The pee tape. The most sensational and salacious part of the dossier didn’t happen. The report says the sub-source involved in that story told the FBI he warned Steele the story was “rumor and speculation” which the sub-source had not been able to substantiate.

Those responsible for creating, validating and spreading the lies should suffer disgrace. But the disruption to the nation’s public life cannot be measured and the damage cannot be undone.

York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.