A brouhaha erupted this week over the creation of a highly questionable and lurid dossier on Donald Trump. That document is of the utmost importance—it may have been cited to authorize wiretaps of Trump Tower—but the controversy over it has unfolded without the true affiliations of some key players being named. We’re not talking about the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton campaign or their lawyers—all of whom are reportedly behind hiring the opposition research firm that delivered the dossier. This is about the Washington Free Beacon, the neoconservative news site that’s admitted to retaining Fusion GPS before the Democrats did.
Oddly, mainstream reports talk about the “Republican allies” or even “conservatives” who hired the muckraking group first, but fail to note who they are or point out that these aren’t just ordinary partisans but neoconservative operators who had Trump in their crosshairs from the beginning.
For example, Byron York’s investigative work for the Washington Examiner, which reports that the dossier originated with the Washington Free Beacon, only hints at, without explicitly mentioning, its neoconservative connections. York links the publication and its editors to Never-Trump activism, but goes no further in breaking down their ideological identities. In fact, the only website that does go further is Breitbart, which tells us that Weekly Standard editor-at-large Bill Kristol founded the Beacon, and that, like the Standard, the Beacon has a “neoconservative foreign policy outlook.”
Kristol and another neoconservative, Michael Goldfarb, were co-founders of the Beacon; the site’s major funder, Paul Singer, gives generously to…