Trump the younger said he was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton, but that all he got in his June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer was an earful about dropping the Magnitzky Act, which sanctions Russian officials involved in the death of a Russian lawyer who was killed in detention.

If the Trump, Jr. meeting is just another chapter in the Beltway telenovela about Trump selling out America to the Russians through an ever-changing cast of supposed intermediaries - come back, Mike Flynn and Carter Page, we hardly knew ye - it sheds valuable light on the ways and means by which the news that fills our iPhone screens and Facebook feeds is now produced.

You see, the Russian lawyer - often carelessly presented as a "Russian government lawyer" with "close ties to Putin" - Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Trump, also worked recently with a Washington, D.C. "commercial research and strategic intelligence firm" that is also believed to have lobbied against the Magnitzy Act. That firm, which also doubles as an opposition research shop, is called Fusion GPS - famous for producing the Russia dossier distributed under the byline of Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent for hire.