I wasn't in the room when the decision was made, but my understanding from reading both the Steele Dossier and the published Mueller report is that Mueller drew considerably from the Steele Dossier as a way to understand where to consider targeting the investigation early on, and then expanded elsewhere after they had identified that most of it was not actionable intelligence. Mueller's investigation ultimately resulted in several convictions, so where there is smoke there is fire, but in this case the fire was burning oak wood and the smoke smelled like mesquite.
The whole thing was completely fucking wild. Papa was ‘caught’ bragging to an Australian diplomat that was politically connected. The diplomat could have just been making the whole thing up because he either received instruction from Australian security services or because the diplomat in question has a bunch of strong incentives to ingratiate himself to the US permanent government. Have a read of Papa’s book to get an alternative view of what happened. In most realities he is going to deny the encounter so we should be suspicious of his narrative but there was a lot of suspect stuff going on.
After seeing how the US intelligence people acted with the Hunter Biden story I have zero faith they wouldn’t monkey around. To be fair I think a lot of the shade that was thrown on the story was from ex-intelligence people and not current US government employees. However, this whole thing looks like a vast conspiracy. You have ex-intelligence people, some who have plum media jobs signing up to this statement that seems to claim that Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation. But if you carefully review the statement it doesn’t actually make this claim. And if someone produced irrefutable proof that the laptop was genuine then all these people who signed up to this claim could claim they were still right. The actually claim was the laptop had the hallmarks of Russian misinformation. But that is not a very useful claim if you as a voter are trying to assess the probability that the laptop is genuine or not. For example it could have the hallmarks but it could still be like a 95% probability that it is genuine. Of course this claim about hallmarks is not strong enough so when it was reported in the press it was often reported as X ex-intelligence people have confirmed it is Russian disinformation. So what the hell is going on here?