“I know nothing,” isn’t just the motto of Sergeant Schultz. It’s also the Clinton motto. And Christopher Steele, the Brit whom the Clinton campaign hired to find out things for them, also knows nothing.

Or at least that’s the theme of the sprawling New Yorker profile of Steele, his dossier and his associates.

Steele, Jane Mayer, its authoress, tells us, is a brilliant researcher and we should take his word about all his allegations involving President Trump. Even the ones that aren’t true and don’t make any sense.

But he doesn’t know anything.

Take the Cody Shearer memo, the document authored by a Clinton plumber and which Steele passed along to the FBI as confirmation of his claims. The existence of the Shearer memo raised serious questions about whether the Clintons weren’t just paying Steele to dig up dirt, but were providing it. Some have speculated that Shearer’s smears were the original basis for Steele’s dossier.

But wait a minute.

Steele knew nothing. The New Yorker asks us to believe that their brilliant and trustworthy researcher passed along Shearer’s smears to the FBI without knowing who he was. ”Steele wasn’t aware that Shearer had longtime ties to the Clintons,” Mayer tells us, “as did Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton ally, who had given Shearer’s report to Winer.”