Trump dossier mystery deepens

On Wednesday, not long after I posted the story, "Republicans skeptical about origin of Trump dossier," I got a note from a friend who had been thinking about the claim that a wealthy GOP donor started the infamous Trump dossier.

I had reported that the Republican operatives who ran against Trump -- the managers of the Cruz, Rubio, Bush, and Kasich campaigns -- had not only not heard of any GOP-funded oppo project but did not believe one existed. Neither did some of the NeverTrump activists working outside the campaigns to try to stop the GOP frontrunner.

"The reason it is not at all believable that a Republican was behind it is, nobody used [any information] from it," Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan told me. "Everybody was pretty damn desperate at the end. If someone had a kitchen sink, they would have thrown it."

My friend thought there might be some semantics involved. "The phrase 'wealthy Republican donor' doesn't necessarily have to denote a Republican," he wrote in an email exchange. "It could refer to a Democrat who has also made occasional donations to Republicans, especially if the source of the info is trying to mislead without technically lying."

Yes, it could. And in so many investigations, misleading-without-technically-lying is the Washington way. So perhaps the dossier origin story fits in that category.