ANGLOSPHERIC DUTY:

We know that he spent two decades as an officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, sometimes known as "MI6"), where he enjoyed the highest esteem from his own bosses as well as his counterparts in the U.S. intelligence community. We know that he spent long stints in Russia, where he built up his knowledge of the country and language and cultivated a wide-ranging network of contacts. At one point he ran the SIS Russia Desk.

And we know that one of his SIS jobs included working in Afghanistan with British and U.S. special forces who were hunting down terrorists. This is a man who put his own life on the line for the sake of his country's close alliance with the United States -- a man who, in July and October 2016, correspondingly saw it as a matter of duty to approach old colleagues in the FBI when he realized he had stumbled onto a breathtaking threat to U.S. national security.

We also know that Steele investigated the case of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector who was assassinated -- allegedly by the Kremlin -- with a deadly radioactive poison in London in 2006. Steele knows only too well what happens to people who get in Putin's way. Yet even this awareness didn't divert him from his path as he began to expose the Trump-Russia nexus. There was a reason why he and his family went into hiding when his name was first made public last year.

The risks are real. Some Moscow-watchers have followed the grim fates of a number of senior Russian officials who were likely involved in Operation Donald Trump. In early 2017, Oleg Erovinkin, an aide to Gazprom CEO Igor Sechin (arguably the second-most powerful man in Russia), mysteriously died in the back of his car. (Steele's reporting offers considerable detail about Page's links with Gazprom, Russia's energy giant.) After Steele took his reporting to the FBI, two key officials in the cyber department of the FSB (Russia's security service, and a successor of the KGB), as well as another cybersecurity expert, were arrested and spirited away. They haven't been heard from since.

This, too, suggests just how high the stakes are -- so much higher than the world of Washington's petty partisan crusades. This is the world of Kremlin intrigue, where mysterious deaths are a common tool of statecraft. This is the world that Christopher Steele had to plumb, at considerable personal risk to himself, to chart Trump's illicit entanglements.

That the Republicans are so determined to destroy Steele's reputation certainly isn't making life easier for him. Happily, he doesn't have to do much to prevail against them. He merely has to endure. The truth will find a way. The members of Trump's party who are smart enough to understand this must be terrified.

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