It seems impossible to defend the attempted coup, but the Dems are going to pretend the Steele dossier was never used directly by the FBI or in the FISAs and that gives them all an out They are going to claim Horowitz and Barr are somehow under President Trump's thumb, and acting like Trump's personal lawyers without any objectivity. They are going to claim that Strzok, Page, McCabe,  Comey, Ohr were justified in all their actions because they honestly thought it was likely that there was collusion. Mueller admits that the dossier was horseshit, so that presents a problem for all these people that told the FISA court was given good, verified information.   Because that is against the law to tell the court the information has been vetted when it hadn't been.  How will Dems handle this in their talking points? The Dems will say that none of these FBI/DOJ people used the dossier.   They're going to say the information came from trusted source Christopher Steele, and that nobody payed attention to the dossier.    Comey, McCable et all were mislead by their trusted colleague Steele, who led them astray.    They will claim that Steele assured them all this information was verified by British ex-spy Steele.   They will say Comey even took the dossier to show President-elect Trump, and told him the information was unverified.   So, (they Dems will say) obviously they (the coup conspirators) would have never dreamed of using the Dossier in the FISA warrant applications.   They will say that Trump and his cohorts are trying conflate information from a trusted source with this now-discredited dossier.  We all know it's the same info.   But I think that it would be a good to not say the dossier was used to get the FISA warrants, because the dossier might never be mentioned directly in the court documents.