For a while there, Fusion GPS had it made.  Occupying the deepest part of the Washington swamp, the famed "opposition research" firm that specialized in smears leaked to the press could make a tidy living smearing others – from Venezuela's human rights campaigners to Planned Parenthood's whistleblowers to honest Russians defying corruption in their system...without consequences.  It also used its press contacts to intimidate reporters against reporting the news.

It looks as though that might be changing now that its Donald Trump "golden shower" phony dossier, now utterly discredited, has drawn a lawsuit from angry Russians whose names got entangled into the work of febrile fiction.

Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan filed suit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, claiming that their reputations were unfairly tattered by the so-called dossier – a largely unsubstantiated document that has taken on a larger-than-life role in several investigations into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

"Even though the Dossier contained unverified allegations, Defendants recklessly placed it beyond their control and allowed it to fall into the hands of media devoted to breaking news on the hottest subject of the day: the Trump candidacy," the suit alleges.

Those Russians aren't just any Russians, but Russian oligarchs, the kind of guys who have the giant yachts the size of skyscrapers in tony harbors around the world.  Meaning: buku cash.  The lawyer power their cash can purchase to make things right is probably bottomless.

Anybody would do it, given the repulsiveness and utter falseness of the dossier, designed to discredit Trump.  But it was particularly stupid of the fiction writers of this dossier to bring in the oligarchs, whose business interests stretch globally and whose resources to fight back are virtually unlimited.  The oligarchs play hard.  They also play dirty.  And Fusion GPS has just made them angry.

The Daily Caller reports that the lawsuit could finally reveal the mysteries of who paid for and whipped up the phony repulsive dossier, something that was impossible to shake out of Fusion GPS's founders during congressional testimony last summer.

But the more interesting thing is that it could swamp Fusion GPS in a legal morass, effectively forcing the firm to drown in its own swamp.  Russia's oligarchs play for keeps and operate in a far swampier survival-of-the-fittest Russian ecosystem than anything known in Washington.

These people deserve each other. What we are seeing here is Fusion GPS finally meeting its match.