Rename it the Clinton dossier: Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. By Charles Lipson.
Last week, John Durham’s grand jury issued its third criminal indictment in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. …
It shows that the special counsel’s probe is methodically unraveling a huge conspiracy, seemingly engineered by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and implicating James Comey’s FBI, either as a willing participant or as utterly incompetent boobs.
The latest indictment also damages the mainstream media, which is why so many news outlets have ignored or underplayed it. After all, they broadcast a false story for years and are none too eager to revisit it. Other losers are the prosecutors assembled by Robert Mueller, most of them Democrats, who had reams of this damaging information and ignored it.
What Durham and a few intrepid reporters are uncovering may well be the most ambitious dirty trick pulled in an American election and its aftermath. …
Dirty, corrupt FBI:
As the FBI blundered forward on its political mission, it made other revealing missteps. The most important was Director Comey’s meeting with the incoming president in early January 2017. Comey told Trump the FBI had acquired some damning materials about him but emphasized they were still unverified. As Comey’s own aides warned him, that communication could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.
Comey’s meeting with the president had another major consequence. Until then, even anti-Trump news outlets had been wary about mentioning the dossier (which the Clinton team had been shopping to them) because they couldn’t actually verify any of the vital details. That reticence changed with Comey’s briefing, which was news in its own right. The story now became, “FBI chief briefs president-elect Trump about salacious dossier, revealing damning info Kremlin could use to blackmail Trump.” One online outlet, BuzzFeed, went further. It published the full Steele dossier, and the media frenzy began.
Remember, this whole story was concocted and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and fed to the FBI and the media by her attorneys and associates. The FBI, which should have been able to quickly prove the story was false, plodded on with its investigation and fed the frenzy.
The Dem lies during Trump’s reign:
Although the dossier was commissioned to sink Trump in November, it was still useful after he won the election. Trump’s adversaries could exploit it to hamstring his embryonic administration, and that’s exactly what they did. With the whole-hearted backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff spent three years beating the drum of the “Russia collusion” hoax. Schiff’s constant media appearances claiming he had conclusive evidence of Trump-Russia collaboration continued long after he had received classified briefings that demolished his story. The briefer was former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, and he has confirmed those meetings with Schiff and his Senate counterpart, Mark Warner. No matter to Schiff, who kept repeating his claims and pursuing his full-scale investigation. First the verdict; then the inquiry. It was all part of a four-year-long battle, first to prevent Trump’s election, then to undermine his presidency, and finally to damage his chances for reelection.
The Clinton team launched this operation with professional expertise. The goal was to produce a powerful anti-Trump story, using whatever materials they could, then share it with the media (to smear Trump) and the FBI (to launch a major investigation and ensnare Trump). Ideally, the campaign’s involvement would be hidden, removed from the damning report by several layers of lawyers, opposition researchers, camp followers, and flacks. …
Bureau agents ignored that early warning and all the others. They quickly learned Steele’s material was a mirage, thanks to their interviews with Danchenko. They also confirmed that Steele’s dossier depended on Danchenko, so its claims of “Russian sourcing” were false. By interviewing Danchenko’s own sources, they learned that their third-hand statements, which were used in the dossier, were mainly rumors and “bar talk.”
Was Mueller stupid or evil?
The prosecutorial team assembled by Robert Mueller should have known all this, too. They had complete access to this exculpatory FBI material on day one and ignored it. A year and a half later, when Mueller himself finally testified before Congress, he didn’t even know what Fusion GPS was. By that point, Mueller seemed to have genuine difficulty remembering the details of his own investigation. His team of attorneys had no such excuse. Hired by Mueller’s top deputy, Andrew Weissmann, they were among the country’s sharpest and toughest prosecutors — and the most partisan. The more Durham uncovers, the worse the Mueller team will look.
Hillary’s dossier:
Reviewing this evidence, Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal has concluded the Steele dossier is misnamed. It should be called the “Clinton dossier,” she says, since Hillary commissioned it, paid for it, and had her aides feed it to the media, the State Department, and the FBI. It was a full-scale disinformation campaign — coherent, well-organized, and well-funded. It was rotten to the core.
It worked, and wasn’t effectively countered until too late. I doubt if any high-ranking members of the ruling class will suffer any adverse consequences for their crimes, let alone go to jail.
