Bleeding Edge

After the discovery that the manufactured & salaciously fake Trump dossier was the only real Russian collusion during the elections of 2016, it becomes evident that finally the Clintons are leaving the American political & public proscenium for good.

Yet they leave behind a nasty legacy of murders, lies, and lawlessness.

Bill Clinton’s shameless behavior, with his perjury, and his obstructions of justice led to his impeachment, but he escaped that fate, whereas Hillary was flat out rejected by the American public, because of Hillary’s serial deceptions, constant lying, and her grotesque mishandling of classified information.

All of these issues militated against her, and led to her thumping defeat.

Her manufacturing of the Trump dossier however, and its sheer negative impact on American public life, may be her most infamous “achievement” out of her whole life of spreading BS and negativity to this country. And we can now safely say that her campaign — and ultimately Hillary herself — bear grave responsibility along with key members of the media and the government who also share in that responsibility, and now, they need to own up to it…

Because the “salacious and unverified” Trump dossier and the attendant debate about the documents within it — has invaded the body politic like a cancerous mole.

And although the Mueller investigation has concluded, and Mueller’s declaration of complete exoneration and total innocence for President Trump has now entered the public record through the words of the Special prosecutor that “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities” most people still have lingering fears that the witch-hunt will continue for some time by the Democrats rear guard actions.

But it’s worth reflecting on how the contrary view — the firm conviction that Trump did coordinate with Russia — became so deeply embedded in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. And it’s worth reflecting on why another set of Americans could look at actual, troubling evidence of Russian contacts and simply not care at all.

The answer is complex, but at its heart is a set of documents compiled into a collection known as the “Steele dossier.” The dossier, characterized by James Comey under oath as “salacious and unverified,” consisted of opposition research compiled by a former British intelligence officer and commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Taken as whole, it undermined the credibility of American intelligence agencies, corrupted elements of the media, and distorted the public debate. It may well be one of the most malignant documents in modern American history.

The most immense and dangerous public scandal in American history is finally cracking open like a ripe pomegranate. The broad swath of the Trump-hating media that has participated in what has amounted to an unconstitutional attempt to overthrow the government are reduced to reporting the events and revelations of the scandal in which they have been complicit, in a po-faced ho-hum manner to impart to the misinformed public that this is as routine as stock market fluctuations or the burning of an American flag in Tehran.

For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.

The instigators, the “authors”, the accomplices, and even the dupes of this attempted overthrow of constitutional government are now well along in reciting their misconduct without embarrassment or remorse because—in fired FBI Director James Comey’s formulation—a “higher duty” than the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution compelled them. Or—in fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s words—“the threat” was too great. Nevermind that the nature of “the threat” was that the people might elect someone he and Comey disapproved of as president, and that that person might actually serve his term, as elected.

The extent of the criminal misconduct of the former law enforcement and intelligence chiefs is now notorious, but to make the right point here, it has to be summarized. The fact that the officially preferred candidate lied to federal officials about her emails and acted in outright contempt of Congress and the legal process in the destruction of evidence, was simply ignored by the FBI director, who announced that she would not be prosecuted, though he had no authority to make that determination.

The dossier of salacious gossip and defamatory falsehoods amassed by a retired British spy from the lowest grade of intelligence sources in Russia, commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, was circulated to the media by high public officials and cited in illegal and dishonest applications to authorize surveillance of the campaign of the other presidential candidate. A special counsel was empowered on the false pretext of the necessity to get to the bottom of Trump-Russian collusion in the election, of which there was and remains no evidence, because it did not occur and was a complete partisan fabrication.

The special counsel then packed his staff with militant Clinton partisans, and acted very late and only when his hand was forced by the media to remove two officials who referred in texts to each other to the Bureau’s ability to smear and provoke the impeachment of the winning candidate as “an insurance policy” against his filling the office to which he was elected.

Large sections of the media colluded with the Democratic campaign and produced the doctrine that anything was justifiable, no matter how dishonest, to destroy the incoming president’s reputation and damage him in public opinion polls to legitimize attempts to remove him from office. Large sections of the media deliberately deluged the public with stories they knew to be false about the new president and referred to him in terms of unprecedented vituperation in what purported to be reportage and not comment.

This unorganized but widespread campaign of defamation was taken up by a great number of ordinarily newsworthy celebrities and was accompanied by false, unresearched stories denigrating President Trump’s supporters, such as the more recent false claims about Catholic school students’ treatment of an elderly native American and the false claim that actor Jussie Smollett had been beaten up and reviled by Trump supporters. The former intelligence chiefs of the nation under President Obama repeatedly have accused this president of treason, the most heinous of all crimes, and have asserted with the authority of their former positions that the Russians determined the result of the 2016 presidential election. They knew this to be entirely false.

The special counsel has failed to find any evidence of the collusion and electoral interference that was the justification for establishing his inquiry, and the Democrats are already expressing disappointment in his failure to produce such evidence when the leading Democratic members of congressional investigative committees still robotically claim to have at least prima facie evidence of such collusion.

The dishonest attempt of much of the opposition and what even left-leaning media-monitoring organizations record as 90 percent of the national media, continued for more than two years to try to condition the country to believe that the president had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” required by the Constitution for impeachment and removal from office.

The special counsel, apart from smearing the president, distracted public attention from or tended to justify the ever more evident misconduct of the president’s enemies. And we now know that Comey, despite his “higher duty,” lied to the president about his not being a target of an FBI investigation, illegally leaked to the New York Times the contents of a self-serving memo he purloined from the government, and lied to Congress by claiming 245 times in one sitting to be ignorant of recent matters that no one of sound mind could have forgotten.

And now we have Andrew McCabe’s proud confirmation that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein not only continued the illegal counterintelligence investigation of President Trump, but actively discussed methods of securing his removal from office by deliberate misuse of a variety of laws, including the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment to deal with mental incompetence, and the Logan Act of 1799, which has never been used successfully and has not been tested in 150 years.

This entire monstrous travesty is finally coming apart without even waiting for the horrible disappointment of the special counsel’s inability to adduce a scrap of evidence to justify his replication of Torquemada as an inquisitor and of the Gestapo and KGB at rounding up and accusing unarmed individuals who were not flight risks. The collapse of this grotesque putsch, under the irresistible pressure of a functioning attorney general and Senate committees that are not hamstrung by NeverTrumpers, will cause a revulsion against the Democratic Party that will be seismic and prolonged.

The disgrace of their misconduct is profound and shocking. Richard Nixon, against whom there is no conclusive evidence that he broke any laws (although a number of people in his entourage did) never did anything like this. J. Edgar Hoover in 47 years at the head of the FBI and its predecessor organization, never tried to meddle in a presidential election. Those responsible will pay for this, including at the polls.

I’m not going to link to the dossier, but it’s worth remembering its core claim. As explained in this December analysis in Lawfare, the document not only contained claims that Russia possessed lurid, compromising information on Donald Trump, it also made the sensational allegation that there existed a “well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [Trump and his associates] and the Russian leadership,” including an “intelligence exchange [that] had been running between them for at least 8 years.” The very existence of this allegation detonated like a bomb in the American body politic.

It had an obvious distorting effect on the intelligence community and parts of the American government. To be clear, I believe that the Trump-Russia investigation would have existed even without the dossier — I’m with Trey Gowdy on that point. As Devin Nunes wrote in his famous February 2018 memorandum alleging FISA abuse, information about George Papadopoulos triggered the opening of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016. Moreover, the multiplicity of problematic Trump-team contacts with Russians or Russian operatives justified an investigation regardless of the dossier’s contents or the dossier’s use by the FBI.

The dossier was used to form a crucial part of the Carter Page FISA-warrant applications, however: The Nunes memo notes that “Deputy Director McCabe testified . . . that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the dossier information.” In addition, elements of the dossier made it to lawmakers including Harry Reid and John McCain, and the FBI ultimately even briefed then-president-elect Trump about its contents. While the summary it provided Trump is still largely redacted, it is easy to imagine how the existence of such a document could enrage the president.

I urge you to read Chuck Ross’s well-reported account of the comprehensive efforts to “seed the dossier with reporters and government officials.” The efforts were in fact so comprehensive — and the existence of its allegations such an open secret with the press — that I even heard about it in Tennessee during the later stages of the campaign. I was flat-out told that there was evidence Trump had been “compromised” by Russian intelligence.

Salacious rumor-mongering is par for the course in politics. I’ve heard the wildest stories about even the most staid politicians. And when politicians aren’t staid, well, there are no boundaries. To this day, there are folks lurking around the dark quarters of the Internet absolutely convinced that the Clintons are responsible for a string of murders in Arkansas.

But even in the face of widespread rumors, responsible journalists — or journalists who aspire to responsibility — do not print the rumor, at least not without verifying or debunking it. They should not print the rumor even if they know that law enforcement is looking into it.

Let’s try a hypothetical. Imagine if you’re a reporter and you know that local police are investigating a wild claim against a prominent local figure. You’ve started to look into the claim yourself, but so far everything you’ve learned contradicts the allegations. Do you dump it into the public domain anyway, heedless of the impact on the public or the person?

Well, if you’re BuzzFeed, that’s exactly what you do. While it may well be newsworthy that the FBI is looking into claims that Trump is “compromised,” there’s a vast difference between that factual report and just tossing a raw opposition-research file into the public square and telling people to “make up their own minds.”

That makes no sense. None. Between taking kids to soccer practice and dance lessons, parents aren’t able to determine whether Michael Cohen went to Prague. As I wrote at the time, “individual Americans aren’t free-standing intelligence agencies, ready and able to investigate alleged Russian operations in Moscow.” If a journalist hears a claim, he should investigate. Not punt to the public.

BuzzFeed’s decision had two immediate effects. First, it demonstrated the extent to which an influential media outlet would depart from best practices when it possessed negative allegations against Trump. Second, the instant the claims were published, millions of Americans became convinced they were true. Combine the recent pain of a shocking electoral loss, Russia’s intervention in the campaign to help Trump and sow chaos generally, Trump’s incredibly odd behavior toward Putin, and the emerging reports (some overblown) of unusual contacts between Trump’s team and Russians or Russian assets, and Democrats were primed to believe the worst. Moreover, the dossier’s memo formats, which looked like movie versions of intelligence reports, enhanced their public credibility. They were official-looking.

And so we were off to the races. An odd sort of consensus developed on the left and the right. In essence, it was this: The dossier is the scandal. On the left, a kind of blind faith emerged that the purpose and ultimate inevitable outcome of the Mueller investigation were to prove the core claims (if not all the specifics) of the dossier. People weren’t singing songs to Mueller with the expectation and hope that he’d simply lay out the facts. They believed that they already knew the facts, it was up to Mueller to come through with the proof.

On the right, when the dossier became the scandal, that meant that misconduct — even lies about contacts with Russians or Russian assets — that fell far short of the dossier’s grandiose claims was treated simply as no big deal. If a meeting with a Russian lawyer with the intention of getting damaging information about Hillary Clinton or alleged efforts to establish back-channel communications with WikiLeaks through Roger Stone fell far short of the dossier’s claims, then they were nothing to worry about — a distraction from the “real” scandal of the “Russia hoax.”

Moreover, a veritable industry sprang up that attempted to tie the entire Trump-Russia investigation to the dossier, to somehow prove that absent the dossier, there never would have been a comprehensive investigation of Russian contacts with the Trump campaign, much less a special counsel. Troubling conduct and contacts by Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and others were swept aside as meaningless. The dossier was the chief weapon in the effort to delegitimize the investigation itself, and it was a potent weapon indeed.

For all of their other accomplishments, the Clintons are leaving American public life with a legacy of lies and lawlessness. Bill Clinton’s shameless behavior, perjury, and obstruction of justice led to his impeachment. Hillary’s serial deceptions and her grotesque mishandling of classified information led to her defeat. The dossier, however, in its sheer negative impact on American public life, may be her most infamous “achievement.”

Her campaign — and ultimately Hillary herself — bears responsibility for the chaos it sowed, because the dossier redefined the Presidential debate, as if it was some kind of cancer, that sickened our American culture and our Democratic and Republican politics.

And today, our nation is weaker because that fake document entered the bloodstream of the body politic, doing maximum damage that the Russians or anyone else cold never have done from the outside.

And we have Hillary Clinton and Obama to thank for it along with a compliant and cooperating mass media, television, and newspaper industry who all together along with some deluded members of Congress and Senate, seem to be really working for the Russians and the FSB…

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

Without realizing the proportions of the emergency, America has survived the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. All those who legitimately oppose or dislike the president, including traditional high-brow Republicans who find him distasteful, should join in the condemnation of this largely criminal assault on democracy, and then, if they wish, go out and try to beat him fair and square, the good old-fashioned way, in a free election. But they must abide by the election’s result.