Yes, That Lying Cunt Hillary Clinton Orchestrated the Russia-Collusion Farce

[Pelosi Ethics Commission]

In article <t2nbme$3oaef$6...@news.freedyn.de>
trumps bitch <patr...@protonmail.com> wrote:

Did she or didn’t she?

Of course she did. In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton, in an
effort to divert attention from the email scandal that was
haunting her presidential bid, directed her campaign to peddle a
political narrative that Russia’s suspected hacking and leaking
of Democratic Party emails was in furtherance of a conspiracy
between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to swing the election to
Trump.

That is, as I argued in Ball of Collusion, the Clinton campaign
dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump–Russia collusion
farce. And in promoting it, President Obama’s former secretary
of state had a willing and able partner in the Obama
administration — very much including its intelligence and law-
enforcement apparatus.

Democrats Change Their Tune

It was amazing to watch Democrats play Twister this week, as
National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe added documentary
corroboration to the disclosure he’d made the week before. In
that first revelation, via letter to the Senate Judiciary
Committee, Ratcliffe explained that, because our spy agencies
have very effective foreign-intelligence-gathering methods, they
were able to “obtain insight” into a Russian intelligence
analysis that concluded Clinton orchestrated the damaging
political narrative. That is, Clinton actually did what she
accused Trump of doing: She colluded with Russians (through yet
another foreigner she recruited to meddle in the 2016
presidential campaign: the ludicrous former British spy
Christopher Steele) in order to damage Trump’s campaign and
cinch the election for herself.

As ever with the Clintonistas: When they’re moving their lips,
they’re projecting.

Ratcliffe’s initial revelation came with a caveat: While our spy
agencies judged Moscow’s analysis about Clinton to be authentic
(in the sense of truly being a Russian intel product), they
could not vouch for its accuracy (i.e., it might reflect what
the Russians really believed, but it might alternatively be
exaggeration or fabrication). This was not a wobble.
Intelligence agencies sweep up scads of information, and they
must always grade its reliability with a skeptical eye to avoid
deluding themselves.

But this was all Democrats needed . . . at least at first. At a
Judiciary Committee hearing, former FBI director James Comey and
Senate Democrats scoffed at Ratcliffe’s frank, professional
concession, claiming it discredited his disclosure in its
entirety, and called his competence into question. He’d clearly
been duped by Russian disinformation . . . said the people who
seem to have made a habit of being duped by Russian
disinformation.

Did the Russians have a window into the Clinton campaign? It
sure looks that way, between Secretary Clinton’s security
practices (which even Comey has described as irresponsible) and
her retention of Steele, with his stable of Russian oligarch
clients and his dossier “primary subsource,” whom the FBI
suspected (with copious reason) to be a Russian asset.

But the point here is not whether Russian spies, thanks to
Clinton’s own carelessness, had effectively infiltrated her
campaign. The point is: Clinton was undeniably doing what, it
turns out, the Russians were contemporaneously detecting.

Want to play epistemological acrobatics? Okay, fine. We can
spend hours pondering whether Russian spies generated an
assessment about what Clinton was up to because they
legitimately wanted to inform their Kremlin superiors, or
whether they did it because they wanted our spies to see it and
to wonder whether the Russians knew that we knew that the
Russians knew . . .

I’d prefer to keep my eye on the ball, which has precious little
to do with spy games and Russian disinformation. The Russians
were able to deduce what Hillary Clinton was up to because it
was patently obvious. It did not take a super sleuth to figure
this one out. Just eyes to see and ears to hear.

That’s why you might have noticed a shift in Democratic tone
when Ratcliffe released more documents.

The second set of disclosures showed that the CIA had taken the
Russian information seriously enough that (a) then-director John
Brennan quickly briefed President Obama and his administration’s
national-security team about it and (b) the agency included the
Russian intel about Clinton in a memo to the FBI, which laid out
information gleaned by the “Crossfire Hurricane fusion cell”
that Brennan had assembled to promote the Trump–Russia storyline.

After Ratcliffe published these documents, we were no longer
hearing much about disinformation. Now the talking point became:
Well, there was nothing criminal in what Clinton did; she was
simply worried about a potentially corrupt conspiracy between
Trump and Putin — and who wouldn’t be?

Right . . . worried based on absolutely zero evidence. There was
not a shred of proof that Donald Trump and his campaign had any
foreknowledge of, much less complicity in, the suspected Russian
hack of DNC emails. That, you may remember, was the sinkhole on
which the collusion farce was constructed.

Clinton Retains Steele to Craft Trump–Russia Narrative

At this point, Democrats have no choice but to concede Clinton’s
catalytic role in the collusion narrative because there is no
other rational way to look at what happened — not for any
sentient person, never mind Russian intelligence agents.

Let’s look at the timeline.

In spring 2016, the Clinton campaign, through their lawyers at
Perkins Coie (an activist Democratic firm that also represents
the DNC), retained Steele to compile opposition research
connecting Trump and Russia. By June 20, Steele had produced the
first of his dossier “reports.” It sets forth the infamous “pee
tape” farce, at which any competent investigator would have
rolled his eyes, especially if he knew anything about Steele’s
self-professed Trump derangement. For Steele, the rumor that
Putin has a video of Trump cavorting with prostitutes is not
good enough; he figures the story is better if he adds that
Trump went out of his way to stage the “golden shower”
performance on a bed in which the Obamas — “whom he hated” — had
slept.

It’s melodrama, in the now familiar genre of Trump fever-dream.
Beyond that, Steele’s “report” could have been written by
Clinton or Brennan themselves. It frets over Trump’s by-then-
well-documented skepticism about NATO, surmising that such
thinking couldn’t possibly be explained by anything other than
Trump’s being blackmailed by Putin.

As usual, what’s actually interesting about a Steele “report” is
what’s not in it. There’s nothing about emails. That this is a
Steele pattern would also have been a red flag for the FBI if
its top officials, like other devotees of the progressive
international order, had not been as repulsed by Trump’s
candidacy as Steele was. None of the seemingly important things
Steele reports are verifiable (and some of them are plain
false); by contrast, the actually important things that happen
are never in Steele’s “intelligence reporting” until after they
happen. He was not unearthing information as an intelligence
professional; he was a paid political hack conveniently folding
reported news into Clinton’s anti-Trump campaign narrative.

Assange Issues a Threat as the Clinton Emails Scandal Intensifies

As Steele might have noted had he been paying attention, over a
week before his June 20 “report,” WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange
had publicly said, “We have emails pending publication,” which
were “in relation to Hillary Clinton.” Western intelligence
services have long observed that WikiLeaks has a collaborative
relationship with Russia.

At the time, it was not common knowledge that the DNC had been
hacked. Nor was it widely known that the FBI and the DNC had
been slow to react to the hack, or that the DNC would deny the
FBI access to its servers (with the support of the Obama Justice
Department, which did not take action to seize them for forensic
examination). Thus, anyone who was focused on Assange would have
assumed that the emails he was talking about were Clinton’s
personal emails — the 33,000 she had declined to surrender to
the State Department even though they were rife with official
business.

The start of summer was a time of frenzied activity regarding
Clinton’s email scandal. The FBI, driven by the political
calendar and the Obama administration’s determination that the
putative future Democratic president would not be charged with a
crime, raced to close its probe-for-show before the Democratic
national convention, scheduled to begin on July 25.

In rapid succession: On June 27, Obama attorney general Loretta
Lynch had her tarmac tête-à-tête with Mrs. Clinton’s husband
(the former president who had first brought Lynch to prominence
by appointing her U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New
York). On Saturday, July 2, the FBI and the Justice Department
did their cursory close-out interview of Clinton (which was such
a sham that she was permitted to have two other subjects of the
investigation present and assisting her as “counsel”). And on
July 5, FBI director James Comey held his infamous “exoneration”
press conference, which illustrated that there was damning
evidence of Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and
destruction of government records, and of her promotion of a
culture of national-security recklessness at the State
Department; but, nevertheless, that the Obama administration
would not charge her, even though her conduct violated the
literal terms of the espionage statute.

If Director Comey thought his press conference was going to put
the email scandal behind the Bureau and the Clinton campaign, it
had the opposite effect. Republicans were outraged that the fix
was in. Democrats were outraged at the director’s misconduct in
going public with the evidence against an uncharged person. At
the congressional hearings that immediately ensued, Republicans
questioned Comey in excruciating detail about all the
disclosures he’d made concerning Clinton’s mishandling of
classified information. It emerged that he’d begun preparing his
exoneration speech months earlier, even though Clinton had not
been questioned, other central witnesses had not been
interviewed, and key evidence had not been obtained, let alone
analyzed.

Heading into the convention that she’d hoped would be a
coronation, Clinton was reeling. Her email scandal was
intensifying rather than dissipating. And Assange seemed to be
threatening to leak the very emails she had taken pains not just
to delete but to destroy — employing the BleachBit program so no
one could ever read them. (Of course, as the Clinton campaign
had to realize, if a foreign intelligence service had hacked
into her non-secure homebrew system to copy the emails and slip
them to WikiLeaks, an after-the-fact BleachBit treatment would
not have helped.)

The DNC Emails

On July 22, Assange pulled the trigger, but it was not the shot
anyone was expecting. He began rolling out thousands of emails.
But not Secretary Clinton’s emails. These were the DNC’s emails.

For Clinton, this was manna from heaven.

Even though Assange had characteristically sought to drum up
attention by promising emails “in relation to Clinton,” the
Democrats’ nominee was not an active participant in the DNC
emails. Nor could the hacking of the DNC be blamed on her
reckless use of a non-government server system. Although Assange
had implied that the emails he was about to release would damage
Clinton, they did not damage her at all.

To the contrary, they helped her. Clinton was able to pose as
the victim, targeted by a WikiLeaks-Russia scheme; yet she
suffered none of the harms of such a scheme, since her own
emails were not at issue. In addition, the fact that emails were
at the center of the controversy would enable her to conflate
her email scandal with the hacking of the DNC. Now, if Trump or
other Republicans referred to her destroyed emails, it would be
spun as a reference to the DNC emails that Russia was suspected
of hacking. When Trump foolishly chided that he hoped Russia
found Clinton’s emails, it would be spun as a plea that Russia
hack the DNC — even though he was obviously referring to the
emails Clinton had purged, and doing so under circumstances
where Clinton’s private servers had long been decommissioned and
in the FBI’s possession.

Steele and the Campaign Get On-Message

Naturally, publication of the hacked DNC emails was included,
post facto, in the Trump-Russia narrative that Steele, at the
Clinton campaign’s urging, had already been fabricating for
weeks. The well-paid former spy got busy, writing a new
“intelligence report.” He thundered about an “extensive
conspiracy between TRUMP’s campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned
at the highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff
based in the US,” which explained the Kremlin’s responsibility
for the “recent appearance of DNC-emails on WikiLeaks.” This, of
course, had been done “with the full knowledge and support of
TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team” — a quid pro quo
for Trump’s supposed agreement “to sideline Russian intervention
in Ukraine as a campaign issue.”

After the lurid “pee tape” story, should we be surprised that
Steele was just getting warmed up? He related that this “well-
developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign
and “the Russian leadership” was being coordinated on the Trump
end “by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul
MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy adviser, Carter PAGE, and
others as intermediaries.”

In fact, Manafort and Page do not know each other. Oh, and what
about that “Russian diplomatic staff based in the US” that
Steele touted? He pointed to the Russian consulate in Miami as a
conspiratorial hub. Alas, there is no Russian consulate in Miami
— as any competent FBI agent who was actually interested in
assessing Steele’s credibility would have figured out in about
five minutes (that’s about how long it took a State Department
official to figure it out when Steele subsequently spun this
yarn for her).

While Steele was scrivening away, the Clinton campaign staff at
the Democratic convention in Philadelphia was wasting no time.
On July 24, with revelations from the hacked DNC emails still
breaking and the convention about to begin, Clinton campaign
manager Robbie Mook told CNN:

What’s disturbing to us is that we — experts are telling us that
Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and
other experts are now saying that they are — the Russians are
releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping
Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails
were released on the eve of our convention here.

That was the narrative. We didn’t need to get it from Russian
intelligence. We got it from the spokesman for the Clinton
campaign itself: Russia hacked emails and strategically leaked
them with the intention of undermining Clinton and promoting
Trump’s candidacy.

It was a great story for Clinton: She would be delighted to have
Americans reading Democratic emails she was not party to, rather
than speculating about her own emails. The DNC emails were
basically a dud, making explicit the already manifest fact that
the party was in the tank for Clinton against Bernie Sanders.
More consequential was that they helped the media push the
Clinton email scandal out of the limelight for a few days,
between the embarrassment of a few top Democrats whose emails
were published and the convention drama — speeches by the Obamas
and Clintons, and Khizr Khan, the father of a heroic fallen
Muslim American soldier, Captain Humayan Khan, blasting Trump’s
proposed restrictions on Muslims entering the U.S.

The Political Narrative Seamlessly Becomes an Investigation

Getting her own email scandal out of the public eye was what
Clinton wanted. And the Obama administration went right along
for the ride.

At exactly the time Clinton was rolling out the Trump-Russia
narrative, based on the DNC email hacking, Alexander Downer — an
Australian ambassador who once arranged a $25 million
contribution to the Clinton Foundation, and who was closely tied
to Steele’s British intelligence colleagues — suddenly
remembered a conversation two months earlier with a nondescript
Trump campaign adviser. That young fellow, George Papadopoulos,
had made a vague remark about hearing that the Russians had some
kind of compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. Eureka,
Downer exclaimed to himself, Papadopoulos must have meant the
DNC emails! Whereupon the diplomat sauntered over to the U.S.
embassy to alert officials from the Obama State Department that
Secretary Clinton used to run.

Quite the leap of logic. Remember, the DNC emails did not
involve Clinton. Plus, even Downer admits that Papadopoulos
never mentioned the word emails in their barroom conversation.
There is not a scintilla of indication that Papadopoulos knew
anything about DNC emails or Russia’s suspected hacking of them.
Months earlier, he says he had been told by the mysterious
Maltese academic, Josef Mifsud, that the Kremlin might have Mrs.
Clinton’s own emails from her non-secure homebrew server —
which, if the conversation really happened, would have made
Mifsud about the zillionth person to so hypothesize on that
subject. (See, e.g., Director Comey’s July 5 remarks: “We assess
it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary
Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”)

No matter. At the same time that Hillary Clinton had her
campaign proclaim that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia
as part of a corrupt Trump-Putin conspiracy to swing the
election to Trump, and Steele dutifully reported that the DNC
emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump-
Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump, the FBI opened
Crossfire Hurricane on — you’ll never guess! — suspicion that
the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt
Trump–Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump.

What a coincidence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hillary-clinton-
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