by Andrew C. McCarthy
Hillary Clinton personally signed off on the Russiagate farce to distract attention from her email scandal, according to a Russian intelligence analysis that was obtained by U.S. intelligence agencies in July 2016.
That is the bombshell allegation that National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe has just dropped on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the first presidential debate just a few hours away and with former FBI director James Comey scheduled to testify before that Committee tomorrow morning.
Ratcliffe’s letter to Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., N.C.) asserts that in late July 2016, American intelligence agencies “obtained insight” into an analysis by Russian spies, which alleged that Democratic “U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to stir up a scandal” against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The plan involved “tying [Trump] to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
Let’s put this information in context.
Mrs. Clinton was cleared of criminal charges in a July 5, 2016, press conference by then-director Comey. This prompted outrage over whether the Obama administration had distorted the criminal law applicable to mishandling classified information in order to give Clinton a pass. The email scandal would dog Clinton throughout the campaign.
On July 25, less than three weeks after the Comey press conference, the 2016 Democratic National Convention began in Philadelphia. Just three days earlier, on July 22, the hacked DNC emails began being published. By that point, former British spy Christopher Steele had been commissioned by the Clinton campaign (through a lawyer for the campaign and the DNC) to compile research tying Trump to Russia. Steele ran a London-based private intelligence business, whose clients include Russian oligarchs. Moreover, as I detailed in my column over the weekend, in compiling the dossier, Steele relied heavily on Igor Danchenko, a man the FBI investigated in 2009-10 on suspicion that he was a Russian spy.
Days after the hacked DNC emails began being published, Steele generated a dossier report alleging that Trump was in “a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with “Russian leadership.” The “evidence of extensive conspiracy between Trump’s campaign team and [the] Kremlin,” Steele claimed, included the hacking and publication of DNC emails: “[T]the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the [DNC] to the WikiLeaks platform.” This “operation,” Steele maintained, “had the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” In exchange, Trump had purportedly committed both to downplay Russian intervention in Ukraine and raise American defense commitments to NATO as campaign issues.
Further, Steele ludicrously claimed that Trump had “moles within the DNC and hackers in the US as well as outside in Russia.” On the Trump side, Steele added, the conspiracy was “managed” by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, who was purportedly using campaign adviser Carter Page as an intermediary.
This story was absurd, through and through.