Patrick J. Buchanan:
Well over a year after the FBI began investigating “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major indictment.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been charged with a series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President Donald Trump or 2016.
With a leak to CNN that indictments were coming, Mueller’s office stole the weekend headlines. This blanketed the explosive news on a separate front, as the dots began to be connected on a bipartisan plot to bring down Trump that began two years ago.
And like “Murder on the Orient Express,” it seems almost everyone on the train had a hand in the plot.
The narrative begins in October 2015.
Then it was that the Washington Free Beacon, a neocon website,engaged a firm of researchers called Fusion GPS to do deep dirt-diving into Trump’s personal and professional life–and take him out.
A spinoff of Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, the Beacon is run by his son-in-law. And its Daddy Warbucks is the GOP oligarch and hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.
From October 2015 to May 2016, Fusion GPS dug up dirt for the neocons and never-Trumpers. By May, however, Trump had routed all rivals and was the certain Republican nominee.
So the Beacon bailed, and Fusion GPS found two new cash cows to finance its dirt-diving–the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
To keep the sordid business at arm’s length, both engaged the party’s law firm of Perkins Coie. Paid $12.4 million by the DNC and Clinton campaign, Perkins used part of this cash hoard to pay Fusion GPS.
Here is where it begins to get interesting.
In June 2016, Fusion GPS engaged a British spy, Christopher Steele, who had headed up the Russia desk at MI6, to ferret out any connections between Trump and Russia.
Steele began contacting old acquaintances in the FSB, the Russian intelligence service. And the Russians began to feed him astonishing dirt on Trump that could, if substantiated, kill his candidacy.
Among the allegations was that Trump had consorted with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, that the Kremlin was blackmailing him, that there was provable collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In memos from June to October 2016, Steele passed this on to Fusion GPS, which passed it on to major U.S. newspapers. But as the press was unable to verify it, they declined to publish it.
Steele’s final product, a 35-page dossier, has been described as full of “unsubstantiated and salacious allegations.”
Steele’s research, however, had also made its way to James Comey’s FBI, which was apparently so taken with it that the bureau considered paying Steele to continue his work.
About this “astonishing” development, columnist Byron York of the Washington Examiner quotes Sen. Chuck Grassley:
“The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises … questions about the FBI’s independence from politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends.”
The questions begin to pile up.
- What was the FBI’s relationship with the British spy who was so wired into Russian intelligence?
- Did the FBI use the information Steele dug up to expand its own investigation of Russia-Trump “collusion”? Did the FBI pass what Steele unearthed to the White House and the National Security Council?
- Did the Obama administration use the information from the Steele dossier to justify unmasking the names of Trump officials that had been picked up on legitimate electronic intercepts?
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed they did not know that Perkins Coie had enlisted Fusion GPA or the British spy to dig up dirt on Trump.
The Demac-RATS would see America ruined all in a attempt to bring Trump down and this is the same party that the Hollywood airheads are always supporting the Demac-Rat Party
I think the primary point of the whole story is being missed: never-Trump Republicans, Hillary, the DNC and the Obama administration have all plowed millions and millions of dollars into financing various intelligence agencies to dig up dirt… ANY dirt… on Trump. So far, here is what they have found.
1.
No, it does not.
That associates of the Clinton campaign would do so is nothing more than opposition research, a practice as old as politics itself. Campaigns routinely do this. I’ll presume integrity and due diligence on the part of a man like Christopher Steele before a scuzzbucket like James O’Keefe any day of the week. The right seems to have no problem with the latter, nor do they particularly care who pays his bills.
As for the FBI, investigating possible criminal activities is its primary function. You don’t get immunity from FBI scrutiny just because you’re a partisan candidate for the highest office in the land. If anything, protecting the integrity of the office mandates an even higher degree of vigilance.
There were so many red warning flags in Trump’s case that failure to look into them would have bordered on criminal negligence. If more people had realized that, we wouldn’t be where we are now. Nor does that necessarily mean that Hillary Clinton would be in the White House. Trump and Clinton weren’t the only options.
@Greg:
Well, not in a liberal’s mind. However, for those who once believed justice was blind and everyone deserved equal justice, politicizing and weaponizing the DOJ and FBI is a serious deterioration of our Constitutional protections.
Constitutional protection claims from people supporting a guy who recently advocated pulling the broadcast licenses of networks that say things about him he doesn’t like are wearing a bit thin. He may be headed for a first-hand demonstration of how the Constitution works.
@Greg:
How did he “advocate” that? Thus far, Trump has followed the Constitution and LAWS far more respectfully than the socialist Obama ever did. Let’s wait and see if Trump ever pays Russian agents for false justifications to illegally spy on innocent US citizens, runs guns to dangerous Mexican drug cartels to undercut the 2nd Amendment or weaponizes the IRS against political opponents.
@Greg:
Unless you’re Hillary Clinton, right?
@Greg: So networks can spread disinformation with the intent to further a political party they are in bed with?
No, that’s corruption.
Libel laws need to be expanded so you can’t take down a political opponent simply by saying they “sexually assaulted” someone.
How many times now have courts blocked Trump’s executive orders owing to Constitutional issues? I’ve lost count.
@Greg:
Let me help you. ZERO. Just because activist liberal judges legislate from the bench and take it upon themselves to decide what is best for our national security (but in reality simply doing whatever they can do to subvert the legal actions of a legitimate President) does not in any way, form or fashion imply that they have any Constitutional concerns.
How many have been reversed by the Supreme Court? I’ve lost count.