Had Hillary Clinton just won the 2016 election, there would have been neither a Mueller investigation nor much talk of Russian collusion.
No Trump Victory, No Collusion Investigation
A losing Donald Trump would have slunk off to left-wing and Never-Trump ridicule and condemnation — and no investigation about collusion.
A defeated Trump would have posed no threat to the 16-year Obama-Clinton progressive project. President Clinton would have been content to let her unverified but lurid dossier rumors hound Trump for the rest of his life, with Trump as the supposed “loser” who had tried, in cahoots with the Russians, to unfairly beat Hillary, though he pathetically failed even at that.
Of course, a President Hillary Clinton herself may well have faced some Russian blackmail attempts. Kremlin fixers would have likely threatened to go public that their planted lies to Christopher Steele were gobbled up by President Clinton’s own private Fusion GPS hit team. In essence, the Russians would have claimed that they had fueled the dossier that wounded the Trump campaign — and expected some sort of quid pro quo, perhaps in Uranium One fashion.
Obama-administration bureaucrats — Attorney General Loretta Lynch, subordinate attorneys general such as Bruce Ohr and Rod Rosenstein, FBI grandees such as James Baker, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, intelligence kingpins such as John Brennan and James Clapper, and national-security officials turned intelligence sleuths such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power — would all have been competing on the basis of service beyond the call of duty for top jobs in the Clinton administration.
Among their swamp talking points would have been rival obsequious claims to have squashed Trump. Clinton-administration transition officials would have had to parcel out patronage by judging the relative help of people who had seeded Hillary’s Steele dossier around the government and the media, or fooled a FISA court to monitor Carter Page and thereby generated leaks that the Trump campaign was “under investigation,” or obstructed the Clinton email investigation, or placed an informant in Trump’s campaign, or unmasked the contents of surveilled conversations and leaked them to the press.
Translated, that means the hysteria that helped prompt the Mueller investigation was in part whipped up by those who had knowingly acted unethically or illegally during and also after the 2016 campaign. These Obama officials bet on the sure-thing but wrong horse and suddenly, after Nov. 8, 2016, feared that they were soon to be subject to lots of criminal exposure.
Assume that both the ruse of “collusion” and James Comey’s leaking gambit to prompt a special counsel’s investigation were thus the preemptive defenses of an assortment of crimes by Obama-era officials, such as lying to federal officials, conspiracy to obstruct justice, illegally leaking confidential or classified documents to the media, deceiving a FISA court, and myriad conflicts of interest. In other words, there were never any evidentiary reasons to appoint a special counsel other than to divert attention away from an array of wrongdoing. After 22 months, that fact finally became clear even to a largely partisan group of attorneys, once eager to become folk heroes by aborting the Trump presidency.
Let us hope both that Attorney General Barr can now turn to the real illegal behavior of an entire array of Obama-administration officials, and that the public at last can have access to unredacted documents that record their frenzied and illegal efforts.
No Phony Dossier, No Investigation
The Clinton-purchased Steele Dossier was the encephalitic virus that infected the entire Washington establishment between 2016 and 2019.
Without it, there would have been no such thing as “collusion,” much less a Mueller investigation.
Had James Comey and his associates (and Bruce Ohr had briefed them all previously on the shaky dossier) been honest and apprised the FISA court in October 2016 that their “opposition research” evidence for a warrant was 1) paid for by Hillary Clinton, 2) largely written by a foreign national (with help from the spouse of Obama DOJ official Bruce Ohr) who despised Donald Trump and who was dismissed from his nebulous relationship with the FBI, 3) remained unverified, and 4) served as the basis for submitted news accounts that in circular fashion supposedly substantiated collusionary behavior, then the writ might have been rejected and the dossier’s usefulness died.
Immediately after the election, the dossier was reinvigorated (by nervous-lame-duck careerists like John Brennan and James Clapper, and Senator John McCain) to serve a new role in aborting the Trump presidency, given that it had always been the only real basis for the entire mythology of Trump-Russian collusion.
Paul Manafort was no doubt duplicitous and acted in a variety of felonious ways, but, without the seeded dossier, his illegal behavior would no more have sparked a wider investigation of the Trump campaign than the actions of the Podesta brothers (whose suspect Russian ties had long contaminated the Clinton campaign) would have spurred investigations of liberal Russian collusion and profiteering.
The Machiavellian brilliance of Trump-hater and otherwise washed-up hack Christopher Steele was his knowledge that lying outrageously (just ask Jussie Smollett) is a far more effective weapon than lying incrementally.
So, Steele’s insertion of the Trump-prostitute-Obama’s-hotel-bed-urolagnia meme was the sharp hook that snagged Washington’s swamp creatures. The Steele dossier was not just spurious in its wild claims about Carter Page eyeing billion-dollar payoffs or a bumbling Michael Cohen in Prague on a secret Trump collusionary mission, it was also so salacious that it served as lurid pornography that supercharged its odyssey throughout the bowels of the Obama government and the media.
The ‘All-Stars’ and ‘Dream Team’ Were Flawed from the Beginning
Robert Mueller spent over $30 million and 674 days in vain ferreting out “collusion” not because it was necessarily difficult to prove such a charge either true or false. After all, the basis for the allegation, the veracity of the Steele dossier, could have been easily and quickly adjudicated.
Indeed, already by May 2017 and the beginning of Mueller’s investigation, the dossier was roundly denounced as fraudulent. FISA transcripts of surveilled conversations had already apprised officials that there was no direct evidence of collusion, which is why Peter Strzok, well before Mueller began, had privately warned his paramour and soon to be fellow Mueller team member, Lisa Page, that “there’s no big there there” to the collusion charge.
