Russiagate

In the pantheon of Trump adversaries, Robert Mueller may rank at the very top. Everything about Mueller – his rectitude, his formality, his blueblood ancestry, his lifelong marriage to his high school sweetheart – was anathema to Trump who has sought, as far as possible, to disestablish the Washington establishment. Yesterday, Trump engaged in a round of gloating over Mueller’s death at age 81, declaring on social media that it couldn’t have come soon enough: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” Gee whiz. No crocodile tears from him for the G-Man who had devoted his life to public service. “It is clearly wrong and unchristian behavior,” Republican Rep. Don Bacon wrote. It should, however, come as no surprise.

Cockburn has awakened from his Russiagate slumber with the news that the Trump administration is seeking to file charges against former FBI director James Comey in federal court within the next few days. The statute of limitations on Comey’s September 30, 2020 testimony about ties between Russia and Trump’s second campaign for president is about to expire, meaning we’re set to re-litigate the Mueller Report. While we’re at it, why not take a look at Solyndra, yellowcake uranium, Whitewater, Iran-Contra, Watergate and Credit Mobilier?   Russiagate is a bit more current, though, and Trump is flinging his prosecutors all over the room.

Tulsi Gabbard's declassification of documents that support the view that the intelligence community engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to target the incoming president with false or dubious claims is truly explosive – unless you deliberately choose to ignore it. Surprise, surprise – the same people who helped manufacture and propagate these claims in the first place are sticking to their guns, with the normal veterans of the CNN octobox.

Yesterday, I wrote about the revelations with which Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, electrified the world.  We had all grown up chewing on the Russia Collusion Delusion, and most of us were happy to have that political enormity pass through the usual emunctory processes and be deposited in some far off midden or compost heap.   But Tulsi showed that, however expert we thought ourselves about the subject, that great precautionary motto – "things are always worse than they seem”– was pertinent even here.

“Who will guard the guardians?” That question, posed two millennia ago by the Roman poet, Juvenal, is just as relevant today. It recurs every time we learn of a new political scandal – or suspect one is being hidden from us.

As the latest special counsel files new charges against former president Donald Trump, it’s beginning to look like legal crusades in America are more important than political ones. Locking up one’s political opponents is the sort of thing they used to do in Ukraine, after all, or the totalitarian state of which Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon. Just a few years after claims of Russian collusion with the winning candidate of America’s 2016 presidential election were debunked, it is ironic that a Russian’s critique of our political culture nearly half a century ago captures our current predicament so clearly.

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

In May, when a federal jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of one count of lying to the FBI, the cadre of politicians, pundits and activists that comprise what they consider a “resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency were brimming with indignation at the insult of its having gone to trial at all. The Sussmann prosecution was the first case from special counsel John Durham to go to trial. Durham was appointed in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. And it took only a few hours for the jury to rule against him.

Timothy Johnson, a "researcher" with Media Matters for America, announced Monday that he had left the organization after ten years — and apparently not on amicable terms. Johnson not only accused his former boss of covering for a sexual predator, but offered a rare mea culpa for his time with Media Matters. Maybe —  just maybe — he notes, the organization dedicated to using out-of-context quotes, spurious accusations, and old tweets to destroy the livelihoods of its political enemies is not the virtuous place he thought it to be. In a long tweet thread, Johnson claims that Media Matters editorial director Ben Dimiero knew for years that a male staff member was engaging in sexual misconduct but did nothing to stop him. He writes: This man suddenly resigned.

The month of May won’t be a merry one for Michael Sussmann, one of Hillary Clinton’s top lawyers at her favorite election law firm Perkins Coie, who is facing a criminal charge of lying to the FBI when he passed information to the Bureau’s general counsel, James Baker. Sussman stated explicitly that he was acting as a “good citizen,” not as a lawyer for Trump’s election opponents. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. The tip was false. It described a secret, traitorous back-channel connection between candidate Trump and the Kremlin and included some “white papers” as “proof.” But that deceit is not part of this criminal charge.

The latest filing by Special Counsel John Durham, investigating Russiagate and the Hillary Clinton campaign, suggests the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper than we thought. One hates to sound like Rachel Maddow, but it is now much more likely that the walls are closing in. Durham filed a new 34-page motion on April 15 in answer to defendant Michael Sussman's request to dismiss the case against him. Durham accused Sussman of lying to the FBI about his working for the Clinton campaign while he was trying to sell the Bureau on an investigation into Trump's ties to Russia, focusing on alleged internet pings between a Trump server and the Russian Alfa Bank. Sussman's claims also included a number of pings against Trump Tower WiFi and later White House WiFi by a Russian-made Yota cellphone.

Part I of this article demonstrated that a conspiracy to smear Donald Trump with false allegations of collusion with Russia took place, with Hillary Clinton at its head. This second part will show the FBI was an active participant in the conspiracy. The FBI smoking gun has been hiding in plain sight. In June 2018 Inspector General for the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including FBI director James Comey’s drafting of a surprise press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even complete.

Hard as the programmers try and tell us there is only one story at a time — Ukraine for now — or that a trite phrase like “but her emails” dismisses one of the most important political events of our time, something sinister happened in the United States which demands our attention. If we remain distracted, it will happen again in 2024. We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today's Part I will show that Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Donald Trump. Part II to follow will show that the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy. In the mainstream media vernacular, we are bearing witness.

There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them. According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The Clinton campaign during the election hid from FBI, CIA and the media that it was the source of the information gathered. Durham doesn't use the word "spy," but that in no way changes what happened. The recent filing relates to Durham’s September indictment of Michael Sussmann, an attorney who represented the Clinton campaign while at the Perkins Coie law firm.

Mike Pompeo has ‘every reason to believe’ director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe’s assessment that the recent story about Hunter Biden and his emails is not the product of Russian disinformation. https://twitter.com/jseldin/status/1318933935007633410 'I have every reason to believe he's got it exactly right,' the secretary of state said during a Wednesday press briefing in response to a question from The Spectator. The New York Post's report contains emails purportedly from Hunter Biden in which he discusses setting up meetings between foreign business associates and vice president Joe Biden.

If Trump is reelected, prepare for Russiagate 2.0. This time it'll be even crazier. The Hunter Biden story has given the President's opponents an excuse to do what they do best: shout 'Russia' at any allegation they don't like. It sounds insane that they would double down on a strategy that has failed so miserably before. The Democratic party's obsession with the Trump-Russia conspiracy alienated average Americans and with very little payoff. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's multi-year investigation indicated that there was insufficient evidence to show collusion between Trump and Moscow, though it did find that Russia had attempted to hack the election.