When the Trump collusion story became news in 2016, I’m sure I wasn’t the only anti-Trump writer to do a double-take and look more closely at the story.
In all of five or ten minutes, any rational person — Trump partisan or anti-Trumper — could see how incredibly flimsy the evidence was. More than that, in order to accept Trump as a traitor, you would have had to swallow the information in the laughable dossier advanced by Christopher Steele.
No. The only people who believed the Trump-Russia collusion story were people who wanted to believe it. They wanted so badly for it to be true that they sacrificed their principles, their integrity, and the institution of a free press in America. And try as they might, they never did find the unicorn in that manure pile.
Now the Sussmann trial is at an end. And regardless of whether he is found guilty or innocent of lying to the FBI, the testimony offered in his defense and by the prosecution condemns the entire, rotten, stinking cabal of rabid partisans who believed they knew better than the American people what was best for the country. They wanted to so damage Donald Trump that he would be unable to govern.
It’s clear that FBI agents — sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution — put their thumb on the scales in order to get rid of Donald Trump. They believed — as the hysterical left still believes — he was a danger to the U.S.
Even if Trump was a danger, it was not the job of the FBI, the CIA, or any government agency to frame him for something so ludicrous that even the special prosecutor — looking into the matter of Trump-Russia collusion for months — couldn’t find enough evidence to present to a grand jury.
At the top of the pyramid in this ham-and-egg plot is none other than Hillary Clinton. Rarely mentioned these days is that Clinton was the candidate for the opposition party. Certainly, some of the angst over the Trump-Russia collusion myth is the very human emotion that the woman destined to be the first female president and the most experienced politician ever to run for high office lost to a rank amateur.
Hillary Clinton did not accept then and does not accept now that she lost because she had absolutely no new ideas — nothing whatsoever to offer the voter except to repeat how “dangerous” Trump was. That and, of course, the first woman president. She never realized that voters wanted actual ideas from her. Without them, they rejected her.
What we learned in the Sussmann trial is that Hillary Clinton herself ordered the leak to the media about a false story involving Trump and a Russian bank. That act set in motion a chain of events that led to an enormous disinformation campaign.
So why isn’t Hillary Clinton banned from Twitter, asks media critic Matt Taibbi?
There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.
More importantly, there’s no term for the offense Democrats committed in 2016, though it was similar to Watergate. Instead of a “third-rate burglary” and a bug, Democrats sent schlock research to the FBI, who in turn lied to the secret FISA court and obtained “legal” surveillance authority over former Trump aide Carter Page (which opened doors to searches of everyone connected to Page). Worse, instead of petty “ratfucking” like Donald Segretti’s “Canuck letter,” the Clinton campaign created and fueled a successful, years-long campaign of official harassment and media fraud. They innovated an extraordinary trick, using government connections and press to generate real criminal and counterintelligence investigations of political enemies, mostly all based on what we now know to be self-generated nonsense.
Matt Taibbi is no fan of Trump. But he hates the destruction of America even more. The silence of most in the media about this incredible story is sickening. It leads Taibbi to question why Hillary Clinton is still allowed to post on Twitter — or any other social media platform.
I’m not a fan of throwing people off Twitter, but how can knowingly launching thousands of bogus news stories across a period of years, leading millions of people to believe lies and expect news that never arrived, not qualify as causing “widespread confusion on public issues”?
Taibbi tabulates the damage done by Clinton and her allies in the media.
The impact on the population of these and other stories was awesome, defining the Trump presidency before it began. An Economist/YouGov poll from late December, 2016, in other words even before Russiagate even came to a full news boil, showed an astonishing 50% of Clinton voters believed Russia had “tampered with vote tallies.” This is one of many interesting pieces of news only discoverable on the WayBack Machine now.
Taibbi sums up the danger.
For all the whining by the likes of Gobbels-for-a-nanosecond Nina Jankowicz of the now-paused DHS “Disinformation Governance Board,” disinformation is a real danger in the Internet age. The most dangerous variety, however, isn’t from random users in porn-like chats, but the kind exposed by the Clinton campaign. There’s just no defense against privately-generated fake news stories, commissioned by prominent politicians who in turn hand them to the corporate press, which then runs them with off-the-record nudges of encouragement from agencies like the FBI.
I wonder if, in 50 years, 100 years, the truth will be told or some future Ministry of Information will deem the story too incredible to be true and scotch it.
