Yes, That Lying Cunt Hillary Clinton Orchestrated the Russia-Collusion Farce

Did she or didn’t she?

Of course she did. In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton, in an 
effort to divert attention from the email scandal that was 
haunting her presidential bid, directed her campaign to peddle a 
political narrative that Russia’s suspected hacking and leaking 
of Democratic Party emails was in furtherance of a conspiracy 
between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to swing the election to 
Trump.

That is, as I argued in Ball of Collusion, the Clinton campaign 
dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump–Russia collusion 
farce. And in promoting it, President Obama’s former secretary 
of state had a willing and able partner in the Obama 
administration — very much including its intelligence and law-
enforcement apparatus.

Democrats Change Their Tune

It was amazing to watch Democrats play Twister this week, as 
National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe added documentary 
corroboration to the disclosure he’d made the week before. In 
that first revelation, via letter to the Senate Judiciary 
Committee, Ratcliffe explained that, because our spy agencies 
have very effective foreign-intelligence-gathering methods, they 
were able to “obtain insight” into a Russian intelligence 
analysis that concluded Clinton orchestrated the damaging 
political narrative. That is, Clinton actually did what she 
accused Trump of doing: She colluded with Russians (through yet 
another foreigner she recruited to meddle in the 2016 
presidential campaign: the ludicrous former British spy 
Christopher Steele) in order to damage Trump’s campaign and 
cinch the election for herself.

As ever with the Clintonistas: When they’re moving their lips, 
they’re projecting.

Ratcliffe’s initial revelation came with a caveat: While our spy 
agencies judged Moscow’s analysis about Clinton to be authentic 
(in the sense of truly being a Russian intel product), they 
could not vouch for its accuracy (i.e., it might reflect what 
the Russians really believed, but it might alternatively be 
exaggeration or fabrication). This was not a wobble. 
Intelligence agencies sweep up scads of information, and they 
must always grade its reliability with a skeptical eye to avoid 
deluding themselves.

But this was all Democrats needed . . . at least at first. At a 
Judiciary Committee hearing, former FBI director James Comey and 
Senate Democrats scoffed at Ratcliffe’s frank, professional 
concession, claiming it discredited his disclosure in its 
entirety, and called his competence into question. He’d clearly 
been duped by Russian disinformation . . . said the people who 
seem to have made a habit of being duped by Russian 
disinformation.

Did the Russians have a window into the Clinton campaign? It 
sure looks that way, between Secretary Clinton’s security 
practices (which even Comey has described as irresponsible) and 
her retention of Steele, with his stable of Russian oligarch 
clients and his dossier “primary subsource,” whom the FBI 
suspected (with copious reason) to be a Russian asset.

But the point here is not whether Russian spies, thanks to 
Clinton’s own carelessness, had effectively infiltrated her 
campaign. The point is: Clinton was undeniably doing what, it 
turns out, the Russians were contemporaneously detecting.

Want to play epistemological acrobatics? Okay, fine. We can 
spend hours pondering whether Russian spies generated an 
assessment about what Clinton was up to because they 
legitimately wanted to inform their Kremlin superiors, or 
whether they did it because they wanted our spies to see it and 
to wonder whether the Russians knew that we knew that the 
Russians knew . . .

I’d prefer to keep my eye on the ball, which has precious little 
to do with spy games and Russian disinformation. The Russians 
were able to deduce what Hillary Clinton was up to because it 
was patently obvious. It did not take a super sleuth to figure 
this one out. Just eyes to see and ears to hear.

That’s why you might have noticed a shift in Democratic tone 
when Ratcliffe released more documents.

The second set of disclosures showed that the CIA had taken the 
Russian information seriously enough that (a) then-director John 
Brennan quickly briefed President Obama and his administration’s 
national-security team about it and (b) the agency included the 
Russian intel about Clinton in a memo to the FBI, which laid out 
information gleaned by the “Crossfire Hurricane fusion cell” 
that Brennan had assembled to promote the Trump–Russia storyline.

After Ratcliffe published these documents, we were no longer 
hearing much about disinformation. Now the talking point became: 
Well, there was nothing criminal in what Clinton did; she was 
simply worried about a potentially corrupt conspiracy between 
Trump and Putin — and who wouldn’t be?

Right . . . worried based on absolutely zero evidence. There was 
not a shred of proof that Donald Trump and his campaign had any 
foreknowledge of, much less complicity in, the suspected Russian 
hack of DNC emails. That, you may remember, was the sinkhole on 
which the collusion farce was constructed.

Clinton Retains Steele to Craft Trump–Russia Narrative

At this point, Democrats have no choice but to concede Clinton’s 
catalytic role in the collusion narrative because there is no 
other rational way to look at what happened — not for any 
sentient person, never mind Russian intelligence agents.

Let’s look at the timeline.

In spring 2016, the Clinton campaign, through their lawyers at 
Perkins Coie (an activist Democratic firm that also represents 
the DNC), retained Steele to compile opposition research 
connecting Trump and Russia. By June 20, Steele had produced the 
first of his dossier “reports.” It sets forth the infamous “pee 
tape” farce, at which any competent investigator would have 
rolled his eyes, especially if he knew anything about Steele’s 
self-professed Trump derangement. For Steele, the rumor that 
Putin has a video of Trump cavorting with prostitutes is not 
good enough; he figures the story is better if he adds that 
Trump went out of his way to stage the “golden shower” 
performance on a bed in which the Obamas — “whom he hated” — had 
slept.

It’s melodrama, in the now familiar genre of Trump fever-dream. 
Beyond that, Steele’s “report” could have been written by 
Clinton or Brennan themselves. It frets over Trump’s by-then-
well-documented skepticism about NATO, surmising that such 
thinking couldn’t possibly be explained by anything other than 
Trump’s being blackmailed by Putin.

As usual, what’s actually interesting about a Steele “report” is 
what’s not in it. There’s nothing about emails. That this is a 
Steele pattern would also have been a red flag for the FBI if 
its top officials, like other devotees of the progressive 
international order, had not been as repulsed by Trump’s 
candidacy as Steele was. None of the seemingly important things 
Steele reports are verifiable (and some of them are plain 
false); by contrast, the actually important things that happen 
are never in Steele’s “intelligence reporting” until after they 
happen. He was not unearthing information as an intelligence 
professional; he was a paid political hack conveniently folding 
reported news into Clinton’s anti-Trump campaign narrative.

Assange Issues a Threat as the Clinton Emails Scandal Intensifies

As Steele might have noted had he been paying attention, over a 
week before his June 20 “report,” WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange 
had publicly said, “We have emails pending publication,” which 
were “in relation to Hillary Clinton.” Western intelligence 
services have long observed that WikiLeaks has a collaborative 
relationship with Russia.

At the time, it was not common knowledge that the DNC had been 
hacked. Nor was it widely known that the FBI and the DNC had 
been slow to react to the hack, or that the DNC would deny the 
FBI access to its servers (with the support of the Obama Justice 
Department, which did not take action to seize them for forensic 
examination). Thus, anyone who was focused on Assange would have 
assumed that the emails he was talking about were Clinton’s 
personal emails — the 33,000 she had declined to surrender to 
the State Department even though they were rife with official 
business.

The start of summer was a time of frenzied activity regarding 
Clinton’s email scandal. The FBI, driven by the political 
calendar and the Obama administration’s determination that the 
putative future Democratic president would not be charged with a 
crime, raced to close its probe-for-show before the Democratic 
national convention, scheduled to begin on July 25.

In rapid succession: On June 27, Obama attorney general Loretta 
Lynch had her tarmac tête-à-tête with Mrs. Clinton’s husband 
(the former president who had first brought Lynch to prominence 
by appointing her U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New 
York). On Saturday, July 2, the FBI and the Justice Department 
did their cursory close-out interview of Clinton (which was such 
a sham that she was permitted to have two other subjects of the 
investigation present and assisting her as “counsel”). And on 
July 5, FBI director James Comey held his infamous “exoneration” 
press conference, which illustrated that there was damning 
evidence of Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and 
destruction of government records, and of her promotion of a 
culture of national-security recklessness at the State 
Department; but, nevertheless, that the Obama administration 
would not charge her, even though her conduct violated the 
literal terms of the espionage statute.

If Director Comey thought his press conference was going to put 
the email scandal behind the Bureau and the Clinton campaign, it 
had the opposite effect. Republicans were outraged that the fix 
was in. Democrats were outraged at the director’s misconduct in 
going public with the evidence against an uncharged person. At 
the congressional hearings that immediately ensued, Republicans 
questioned Comey in excruciating detail about all the 
disclosures he’d made concerning Clinton’s mishandling of 
classified information. It emerged that he’d begun preparing his 
exoneration speech months earlier, even though Clinton had not 
been questioned, other central witnesses had not been 
interviewed, and key evidence had not been obtained, let alone 
analyzed.

Heading into the convention that she’d hoped would be a 
coronation, Clinton was reeling. Her email scandal was 
intensifying rather than dissipating. And Assange seemed to be 
threatening to leak the very emails she had taken pains not just 
to delete but to destroy — employing the BleachBit program so no 
one could ever read them. (Of course, as the Clinton campaign 
had to realize, if a foreign intelligence service had hacked 
into her non-secure homebrew system to copy the emails and slip 
them to WikiLeaks, an after-the-fact BleachBit treatment would 
not have helped.)

The DNC Emails

On July 22, Assange pulled the trigger, but it was not the shot 
anyone was expecting. He began rolling out thousands of emails. 
But not Secretary Clinton’s emails. These were the DNC’s emails.

For Clinton, this was manna from heaven.

Even though Assange had characteristically sought to drum up 
attention by promising emails “in relation to Clinton,” the 
Democrats’ nominee was not an active participant in the DNC 
emails. Nor could the hacking of the DNC be blamed on her 
reckless use of a non-government server system. Although Assange 
had implied that the emails he was about to release would damage 
Clinton, they did not damage her at all.

To the contrary, they helped her. Clinton was able to pose as 
the victim, targeted by a WikiLeaks-Russia scheme; yet she 
suffered none of the harms of such a scheme, since her own 
emails were not at issue. In addition, the fact that emails were 
at the center of the controversy would enable her to conflate 
her email scandal with the hacking of the DNC. Now, if Trump or 
other Republicans referred to her destroyed emails, it would be 
spun as a reference to the DNC emails that Russia was suspected 
of hacking. When Trump foolishly chided that he hoped Russia 
found Clinton’s emails, it would be spun as a plea that Russia 
hack the DNC — even though he was obviously referring to the 
emails Clinton had purged, and doing so under circumstances 
where Clinton’s private servers had long been decommissioned and 
in the FBI’s possession.

Steele and the Campaign Get On-Message

Naturally, publication of the hacked DNC emails was included, 
post facto, in the Trump-Russia narrative that Steele, at the 
Clinton campaign’s urging, had already been fabricating for 
weeks. The well-paid former spy got busy, writing a new 
“intelligence report.” He thundered about an “extensive 
conspiracy between TRUMP’s campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned 
at the highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff 
based in the US,” which explained the Kremlin’s responsibility 
for the “recent appearance of DNC-emails on WikiLeaks.” This, of 
course, had been done “with the full knowledge and support of 
TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team” — a quid pro quo 
for Trump’s supposed agreement “to sideline Russian intervention 
in Ukraine as a campaign issue.”

After the lurid “pee tape” story, should we be surprised that 
Steele was just getting warmed up? He related that this “well-
developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign 
and “the Russian leadership” was being coordinated on the Trump 
end “by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul 
MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy adviser, Carter PAGE, and 
others as intermediaries.”

In fact, Manafort and Page do not know each other. Oh, and what 
about that “Russian diplomatic staff based in the US” that 
Steele touted? He pointed to the Russian consulate in Miami as a 
conspiratorial hub. Alas, there is no Russian consulate in Miami 
— as any competent FBI agent who was actually interested in 
assessing Steele’s credibility would have figured out in about 
five minutes (that’s about how long it took a State Department 
official to figure it out when Steele subsequently spun this 
yarn for her).

While Steele was scrivening away, the Clinton campaign staff at 
the Democratic convention in Philadelphia was wasting no time. 
On July 24, with revelations from the hacked DNC emails still 
breaking and the convention about to begin, Clinton campaign 
manager Robbie Mook told CNN:

What’s disturbing to us is that we — experts are telling us that 
Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and 
other experts are now saying that they are — the Russians are 
releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping 
Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails 
were released on the eve of our convention here.

That was the narrative. We didn’t need to get it from Russian 
intelligence. We got it from the spokesman for the Clinton 
campaign itself: Russia hacked emails and strategically leaked 
them with the intention of undermining Clinton and promoting 
Trump’s candidacy.

It was a great story for Clinton: She would be delighted to have 
Americans reading Democratic emails she was not party to, rather 
than speculating about her own emails. The DNC emails were 
basically a dud, making explicit the already manifest fact that 
the party was in the tank for Clinton against Bernie Sanders. 
More consequential was that they helped the media push the 
Clinton email scandal out of the limelight for a few days, 
between the embarrassment of a few top Democrats whose emails 
were published and the convention drama — speeches by the Obamas 
and Clintons, and Khizr Khan, the father of a heroic fallen 
Muslim American soldier, Captain Humayan Khan, blasting Trump’s 
proposed restrictions on Muslims entering the U.S.

The Political Narrative Seamlessly Becomes an Investigation

Getting her own email scandal out of the public eye was what 
Clinton wanted. And the Obama administration went right along 
for the ride.

At exactly the time Clinton was rolling out the Trump-Russia 
narrative, based on the DNC email hacking, Alexander Downer — an 
Australian ambassador who once arranged a $25 million 
contribution to the Clinton Foundation, and who was closely tied 
to Steele’s British intelligence colleagues — suddenly 
remembered a conversation two months earlier with a nondescript 
Trump campaign adviser. That young fellow, George Papadopoulos, 
had made a vague remark about hearing that the Russians had some 
kind of compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. Eureka, 
Downer exclaimed to himself, Papadopoulos must have meant the 
DNC emails! Whereupon the diplomat sauntered over to the U.S. 
embassy to alert officials from the Obama State Department that 
Secretary Clinton used to run.

Quite the leap of logic. Remember, the DNC emails did not 
involve Clinton. Plus, even Downer admits that Papadopoulos 
never mentioned the word emails in their barroom conversation. 
There is not a scintilla of indication that Papadopoulos knew 
anything about DNC emails or Russia’s suspected hacking of them. 
Months earlier, he says he had been told by the mysterious 
Maltese academic, Josef Mifsud, that the Kremlin might have Mrs. 
Clinton’s own emails from her non-secure homebrew server — 
which, if the conversation really happened, would have made 
Mifsud about the zillionth person to so hypothesize on that 
subject. (See, e.g., Director Comey’s July 5 remarks: “We assess 
it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary 
Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”)

No matter. At the same time that Hillary Clinton had her 
campaign proclaim that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia 
as part of a corrupt Trump-Putin conspiracy to swing the 
election to Trump, and Steele dutifully reported that the DNC 
emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump-
Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump, the FBI opened 
Crossfire Hurricane on — you’ll never guess! — suspicion that 
the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt 
Trump–Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump.

What a coincidence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hillary-clinton-
orchestrated-russia-collusion-farce/?utm_source=recirc-
desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-
rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=second