Really solid recapitulation - good to pass around as a red pill
http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/25/russiagates-damage-country-will-take-years-realize/
Russiagate’s Damage To The Country Will Take Years To Realize
Willis L. Krumholz
FTA:
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If our country is ever to recover from this mess, we can’t forget how we got here. Russians were attempting to hack both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee in late 2015. Whether the DNC was ultimately hacked or suffered an internal leak, the truth remains that the DNC documents and emails obtained by WikiLeaks showed the entire country that Hillary Clinton, and those around her, were corrupt and would bend the rules (or worse) for power. There was never a real and fair contest between her and Bernie Sanders.
As soon as the Clinton campaign realized its misdeeds toward Bernie had been made public, they blamed Russia. They immediately began putting out a narrative that attempted to say Russia had acted to favor Trump, which included paying Fusion GPS—a notorious propaganda outfit with ties to loads of so-called journalists—to create ties between Trump and Russia.
Fusion GPS then hired a former British spy, Chris Steele, to boost their credibility. He used a different British guy with ties to the Kremlin, Edward Baumgartner, who employed unknown Russians to write a series of Word documents that alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
Meanwhile, Clinton stooge Cody Shearer wrote other documents that alleged Trump-Russia collusion, and Clinton stooge Sidney Blumenthal disseminated those documents into the Obama State Department with the help of would-be Clinton administration secretary of state Victoria Nuland. The State Department people then gave those documents to the FBI.
In short, the Hillary campaign peppered the Obama executive branch with allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. The Obama intelligence apparatus, pushed on by Obama’s Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, was only too happy to run with it. Jim Comey’s FBI then used those Word documents to get a warrant from a secret court to spy on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide, which allowed the FBI to spy on the rival political party’s presidential campaign.
Coordinated with a Media Influence Operation
The FBI’s involvement allowed Fusion GPS and the journalists it was working with to put out all sorts of stories before the election, meant to damage Trump’s candidacy. These stories alleged that the ties between Trump and Russia were so serious, the FBI was investigating them. For example, CNN and others ran stories about the FBI looking into Trump because there was supposedly a computer in Trump Tower that was communicating with a Russian bank.
When the FBI figured out that Steele and his boss at Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, were planting stories in the media, rules forced the FBI to discontinue ties with Steele. But they didn’t tell these things to the court used to get a secret warrant on the Trump campaign, and they continued to talk to Steele via Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department (DOJ) official whose wife, Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS.
Fusion GPS didn’t just use the Word docs it had created to push the narrative of Trump-Russia collusion. Before and after the election, there were all sorts of set-ups. In but one example, the Russians who met with Don Jr. in Trump tower, a meeting often cited as a supposed example of collusion, were working with Fusion GPS. Fusion’s Simpson met with the Russians present both before and after that meeting, and even supplied the materials that the Russians handed out at the meeting.
In another example, Joseph Mifsud, the supposedly Kremlin-linked European who supposedly told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, likely has ties to Western intelligence agencies. And the Aussie ambassador who relayed to “U.S. officials” what Papadopoulos said that Mifsud said, has ties to the Clinton foundation. Then there’s Stefan Halper—a sketchy man who was for some reason on the Pentagon payroll, and highly paid at that—who approached multiple Trump campaign people in 2016.
An All-Out Effort to Pre-Empt, then Undo, 2016
Once Trump won, all hell broke loose.
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