Was the Russia Conspiracy Hillary Clinton’s Doomsday Scenario?

Was the Russia Conspiracy Hillary Clinton’s Doomsday Scenario? The politician Plan B tearing the country apart. December 21, 2018 Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The Steele dossier, a document produced by Christopher Steele at the behest of the Clinton campaign is ground zero for the Russia conspiracy theory that is tearing apart the country. Even the Mueller investigation has its ultimate roots in the eavesdropping carried out by the Obama administration using the dossier as evidence and the dubious and unverified claims made by Steele in the dossier.

The Steele dossier has been described as opposition research and it was certainly circulated among reporters in order to spread the Russia conspiracy theory in the media, but its contents were circulated more in the Obama era FBI and the DOJ, and its media rounds seemed more geared to creating stories that would justify a FISA warrant than to any serious effort to sway the electorate with its attacks.

The dossier was never convincing opposition research because its central claim, that Trump was a Russian agent, was too farfetched and detached from election issues to ever connect with voters. It required the complicity of the FBI and the DOJ, and Mueller’s sanction, to give it any credibility.

The dossier’s real role was legal, not political. It wasn’t meant for the tabloids, but to create a pretext for an investigation of Trump and his associates. And so it’s easy to see its usefulness to the Dems today.

But why create a pretext for a secret investigation of Trump before the election was even done?

The FISA warrants had always raised the possibility that the investigation was used to collect information on a rival campaign. And, because of the slow pace of declassification and the lack of a thorough release of information about exactly what was done and who was responsible, that remains a real possibility. But a recent statement by Christopher Steele raises an even more disturbing possibility.

Steele had been hired by Fusion GPS, a smear firm, which in turn had been hired by the Clinton campaign through Perkins Coie.

In response to a lawsuit, Steele admitted that, “Fusion’s immediate client was law firm Perkins Coie. It engaged Fusion to obtain information necessary for Perkins Coie LLP to provide legal advice on the potential impact of Russian involvement on the legal validity of the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election.”

“Based on that advice, parties such as the Democratic National Committee and HFACC Inc. (also known as ‘Hillary for America’) could consider steps they would be legally entitled to take to challenge the validity of the outcome of that election.”

The Steele dossier would have been mostly worthless in a conventional legal challenge of the election outcome, but it was used to launch a very different brand of “legal challenge” that is more often seen in banana republics in which police powers are abused to target the political opposition.

It is highly implausible that the Clinton campaign had hired a firm to investigate the possibility of Russian election tampering as far back as April or June. But it could have been laying the groundwork for a variety of scenarios, including a doomsday scenario in which Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump.

It’s a matter of faith among both Democrats and Republicans that Hillary Clinton never expected to lose. And there’s certainly plenty of evidence of arrogance and complacency by the Clinton campaign. But Steele’s reply offers evidence that some people in the Clinton campaign had a doomsday plan.

To understand why, consider the unique natures of both the Clinton and Trump campaigns.

The Clinton campaign wasn’t just a candidacy thrown together a year or two before an election. It was Clintonworld, a political network going back decades, an interface between government, charity and political campaigns, with loyalists whose entire careers had been built around the Clintons. There’s been nothing quite like it in American history. And it all depended on one unappealing politician. Hillary.

Clintonworld had been badly burned by Hillary’s loss to Obama. The Clinton Foundation wasn’t just about Bill and Hillary. It gave Clintonworlders their own embassy with an international presence, employment opportunities and networking. It was the royal court in exile of the Clintons and it allowed them to maintain an army of loyalists to launch yet another bid for the White House.

A second defeat would be catastrophic because it would kill Clintonworld leaving behind an army of unemployed and unemployable Clintonites with egg on their face after having lost yet another expensive election and burned through another vast fortune of donor cash. And few in the golden halls of Clintonworld wanted to take the fall for Hillary’s poor people skills and lack of popular appeal.

They needed a potential election defeat to be illegitimate even before it happened.

But there was something even bigger at stake. Shortly after Steele got to work on his dossier, Trump was cheering the “Lock her up” chants directed at Hillary. The Clintons had done plenty of things to be locked up for. But Clintonworld staffers knew that Bill and Hillary were unlikely to ever go down. If a new DOJ were to seriously go after them, it would be the minions of Clintonworld who would take the fall.

The Steele dossier became Plan B. A doomsday scenario in case the impossible truly happened.

Was Plan B meant to be Hillary’s revenge by bringing down her rival even if he defeated her? Was it a conspiracy to cripple any possible investigation of the Clintons by instead enmeshing Trump in legal troubles? Was it an excuse to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign? A last ditch effort by Clinton staffers to justify their loss? It could be any and all of the above. But the tactics do reveal certain clues.

The Russia theme enabled abuses like the FISA warrant. Any scandal short of foreign espionage would not have allowed the Obama administration and its Clinton allies to pull off their own Watergate. Being able to eavesdrop on Trump allies was crucial to the conspiracy. But false accusations are also revealing. The accusers tend to slander their targets by accusing them of their own crimes to cover them up. What Trump and his allies have been accused of, is what Clintonworld most feared being accused of.

General Michael Flynn was a special target. The NSC had been abused, and so had to be secured. But one obvious personal reason was the "Lock her up" chants. Revenge is a cliché, but it should never be overlooked when it comes to the famously spiteful Clintons. An ongoing investigation building to impeachment looks a lot like the Clintons seeking revenge for Bill.

Would the Clintons have diverted effort and energy from the campaign to plot a doomsday scenario? We don’t know, but a group in the campaign and integrated within the government certainly did.

There’s been a lot of talk about the ‘deep state’. But anyone who knows Washington D.C. also knows that there are many deep states. Some are ideological, most are careerist. Moving up the ladder is about making the right connections. Political patronage isn’t just a necessary evil, but a way of life. Transactional opportunism defines the microscopic political universe of the city that runs the country.

“Lock her up” was less of a threat to Hillary Clinton than to the people who had been doing her dirty work, and everyone who had been doing their dirty work. Even more than the threat of prison, the fall of Clintonworld was a blow to countless careers. And then there were the Obama people who weren’t invested in Clintonworld, but were concerned about the light being shined under their particular rock.

The Steele dossier was a clumsy instrument, but it got the job done. And if it was clumsy, that may be because no one ever thought that it would be truly needed or ever see the light of day. It was badly made because it wasn’t a priority. But then it was truly needed, and it was too late to fix it, so it had to be put into action as it was, with all its errors and absurd nonsense.

The Clinton campaign spared enough resources to create a post-election doomsday weapon. It built the weapon and detonated it. And the radioactivity from the blast has poisoned our political system.

Dirty tricks are part of politics. But few presidential candidates have the spite and hubris to create a dirty trick that blows up the presidency even when it can no longer benefit them in any obvious way.

Hillary Clinton never made history the way she wanted to. But she made history anyway.

.....the Mueller investigation has its ultimate roots in the eavesdropping carried out by the Obama administration using the dossier as evidence and the dubious and unverified claims made by Steele in the dossier.....

FISA: 85% of NSA searches by Obama Were Illegal
Freedom Outpost ^ | 01-24-2018 | Tim Brown / FR Posted 1/24/2018 by ReformedMedia

In trudging through the FISA document that came to light on Tuesday, it was discovered that the National Security Agency had been illegally conducting searches on people in the US. The document has gone on to state that those illegal searches, which were conducted under Barack Hussein Obama Soetoro Sobarkah, mounted to a whopping 85% of the total searches involving US person identifiers.

Section 702 data on US persons identifiers may be conducted if they are first “approved in accordance with [internal] NSA procedures, which must require a statement of facts establishing that the use of any such identifier as a selection term is reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information.” The problem is that querying US persons without a warrant amounts to a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, no matter what “internal NSA procedures” are followed.

The Fourth Amendment is crystal clear: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

On page 81, the FISA report pointed out that “In May and June 2016, NSA reported to oversight personnel in the ODNI and DOJ that, since approximately 2012, use of [redacted] to query communications in [redacted] had resulted in inadvertent violations of the above-described querying rules of Section 702 information.” The NSA claims that “the violations resulted from analysts not recognizing the need to avoid querying datasets for which querying requirements were not satisfied or not understanding how to formulate [redacted] queries to exclude such datasets.” more at freedomoutpost.com

8 Times Obama’s Intelligence Agencies Set People Up To Fabricate The Russia Story
The Federalist ^ | JUNE 6, 2018 | Willis L. Krumholz
FR Posted by E. Pluribus Unum

The Obama intelligence bureaucracies spied on the Donald Trump campaign: FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants were granted because of a Hillary Clinton-funded and unverified document, national-security letters were issued to allow warrantless spying, and the unprecedented but not-illegal-per-se unmasking of Trump officials’ conversations with non-U.S. persons was shockingly routine.

Yet the news of a CIA-connected human source operating as far back as April or May of 2016 is about more than just spying. It is the latest example in what now looks to be a long line of attempted setups by the Clinton team, many times aided and abetted by our intelligence bureaucracies. These events should anger any red blooded American who believes in representative democracy and the importance of the rule of law. Let’s review eight examples.

1. CIA And FBI ‘Human Intelligence’ We’ve just learned about Stefan Halper, a CIA-connected Cambridge professor who — working for the FBI — contacted Trump advisers Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis during the 2016 election, to investigate what they might know about suspicions of collusion with Russia. Former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo has claimed that he was approached by an unknown second U.S. intelligence community asset in early May of 2016. The FBI says that the Russia investigation began in July, because of something Papadopoulos said to an Australian diplomat in May. Papadopoulos had supposedly told the Australian diplomat something about Russia having information that “could be damaging” to Clinton. Papadopoulos allegedly heard this from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese-born professor who allegedly claimed to have close ties with Russia. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team charged Papadopoulos — unconvincingly — with lying to investigators, because Papadopoulos said his contacts with Mifsud began before he was on the Trump campaign. Actually, the contacts started after he “learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the campaign,” but before the campaign made a public announcement that he was to be an advisor. Mifsud is strangely now in hiding, possibly fearing for his life. Lee Smith details Mifsud’s ties to Western intelligence agencies, and Margot Cleveland suspects Mifsud may have been a U.S. intelligence plant along with Halper.

2. The Trump Tower Meeting Whenever Democrats or David French types talk about Trump and Russia collusion they look to the Trump Tower meeting as definitive proof. There are several problems with that. First, no presidential campaign in American history would pass up the chance of hearing evidence of crimes being committed by their opponent, no matter the source. In fact, some would say you’re doing the country a favor if you let everyone know that your opponent is subject to blackmail from a not-so-friendly foreign power (just don’t have your son and son-in-law sit in on the meeting). More problematic is that Glenn Simpson — head of Fusion GPS, the firm being paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to prove (or create) ties between Trump and Russia — met with the two Russians who attended the Trump Tower meeting both before and after the meeting. Simpson’s excuse for doing so? Because he was working with the two Russians on a different issue, the repeal of the anti-Kremlin Magnitsky Act. In other words, at the very least, the firm that created the dossier for Clinton and the DNC — using Russian intelligence sources — was the same firm that was working with the Kremlin to repeal a law passed by Congress because Putin’s thugs beat an innocent man to death in Russian prison. At most, this was yet another setup.

3. Mike Flynn And The Logan Act During the 2016 campaign, Democrats howled about the need to prosecute Trump campaign officials under an obscure 1799 law called the Logan Act. Byron York has documented that this was the pretext Obama-appointed former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates used to unmask former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s side of highly-appropriate phone conversations with the Russian ambassador that occurred during the transition period, and then send FBI agents to interview Flynn about those conversations. Although the FBI has tried to cover this up, we now know that the agents who interviewed Flynn — including the disgraced and hugely anti-Trump Peter Strzok — didn’t believe that Flynn had lied. Nevertheless, Mueller’s team charged Flynn with lying to the FBI. After Mueller’s charge had nearly bankrupted Flynn, and after Mueller threatened to go after Flynn’s son, Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI.

4. Andrew McCabe Sets Up Reince Priebus After an intelligence briefing at the White House in early 2017, former FBI number two Andrew McCabe asked to meet privately with former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. A story had just dropped — anonymously sourced from multiple intelligence community officials — that Trump aides had multiple contacts with Russian intelligence during the election. McCabe wanted to tell Priebus that the FBI didn’t think the story was true. Of course, Priebus asked McCabe if the FBI could publicly say just that. McCabe said he would have to check. But former FBI Director James Comey called Priebus to say that the FBI couldn’t publicly shoot down the story. Days later, the “breaking news” on CNN was that the White House had tried to pressure the FBI into batting down the reports on supposed ties between Trump and Russia. So not only was the White House supposedly colluding, now there were allegations of obstruction of justice.

5. Brennan Shops Dossier To Harry Reid Former CIA Director John Brennan, who may have been the U.S. intelligence official to first push an investigation into the Trump campaign, briefed then-Sen. Harry Reid on the Clinton-funded dossier in August 2016. The briefing did two things: First, it lent some legitimacy to the dossier, and second, it got Reid to pressure the FBI to not drop the investigation. The briefing had the added bonus of allowing Reid to speak publicly about Trump’s ties to Russia, as if he had just gained access to groundbreaking proof of collusion, which was of course covered by the media.

6. Comey And Clapper Give CNN A Reason To Publish The Dossier Comey, at the behest of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, briefed Trump on one of the allegations in the dossier, but not on the main allegation in the dossier, who had funded the dossier, or how that dossier was being used by the FBI. Nevertheless, this briefing looks like one more setup, meant to allow CNN to report on the existence of the dossier as if it were highly verified and being seriously examined by U.S. intelligence community officials. Clapper then leaked information about the dossier and the briefings to CNN, and later looks to have lied about those leaks to Congress. Amazingly, Clapper has previously lied to Congress. Clapper now works for CNN.

7. The Jeff Sessions Recusal Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation after anonymous intelligence community leaks about his contacts with Russians. Specifically, Sessions — as a senator — met with former Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak in his D.C. office. In another meeting, Sessions gave a speech and a gaggle of diplomats — including Kislyak — talked with him for several minutes as he was coming off the stage. The idea behind the unnecessary recusal was that somehow Sessions had misrepresented these contacts to former Sen. Al Franken. Actually, Franken — referring to one of many CNN stories sourced by anonymous officials about supposed Trump and Russia collusion — had clearly asked about whether Sessions had colluded with any Russians during the campaign, not whether Sessions had ever met any Russians.

8. Rosenstein Recommends Comey Firing, Appoints Special Counsel But with Jeff Sessions out of the way, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein became the acting attorney general for all things Russia-investigation-related. Rosenstein then recommended Comey’s firing, and then — overseeing the investigation that stemmed from that firing — appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel. Mueller, a former FBI Director, happened to be a close associate of Comey and Rosenstein, and would surely want to protect the interests of the FBI and the Justice Department. Taken together, these setups indicate a massive effort to aid the Clinton campaign before the election.

-—snip-—more at thefederalist.com ...

Willis L. Krumholz is a fellow at Defense Priorities. He holds a JD and MBA degree from the University of St. Thomas, and works in the financial services industry. The views expressed are those of the author only.

“But why create a pretext for a secret investigation of Trump before the election was even done?”

When, in the early 80s, it was alleged that the elder Bush had flown to Paris on an SR-71 to meet with Iranians to get them to hold the hostages that assertion, thought absurd, was still used as a basis to hold congressional hearings.

it was from this era that, though it had been true well before then, we found Tip O’Neil saying that the seriousness of the charges merited scrutiny.

Naturally he never meant to imply that the seriousness of the charges matters when it’s a Democrat ... that would be silly and might possibly benefit Republicans as opposed to only harming them,

So let me ask you: do you think in the 80s if there had been a FISA court and the deep state been as opposed to Reagan as they are to Trump that this accusation would have been used like these absurd allegations have been used?

Of course they would have been.

The author is incorrect to assert that the dossier is mostly legal rather than political because he was not admitting that the law is, for the Left, just politics by different means.

Why create the pretext?

Because they could.

Maybe they felt they couldn’t Arkancide someone as prominent as Trump, though considering Scalia I rather think they could, but then again him simply dying rather than being made to twist in the wind as a warning to outsiders to get on the deep state train or stay out of its way probably would have served them better.

... and is serving them better? How many never Trumpersin office are that way because they got the message?

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