Well over a year after
the FBI began investigating “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Vladimir
Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major
indictment.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been charged with a
series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President
Donald Trump or 2016.
With a leak to CNN that indictments were coming, Mueller’s
office stole the weekend headlines. This blanketed the explosive news on a
separate front, as the dots began to be connected on a bipartisan plot to bring
down Trump that began two years ago.
And like “Murder of the Orient Express,” it seems almost
everyone on the train had a hand in the plot.
The narrative begins in October 2015.
Then it was that the Washington Free Beacon, a neocon website,
engaged a firm of researchers called Fusion GPS to do deep dirt-diving into
Trump’s personal and professional life — and take him out.
A spinoff of Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, the Beacon is
run by his son-in-law. And its Daddy Warbucks is the GOP oligarch and hedge
fund billionaire Paul Singer.
From October 2015 to May 2016, Fusion GPS dug up dirt for the
neocons and never-Trumpers. By May, however, Trump had routed all rivals and
was the certain Republican nominee.
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So the Beacon bailed, and Fusion GPS found two new cash cows to
finance its dirt-diving — the DNC and the Clinton campaign.
To keep the sordid business at arm’s length, both engaged the
party’s law firm of Perkins Coie. Paid $12.4 million by the DNC and Clinton
campaign, Perkins used part of this cash hoard to pay Fusion GPS.
Here is where it begins to get interesting.
In June 2016, Fusion GPS engaged a British spy, Christopher
Steele, who had headed up the Russia desk at MI6, to ferret out any connections
between Trump and Russia.
Steele began contacting old acquaintances in the FSB, the
Russian intelligence service. And the Russians began to feed him astonishing
dirt on Trump that could, if substantiated, kill his candidacy.
Among the allegations was that Trump had consorted with
prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, that the Kremlin was blackmailing him, that
there was provable collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In memos from June to October 2016, Steele passed this on to
Fusion GPS, which passed it on to major U.S. newspapers. But as the press was
unable to verify it, they declined to publish it.
Steele’s final product, a 35-page dossier, has been described as
full of “unsubstantiated and salacious allegations.”
Steele’s research, however, had also made its way to James
Comey’s FBI, which was apparently so taken with it that the bureau considered
paying Steele to continue his work.
About this “astonishing” development, columnist Byron York of
the Washington Examiner quotes Sen. Chuck Grassley:
“The idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign
would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the
run-up to the election raises … questions about the FBI’s independence from
politics, as well as the Obama administration’s use of law enforcement and
intelligence agencies for political ends.”
The questions begin to pile up.
What was the FBI’s relationship with the British spy who was so
wired into Russian intelligence?
Did the FBI use the information Steele dug up to expand its own
investigation of Russia-Trump “collusion”? Did the FBI pass what Steele
unearthed to the White House and the National Security Council?
Did the Obama administration use the information from the Steele
dossier to justify unmasking the names of Trump officials that had been picked
up on legitimate electronic intercepts?
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Clinton
campaign chair John Podesta and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed they
did not know that Perkins Coie had enlisted Fusion GPA or the British spy to
dig up dirt on Trump.
Yet, when Podesta testified, the lawyer sitting beside him in
the committee room was Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, who had engaged Fusion GPS
and received the fruits of Steele’s undercover work.
Here one is tempted to cite Bismarck that, if you wish to enjoy
politics or sausages, you should not inquire too closely how they are made.
Thus we have Free Beacon neocons, never-Trump Republicans, the
Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, a British spy and comrades in Russian
intelligence, and perhaps the FBI, all working with secret money and seedy
individuals to destroy a candidate they could not defeat in a free election.
If future revelations demonstrate that this is what went down,
it is not only the White House that has major problems.
If you wish to know why Americans detest politics and hate the
“swamp” that has been made of their capital city, follow this story all the way
to its inevitable end. It will be months of unfolding.
The real indictment here is of the American political system,
and the true tragedy is the decline of the Old Republic.