Article by J.B. Shurk in "The American Thinker":
The
biggest political scandal in the history of the United States. Three
years of constant lies told by government agents, political operatives,
and deceitful news personalities. Thousands of hours of criminal
investigative interviews; thousands of written stories and television
segments; thousands of leaks and insinuations and threats. All to take
down the legitimately elected American president, Donald J. Trump.
Now
that some light is finally revealing just how rotten this whole
nonsense has been from the very beginning, the most maddening aspect of
all is the one thing not said nearly enough: every bit of this frame-up
job to hang the American president for being a Russian agent and traitor
to his nation began as a way to inoculate Hillary Clinton from her
largest political vulnerabilities going into the 2016 campaign.
Aside
from her questionable health and a lifetime of scandal, Hillary had two
sizable liabilities (of her own creation) that threatened her ability
to win the general election: (1) her use of the Clinton Foundation as a
vehicle for laundering bribes from foreign governments and moneyed
interests and (2) her decision to conduct the business of the State
Department (as well as to discuss our nation's most guarded secrets) on
an unsecured private email server that had been hacked by known and
unknown foreign governments and adverse entities. Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash
did a remarkable job exposing the Clinton Foundation as a spectacular
pay-to-play operation that had allowed Hillary to trade the powers of
her office for personal aggrandizement (including the sale of 20% of
America's uranium to Russia for, among other things, $145 million
transferred to her foundation). And even though the Obama Justice
Department was doing its best to minimize the revelation of Hillary's
gross breach of national security and slow-walk any repercussions, the
American people were discovering that life-and-death secrets had been
entrusted to a person with such disregard for our well-being that she
stored them on a personal server in a downstairs bathroom.
For
a normal person with a modicum of ethical concern, sense of shame, or
patriotic duty, these crimes would have been more than sufficient to
prompt withdrawal from an election for the country's highest
office. This type of honest self-reflection and private admission of
guilt is alien to the Clintons, though, so what would have represented
immovable obstacles to anyone else became just another set of political
variables that had to be neutralized in her favor.
I
can just imagine the conversation Hillary had with her most trusted
advisers — not the ones with the official titles like Robby Mook and
Brian Fallon, whose chief value lay in their expendable nature and the
ease with which Hillary could roll them up into any unexpected scandal
to be disposed with the trash at a future time of her convenience. I
mean the real group of confidants, the ones who have "the ends justify
the means" tattooed on their souls and have gotten away with more crimes
than we'll ever know. If you're Sid Blumenthal or John Podesta or
Cheryl Mills or Marc Elias or Lanny Davis and you know where some of the
bodies are buried along the spectacular trail of Clinton corruption
through the years, then the prospect of a massive pay-to-play scandal or
criminal indictment for mishandling top-secret intelligence or engaging
wittingly or unwittingly in espionage is just another bump on the long
road of progressive relativism and Clinton nihilism. If Clinton Cash
and FBI investigators come knocking, you simply accuse all your
political opponents of being the real grifters and foreign agents.
That's
exactly what Team Hillary did. They leveled allegations of criminal
bribery at Jeb Bush; they questioned Marco Rubio's loyalty to the United
States; but Donald Trump was the prize. A man who had spent a lifetime
in the exotic world of luxury real estate around the globe while mixing
it up with all kinds of powerful figures in that often shady world was
the ideal mark, and he also happened to be a political novice who the
Democrats universally believed would lose in a landslide of historical
dimensions for political lore long to come. When Paul Manafort joined
his team just before the kickoff to the general election and brought
with him a lifetime of political baggage that included skullduggery
around Russia's zone of interest, it must have seemed as if Christmas
had come early for the Clinton team. (Kind of makes you wonder how
coincidental this unforced error really was.)
And
so, after a lifetime in the public eye, starring in a popular
television show, and rubbing elbows with celebrities and politicians of
all stripes, Donald Trump woke up one day to find himself being
generally slandered (and libeled) as a Russian spy by the information
merchants who control America's airwaves and print media. That had to
have made him laugh, considering that the press had spent most of his
foray into politics demeaning him as a greedy capitalist playboy
nationalist who selfishly placed America's interests before those of our
common world.
Yes,
before John Brennan devised a global espionage ring to frame President
Trump as a national security risk and enable the FBI to open up
counterintelligence investigations into his political associates; before
Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe attested to false information with the FISA
Court; before Robert Mueller put the screws to General Flynn in order
to sink a lifetime defender of America for political purposes; before
President Obama initiated changes to security classification that opened
up scurrilous investigative records on President-Elect Trump to an
exponentially greater number of bureaucrats with partisan motivations;
before Susan Rice left an electronic CYA memorandum at 12:15 P.M. on
Inauguration Day of 2017 noting that Sally Yates and James Clapper and
John Brennan and Joe Biden and Jim Comey had all agreed in the Oval
Office with President Obama to continue any investigations "by the
book"; before Samantha Power unmasked hundreds of names picked up during
the course of electronic surveillance that were deemed to somehow
implicate the new president in wrongdoing; even before the Clinton
operatives and Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele first started composing
the fan fiction now known as "the Dossier" — before all of this and
everything else we have been forced to endure for three long years,
there was Hillary Clinton, doing what she and her people know best:
accusing her political opponent of the very crimes she had committed
herself.
As
awful as this orchestrated campaign against President Trump has been,
it is absolutely maddening to realize that none of it would have
happened had Hillary Clinton not engaged in one of the greatest
pay-for-play operations in American history while placing our most
guarded secrets (as well as the very lives of our soldiers and
civilians) on a silver platter for those governments and adversaries who
wish us the most harm in this world. Three years of Russian hysteria
happened only because of the deep corruption of Hillary Clinton.
This
scheme of political projection and wicked treachery should go down as a
final reminder that America survives today only because President Trump
managed to prevail against the nearly insurmountable wave of our
government's intelligence agencies, the justice system, media
propagandists, and the combined wills of the Democrats and NeverTrump
Republicans intending to swamp him
