by Lee Smith for NY Post
Last week, Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell forced Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff’s hand. If the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee didn’t release the transcripts of 53 interviews from the committee’s Russia collusion investigations, then he’d do it himself. The transcripts, many of them from nearly three years ago, were declassified and ready for public viewing since June.
As the grand impresario of collusion, Schiff has filled print and broadcast media since January 2017 claiming that he has seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of a Trump-Putin conspiracy. Obviously there was none in the transcripts, or he’d have pulled back the curtain years ago. But Schiff didn’t want to hand control of the narrative to one of Trump’s most effective deputies, so on Thursday they finally went live.
They show exactly what you’d expect them to show: None of the former Obama administration officials who took to the airwaves immediately after Trump’s election to claim collusion had any evidence of it.
Here’s Obama’s director of national intelligence, and CNN analyst, James Clapper: “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
Former Pentagon official and now candidate for New York’s 17th Congressional District Evelyn Farkas claimed in a notorious 2017 MSNBC segment that she advised her colleagues to disseminate intelligence so that Trump could not destroy evidence of collusion. Under oath, however, she testified she “didn’t know anything” about Trump staff dealing with Russians.
But what makes the transcripts significant is not what’s contained in them. Rather, it’s what they represent.
Grenell’s deputy at DNI is Kash Patel. He was lead investigator in the Russia probe conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, when it was chaired by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes. He told me for my book “The Plot Against the President” that he and GOP colleagues asked every former Obama official they interviewed if they had any evidence of collusion.
“I’m not asking if you thought it happened or if you heard it happened,” Patel told them all, from Attorney General Loretta Lynch to FBI Director James Comey. “I said, ‘Do you have information that exactly addresses this issue?’ ”
It was when Patel and Nunes saw no Obama official had any that their inquiry changed course. If there was no evidence of the Trump team’s ties to Russia, why was the FBI investigating Trump’s 2016 campaign?
And thus began what Patel called “Objective Medusa,” the Nunes team’s investigation of the FBI team that targeted the Trump campaign. Their efforts not only unraveled the collusion myth but also first illuminated the FBI’s crimes and abuses. Their groundwork led, among other things, to Attorney General William Barr’s decision, also Thursday, to drop the DOJ’s case against Gen. Michael Flynn.
The transcripts also represent yet another blow to the media’s credibility. The Obama officials interviewed were among the many sources, like Schiff, the press tapped for its prize-winning collusion reporting. They lied for years about Trump and Russia and the press peddled their narrative without question.
No matter what evidence surfaced to prove the collusion story wrong, the media continued to credential the destructive conspiracy theory. It didn’t matter when Objective Medusa showed that former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele’s reports were paid for by the Clinton campaign. Or when the Nunes memo explained that the FBI used the Steele dossier to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. It didn’t even matter when resistance messiah Robert Mueller concluded there was no evidence of collusion.
After Mueller filed his report last spring, CNN’s Jake Tapper said that “I don’t know anybody who got anything wrong.” Don’t expect anyone in the mainstream media to admit gross journalistic malpractice this time either. The tragic fact is that once-prestigious press organizations, including CNN as well as MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post, weren’t fooled by the collusion hoax. They were an essential part of it.