Senator Rubio, acting chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, announced their finding yesterday on what everyone’s known for years: “the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government … and we discovered deeply troubling actions taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly their acceptance and willingness to rely on the ‘Steele Dossier’ without verifying its methodology or sourcing.” The bipartisan report is “nearly 1,000 pages, was the product of more than 200 witness interviews and nearly a million documents” and has been ongoing for years.
NBC somehow refers to the same report as a “partisan account of how the Trump campaign embraced Russia’s intelligence operation in 2016 designed to hurt Democrat Hillary Clinton and help Trump.” This is the opposite of Rubio tweeted (“Absolutely no evidence”) and nothing in their article supports it.
Professional liar John Brennan tweeted back to Rubio, “You are dead wrong, Senator. The report shows extensive evidence of collusion between between the Trump campaign & the Russians,” but once again, Brennan was incapable of articulating this evidence. Brennan previously had lied to Congress under oath about the “Dossier,” saying it played no role in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Community Assessment. Before that he lied under oath to the Senate about having spied on them. Victor Davis Hanson cataloged his record of lying here and it looks like Brennan’s word is all we have to support the Russian collusion: if that can teach us anything it’s that there was no Russian collusion. There’s nothing to disprove, so I’ll give the reasons I think the FBI’s actions were troubling. This is not a detail of the Senate’s report but a review of what’s happened and why it was wrong.
Mueller and Wiseman’s tinfoil investigation found almost nothing but process crimes, and in Manafort’s case, there were also tax violations and bank fraud that had nothing to do with Russia’s supposed election interference. In Michael Flynn’s case, FBI officials Strzok and Page had to alter a document, the 302 form which *was* the record of their interview, in order to charge him with lying in that interview. This is not only a felony, it’s a more serious crime than the one Flynn was charged with, and the Flynn charge was based on these falsified records.
These FBI agents committed a litany of violations in the process (how soon the 302 has to be submitted, who can look at it, who can write it), and threatened Flynn’s son in order to coerce him into pleading guilty. Did he lie in the first place? We don’t know, because the original Pientka-written 302 form (the one that Strzok and Page didn’t falsify) has disappeared. Furthermore, a handwritten note from their supervisor Bill Priestap has been found, plotting to trick Flynn into lying or pressure him to plead guilty under the obscure, unconstitutional and never-once-prosecuted Logan Act:
What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired? If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ & have them decide. Or, if he initially lies, then we present him [redacted] & he admits it, document for DOJ, & let them decide how to address it.”
Prominent conservative lawyers to this day, mystifyingly (and publicly), are saying that Flynn did lie, and not acknowledging that this is based on the falsified 302 or on his admission which came under coercion. “It doesn’t matter that he lied, but he did,” they say, and they’re wrong.
Roger Stone made some dumb comment about a judge and they swatted him and his wife on live TV, in coordination with CNN; the whole while portraying the raid as part of a crackdown on foreign influence. George Papadopoulos was given $10,000 cash in Israel and arrested in the US on arrival, by FBI who were waiting for him at the airport. How did they know? He’d wisely left the cash with an attorney, otherwise I’m sure he’d have faced more serious charges.
Then there’s Carter Page, who’s visits with Russian operatives were ruled by the FISA Court to be sufficient grounds to open a warrant on him. On the third renewal, they wanted their lawyer to ask the CIA if Page was theirs. The CIA said he was, by attaching documents showing his history at the agency, and the FBI lawyer altered the email to say no.
The central problem with the Mueller and Wiseman Show (or maybe the Wiseman and Mueller) is that rather than investigating what happened, they tried to set people up to promote their own version of it. They never found that crime they were searching for.
In the Trump Tower Meeting, Don Jr. was set up by “Natalia Veselnitskaya, who employed Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS and dined with him the nights before and after the Trump Tower meeting.” Glenn Simpson in turn employed Christopher Steele who compiled the stories. Funding for this came from Hillary’s campaign and the DNC, while the FBI and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska also paid Steele, who was working for the FBI “on a special program to recruit Russian oligarchs.” Deripaska says Steele offered him visa help as a pretext to recruit him.
There’s no reason to think they saw Deripaska as a collusion suspect since he’s never been accused, but Steele’s involvement suggests the FBI would use the Russian oligarchs on the surveillance of Trump associates. Maybe the FBI planned on paying them with Hillary Clinton’s campaign money to make false accusations for Steele to compile, and the FBI to use against Candidate Trump.
Now that would be collusion.
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