The Clintons Are Definitely in Contempt of Congress

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 22, 2026

 

The usual suspects are up in arms.

 

“Absolutely NO ONE is out of bounds,” the commentator Kurt Bardella declared. The House Republicans are “obsessed,” Representative Robert Garcia exclaimed. It’s the Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results who should be found in contempt, he added. Indeed, Bondi, too, belongs in the dock, said Representative Ro Khanna.

 

The cacophony of loud noises and agitated gesticulations notwithstanding, the effort by some Democrats to change the subject confirms what you probably already suspected: The Clintons are clearly in contempt of Congress, and that behavior invites legal consequences.

 

Don’t take the Republican House conference’s word for it. Just listen to what the Democrats who joined with the GOP in a committee vote to put Bill and Hillary Clinton in the hot seat after they defied a congressional subpoena to testify as part of a legislative panel’s inquiry into Jeffrey Epstein’s activities.

 

There is “plenty of evidence” that Bill Clinton, if not his wife, “might have information that he could share with the committee,” said Massachusetts Democrat Stephen Lynch. Sure, “leadership” might “like to defend the Clintons,” he said. And he did object to the investigatory panel’s targeting of Hillary Clinton. Still, Lynch maintained, the integrity of Congress’s investigation should come first.

 

“I voted my conscience, and I voted my district,” California Representative Lateefah Simon explained. While that sounds like a sheepish dodge, Simon reaffirmed her intention to vote for a contempt charge when the panel’s vote comes before the House.

 

New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury was “deeply troubled” when the Clintons “did not appear on their scheduled date.” She, too, wished to see Bondi endure congressional or even legal scrutiny, but that’s another matter.

 

“I don’t care if you’re a Democrat. I don’t care if you’re a Republican,” said Florida Representative Maxwell Frost. “I’m tired of rich people trying to evade justice and accountability, period.”

 

Frost, one of the more progressive members of the investigative panel that issued the original subpoenas, was one of several prominent progressives to turn on the Clintons. In a demonstration of the generational and ideological makeover the Democratic Party is presently undergoing, Frost was joined by Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee, Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan lawmaker Rashida Tlaib.

 

The vote to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt was narrower. Whereas nine Democrats voted to hold Bill Clinton in contempt, only three Democrats broke ranks to put Hillary in the dock: Lee, Stansbury, and Tlaib. It’s no coincidence that these progressive lawmakers are often at odds with the establishmentarians in their party and are, thus, bound less to institutional partisanship than to their supporters in the activist clique.

 

Irrespective of these Democrats’ motives, the case against the Clintons is cut and dried.

 

The former first family insists that the subpoenas compelling their testimony were unlawful (a claim with which many of the panel’s Democrats disagreed). Bill Clinton’s cooperation with the investigation, including an offer to provide sworn statements answering the committee’s questions, fell short of the subpoena’s demands. “Dragging your feet is not the same as noncompliance,” California Democrat Dave Min objected, “it’s not the same as contempt.” Even if we take that dubious supposition at face value, the Clintons were not merely delaying their cooperation with the committee. They seemed to believe that Congress’s subpoena power should not apply to them.

 

“There was a time when subpoenas were viewed as more than discretionary matters,” the legal scholar Jonathan Turley observed. “Counsel has insisted that the testimony is unnecessary and a distraction. However, that is not a ground that any court would view as justification for knowingly and repeatedly ignoring a lawfully issued subpoena.”

 

Maybe this episode says more about the Clintons’ depreciating political relevance than the diminished influence of partisanship or the minority party’s leaders’ capacity to keep their troops in line. Still, it is obvious and undeniable that the Clintons defied a subpoena, and it’s heartening to see congressional Democrats join with Republicans in enforcing the legislature’s prerogative.

The Affluent Progressive Lifestyle Is Unsustainable

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

 

It hasn’t really hit the headlines yet — it’s only being passed around as a piece of video samizdat — but, during an interview at the 92NY as part of the Newmark Civic Life series, Hillary Clinton uttered a barely utterable truth: lifestyle liberalism, and the feminist ideal it embodies, is the privilege of affluent Americans, and it has been supported by mass immigration, legal and illegal. By implication: progressivism is not economically or socially sustainable beyond two or three generations.

Of course, any admission against interest was inadvertent. Clinton meant to attack conservative figures such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, who, she says, want to “make America great again by returning to the lifestyles and the economic arrangements of not just the 1950s — I mean let’s keep going back as far as we can.” Clinton says these people promote “the nuclear family, return to being a Christian nation, and return to producing a lot of children,” even though they, she alleges, have no interest in paid family leave or in “funding quality child care” and are “cutting Head Start,” the early-childhood education program for low-income families.

 

Clinton observed that this attitude was “sort of odd, because the people who produce the most children in our country are immigrants, and they want to deport them.” “So, none of this adds up,” she says. In fact, “one of the reasons why our economy did so much better than comparable advanced economies across the world is because we . . . had a lot of immigrants, legally and undocumented, who had a larger than normal, by American standards, family.”

 

Taken together, Clinton says that immigrants make the American lifestyle of today “add up” in part because of their higher birth rates. We can argue a little about the economics, but she’s correct that one of the largest components of economic growth is population growth. And without immigration, American population would be growing much more slowly than it is, with huge economic consequences.

 

But she’s more correct in this than she thinks. In a way, the affluent progressive lifestyle is also enabled by mass immigration precisely because it outsources features of the 1950s homemaker mom or weekend dad to immigrant labor. Landscaping, home-cleaning, remodeling, and nights at the restaurant are cheaper than they would have been because of the influx of labor that’s paid under-the-table. Lifestyle progressivism is therefore directly at odds with former egalitarian progressivism.

 

But there’s a problem. This isn’t sustainable, either politically or as a matter of math.

 

Democratic peoples the world over are asserting themselves against mass immigration. Why? Because when the native reality is falling birth rates, immigration is more disruptive. Instead of being welcomed as reinforcements to a thriving society, immigrants are feared as replacements in one with an uncertain future.

 

Even if democratic backlash could be managed, or quelled by liberal technocracy, there is also a math problem at work. Although birth rates among immigrant families in the U.S. are higher than the native birth rate, since 2013, they’ve been falling faster than the native birth rate and converging, within a single generation, to levels well below replacement. That is, if American society is a machine that depopulates the world of Americans, it isn’t halted or slowed much at all by feeding it immigrants. This society devours their posterity, too.

 

And what’s worse is that it’s a self-perpetuating problem. The lower the fertility in one generation, the more you deny the next one the tools to maintain or raise fertility. That is, the primary thing that gives people the confidence to form and raise larger families is their having had the example of a larger extended family and the support of younger grandparents, in-laws, aunts, uncles, and cousins — whether moral, financial, or simply tactical: Who’s going to pick the kids up after school today?

 

So, what does that say about the “lifestyle and economic arrangements” that Hillary Clinton is defending? It’s a strange thing that we put so much thought into whether certain means of raising fish or harvesting lumber are sustainable for five or six generations, and yet the way of life that Boomers pioneered and handed to us relies on an unsustainable rate and exploitation of migration, leads to low economic growth, and breaks down altogether in just two or three generations.

‘Get Over Yourself’

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 02, 2024

 

Onetime Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton displayed all the political skill for which she is famous in a Monday night appearance on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. There, she was asked how Democrats could overcome voters’ dissatisfaction with the two likeliest presidential nominees, but Clinton summarily rejected the premise.

 

“What do you say to voters who are upset that those are the two choices?” Fallon asked. “Get over yourself,” Clinton responded. “Those are the two choices.” She went on to heap scorn on the muddled thinking that has led millions of Americans to reject both major party’s nominees. “I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice,” Clinton remarked. “Really. I don’t understand it.” Indeed, she didn’t seem to have any interest in or desire to clear up her own confusion. If Clinton retained an ounce of intellectual curiosity, it was not in evidence in this segment.

 

If this tactic seems unlikely to transform potential Democratic voters into active Democratic voters, it’s probably because that isn’t the goal. The design is to reinforce the faith in a congregation of true believers. Reducing something as banal as just one more quadrennial election cycle into what Clinton called an “existential question” renders debate on the relevant issues obtuse. After all, she said, Donald Trump and his ilk are “pretty clear about what kind of country they want.” What’s there to debate? Indeed, to even countenance the notion that persuasion might be valuable is to concede the legitimacy of the other side’s arguments. It’s beneath the dignity of one so august as Hillary Clinton to entertain the solicitations of Americans who haven’t yet made up their minds.

 

This performance may be unsurprising from a candidate who deemed her opponents “deplorables” and was subsequently confused by her torpid standing in the polls, but Clinton’s distaste for the art of persuasion isn’t unique. Joe Biden, too, is loath to behave in ways that would confirm to Democratic voters that he’s interested in expanding his voting base to include the people Democrats dislike.

 

The Biden campaign recently produced a 30-second spot allegedly targeting disaffected Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the primaries, which is composed exclusively of comments from Donald Trump disparaging her and her supporters. The president’s campaign has put a little money behind it, too. One-thirtieth of the $30 million ad buy has been devoted to the spot, which will run for three weeks in select battleground states. But the audience for this advertisement isn’t voters; it’s the political press, which has given the ad a far broader airing than the one the Biden campaign purchased. The objective is to create the impression in voters’ minds that the president and his campaign are making substantive overtures to a broader universe of voters beyond the Democratic base without actually making any substantive commitments to those voters.

 

What other overtures have the Biden campaign made to disaffected Republicans and GOP-leaning independents? Well, there was that one statement: “Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters,” read a presidential statement upon Haley’s exit from the Republican nominating contest. “I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign.” That’s about it. No policy concessions. No meaningful efforts to fold non-progressives into either the campaign apparatus or the administration. No “Sister Souljah” moments to exile from respectable Democratic politics those who promulgate the fashionable bigotries that enchant the activist left. Only this, a slightly more elevated version of “get over yourself.”

 

Joe Biden might be convinced to do more to court centrist Republicans and independents in the coming weeks, but it would be foolish to bet on it. The president seems content to outsource the presidency he won by rejecting progressive policy prescriptions to the very progressives he defeated. They’ve been running the show ever since. The slightest deviation from ever-shifting leftwing orthodoxy so profoundly discomforts this White House that they cannot maintain a posture of independence for long. Those Democratic voters, donors, and advocates resent the notion that their preferences even need to be argued. To submit to being just a part of an ideologically heterogeneous coalition is an affront — one they need not tolerate if the arc of history inexorably bends in their direction anyway.

 

The muscles Democrats once exercised in the effort to persuade voters to their cause have atrophied to the point of uselessness. All that remains is the impulse to hector and morally blackmail the holdouts. Democrats may successfully convince themselves that they don’t need to stoop so low as to address voters’ concerns about their records, but “get over yourself” works both ways. If the party in power leans into the idea that persuasion is beneath them, leaving it to the electorate to assess its own best interests and vote accordingly, Democrats may not like the verdict the voting public reaches.

Hillary Clinton’s Weaponized Loneliness

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

 

Hillary can’t say she didn’t warn us.

 

In a new 3,500-word essay on “The Weaponization of Loneliness” in the Atlantic, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate says her jejune 1996 book, It Takes a Village, forecast the country’s current crisis of loneliness and offered still-relevant solutions.

 

And, oh yeah, hapless lonely people exploited by authoritarian right-wingers basically kept her from the White House in 2016 (and here you thought it was Russia).

 

Now, social isolation is a real social problem in America, as Hillary correctly recounts in her essay, and it has contributed to the Trump phenomenon. But that it has been uniquely weaponized against progressives, or that conventional progressive policies are the antidote to this deep-seated phenomenon, is as absurd and self-serving as you’d expect from a woman who managed one of the more shocking losses in U.S. presidential history and has been offering excuses ever since.

 

In her telling, an army of so-called incels, or involuntarily celibate men, organized by Steve Bannon is part of a growing threat to U.S. democracy. You can see the appeal of this gloss on our politics to someone who has long warned of the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and uses the phrase, once again, in an essay otherwise devoted to warning about the threats of conspiratorial thinking.

 

Rather than shadowy forces, from Russian hackers to Bannon’s a-socialized acolytes, determining the course of the country, it is the middle of the electorate that remains crucially important, and it is open to persuasion on the big questions. Donald Trump fought Hillary to a draw among independents in 2016 and eked out a narrow victory, and lost them to Biden and was defeated in 2020.

 

To read Hillary, you might think that no one who supports the Democrats is ever lonely.

 

As it happens, Republicans are the party of married people. As Conn Carroll pointed out at the Washington Examiner, in the 2022 House races, Republicans won married men by 20 points and unmarried men by seven, and won married women by 14 points. The GOP, on the other hand, got wiped out with unmarried women by nearly 40 points.

 

This marriage gap has a connection to loneliness. According to a Gallup survey in 2020, 41 percent of single people reported being lonely the day before, whereas only 16 percent of people who were married or in a domestic partnership said the same thing. (This was in the midst of the pandemic, by the way — overall loneliness has declined since.) By region, New England has the highest rate of loneliness, and big cities are significantly more lonely than rural areas.

 

This means that Hillary forged a coalition of the lonely (or at least the more lonely) in 2016, and the worst thing that could happen to her party is more people getting married and living in small places with a stronger sense of community.

 

Of course, Hillary doesn’t offer either of those as potential solutions to the crisis of loneliness. No, but Joe Biden’s infrastructure program might help — as if people are disconnected because they can’t take high-speed rail to go see friends. She’s heartened, too, by parents protesting “book bans” and workers engaged in union organizing. Left-wing activism, apparently, is what can knit us all back together.

 

She invokes “the wisdom and power of the American village” and says “we have more in common than we think,” without ever giving any sense that she acknowledges the values of the other side, or even its legitimacy. If she doesn’t use her infamous word from 2016, “deplorables,” to describe her opponents, that’s clearly what she still thinks about them.

 

Hillary may not be lonely, but she’s a case study in the myopic self-righteousness of the Left that is unjustified, high-handed, and off-putting. It’s no wonder that if Hillary’s “village” is the community on offer, millions of rational, well-adjusted, happy Americans want nothing to do with it.

Yes, Her Emails

By Mark Antonio Wright

Thursday, August 11, 2022

 

“If you’re talking about Hillary Clinton right now,” an old friend of mine wrote on Twitter, “you clearly have no argument.”

 

Unfortunately for every American, Hillary Rodham Clinton is very relevant right now.

 

Listen, I am no one’s idea of a Trump fan. I didn’t vote for him. And I believe strongly that he should have been convicted by the Senate in January 2021 and shot into outer political darkness for his assault on the Constitution and his complicity in the assault on Congress.

 

But anyone — either on the anti-Trump left or the Trump-skeptical right — who thinks that the FBI and Department of Justice’s credibility can survive in the eyes of the average, normie American if it prosecutes Donald J. Trump on very, very similar mishandling-of-classified-documents charges that Hillary avoided with nary a slap on the wrist is naïve to the point of lunacy.

 

The FBI better have found that Trump did something truly heinous with classified documents — like pass top-secret material to the Saudis to get a LIV Golf tournament at one of his golf courses or hide the nuclear football under the shoe rack in Melania’s closet — or it better be playing hardball (Andy McCarthy’s theory) and actually investigating his 6 January shenanigans. If this is about enforcing the Presidential Records Act, I have no problem calling this one of the gravest blunders in the history of American law enforcement (that didn’t result in anyone dying, like, ya know, Waco).

 

Worst of all, at least from my perspective, if the DOJ and FBI are in the process of bungling this situation by pushing a ticky-tack criminal investigation on Trump — then they have given an enormous in-kind donation to his renomination and reelection campaigns at the expense of turn-the-page possibilities like Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, or a dozen others.

 

Like it or not, those are the cold, hard political facts.

 

“But her emails,” our Democratic friends have been mocking conservatives for six years.

 

Yes, her emails.

‘Lock Her Up’ vs. ‘But Her Emails!’

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, February 11, 2022

 

Did Trump pull a Hillary and remove classified documents from their proper location? It seems possible. Here’s the always-even-handed Jonathan Turley:

 

According to a new report by The Washington Post, the National Archives had to retrieve a large number of boxes from Mar-a-Lago that were unlawfully removed by President Trump or his staff upon leaving the White House. There are strict laws on the preservation of presidential documents, laws that President Trump was repeatedly accused of flaunting during his presidency. However, the most serious element of this latest allegation is that the removed material included clearly marked classified information, including some at the Top Secret level.

 

We still do not have confirmation of the allegation from the National Archives but Trump himself acknowledged that boxes were removed and called the exchange friendly and routine. There are often conflicts over what material can be removed by departing presidents, though the reports are suggesting that this conflict was more serious in light of the status of the documents.

 

The allegation that Trump removed classified information is a potential criminal violation. It is also highly ironic given Trump’s long use of “Lock Her Up” to refer to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for official and classified material.

 

If Trump did this, he should absolutely be . . . well, what should he be? Certainly, he should be termed a grotesque hypocrite for arguing that Hillary should be “locked up” for a crime he committed himself. But, beyond that? Hillary was not, in fact, “locked up.” She wasn’t even prosecuted. I thought she probably should have been prosecuted, just as I think that, if there’s evidence that Trump did this, it would be reasonable to prosecute him, too. But that isn’t what has happened in this area when the person of interest is extremely powerful. So what next? Goose, meet gander.

 

Neither is the hypocrisy here unique to Donald Trump. The New York Times notes today that “among Republicans, once so forceful about the issue of mishandling documents, there was little sign of outrage.” This is true. But it also works the other way around. Many of the people who are now pointing to this story with a frustrated “but her emails!” spent 2015 and 2016 flatly denying that Hillary did anything wrong, rejecting the claim that there were any grounds for an indictment, and, in some cases, going so far as to suggest that any prosecution of a presidential candidate (or failed presidential candidate) would turn America into a “banana republic.” Well, Trump is a presidential candidate (and a failed presidential candidate), too, and, whether it should be or not, the precedent here is clearly against prosecution. Careful what you wish for, I guess.

The Dossier Deceit

National Review Online

Saturday, November 06, 2021

 

We learn from special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko that “the FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations” in the now-infamous Steele dossier. “Ultimately” is right — but not before it relied on the shoddy document to surveil an American citizen in an investigation that produced the Mueller probe and a two-year-long obsession with Trump and Russian built on a preposterous foundation.

 

The web of deceit is a tangled one, but while the indictment details a shocking story of transnational dirty tricks weaponized at the highest level of American politics, the most significant moral failure was on the part of the FBI itself.

 

Durham, who is investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, indicted Danchenko on five counts of lying to the Bureau’s investigators regarding the compilation of the information in the dossier. The document was a collection of political opposition research posing as intelligence reports, generated at the behest of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which portrayed Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign as clandestine agents of the Kremlin.

 

It is worth relating the background in detail.

 

These reports were crafted by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, in partnership with Glenn Simpson, co-founder of the political research firm Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie, the sharp-elbowed Democratic law firm that represented the Clinton campaign, retained Simpson for the project. Simpson, in turn, recruited Steele, who brought in Danchenko, his business associate.

 

Danchenko’s background, which is worthy of a second-rate spy novel, came to light in late 2020, when a Justice Department inspector-general investigation was unsealed. A Russian citizen transplanted to Washington as a geopolitics scholar, he landed at the Brookings Institution, a prominent Clinton-friendly think-tank. In 2009, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation of Danchenko. He had allegedly suggested to two Brookings staffers, who appeared to be headed for jobs in the Obama administration, that he could make it worth their while if they passed along classified information. The staffers (one of whom believed Danchenko must be a Russian agent – imagine that!) instead passed along word of Danchenko’s entreaty to the FBI. The Bureau learned that Danchenko appeared to be tied to two Russian agents who were also under investigation.

 

Agents prepared to seek national-security surveillance of Danchenko under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But, in what would become an alarming theme, the FBI did not follow through and closed the investigation in March 2011, apparently believing that Danchenko had gone back to Russia.

 

In fact, he had begun working with Steele. Danchenko was introduced to Steele in 2010 by Fiona Hill, another Brookings Russia scholar. Hill, you may recall, was a Trump White House National Security Council member who provided key testimony in the House’s impeachment of then-President Trump in the Ukraine kerfuffle. (Hill appears not to have been knowingly complicit in the unrelated Trump-Russia hype.)

 

When Steele was recruited for the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump project in spring 2016, he relied on Danchenko to supply most of the information. Contrary to Steele’s later claims, Danchenko did not have a network of useful contacts. But here again, Hill appears inadvertently to have advanced the plot. In 2016, she introduced Danchenko to Charles Dolan, a Russia-focused businessman and Democratic Party activist.

 

Dolan is identified in the indictment as “PR Executive-1” because he helped run a public-relations firm. He is a longtime Clinton insider, having worked on Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, as well as Hillary’s failed 2008 and 2016 bids. In the interim, he was appointed by President Clinton to a State Department advisory committee. From 2006 until 2014, the Kremlin retained Dolan to be its global public-relations agent. For much of that time, conveniently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the Obama administration point-person on the “Russia Reset,” in which the State Department promoted Russian economic development.

 

As the indictment details, Dolan hired Danchenko to consult on a conference he planned for October 2016 in Moscow. In the preceding months, Dolan had constant communication with Danchenko and made a preparatory trip to Moscow, meeting with Danchenko. Dolan would pass information to Danchenko, which Danchenko would embellish, sometimes beyond recognition, in passing it on to Steele, who dutifully included it in the dossier without disclosing its origins.

 

In the most notorious example, Dolan had meetings in a Moscow hotel and was given a tour of the presidential suite, in which he was told Donald Trump had once stayed. Danchenko was not present for these meetings, and the indictment says there was no discussion of any sexual hijinks. Dolan then communicated some of the details to Danchenko who, within days, flew to London to meet with Steele. By the time Steele finished writing up what Danchenko told him, the episode had been spun into the now infamous “pee tape” claim – i.e., that Trump had cavorted with prostitutes in the presidential suite, which they defiled because Trump hated the Obamas (who had supposedly stayed there earlier), and Putin thus had a recording of the whole sordid affair. In reality, Danchenko is Steele’s source, has no first-hand knowledge, and appears to have made the whole thing up.

 

According to the indictment, Danchenko lied to the FBI about getting information from Dolan. He also lied about having learned directly from a close Trump associate that Trump’s campaign was in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. Danchenko claimed that this information came from the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce — identified in the indictment as “Chamber President-1,” and in public reporting as Sergei Millian.

 

A minor real-estate developer, Millian did some business with the Trump organization and started this obscure “chamber” in order to raise his profile. In reality, Danchenko never spoke or met with Millian. He continued to cling to his incredible story in several interviews by the FBI throughout 2017. As a result, four of the five false statement counts relate to this alleged fabrication. The other concerns Danchenko’s alleged concealment of Dolan’s role.

 

The spotlight on Danchenko, and on the seminal role of the Hillary Clinton campaign in creating and disseminating the Trump-Russia “collusion” tale, is understandable. It should not, however, divert attention from the FBI’s stunningly inept performance. On its face, the dossier is a screed full of blatant nonsense. The Danchenko indictment shows that if a modicum of fair-minded investigation had been done, a borderline competent FBI agent would quickly have spotted its glaring weaknesses. Yet, the Bureau took no meaningful action to corroborate the Steele/Danchenko claims before seeking FISA warrants under oath. Agents did not even interview Danchenko, the main source, until four months later.

 

Too good to check is an impulse that never serves journalists well, and it’s even worse when it is the policy of a law-enforcement agency wielding awesome powers. At best, the FBI allowed itself to get duped into playing along with a political hit against, first, a presidential candidate and, then, the duly elected president of the United States. May John Durham continue to expose the details of this sorry scheme, and hold accountable anyone who broke the law in the course of advancing it.

Our Brave New Biden World

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, December 08, 2020

 

America traditionally has not reinvented reality after an election, although prior presidential winners have often tried, as in the fashion of our politics. But the new powers of social media, Silicon Valley, and a woke media have made reality-changing now a reality.

 

Suddenly Antifa and BLM have all but disappeared from their heroic barricades. Where and why did they go? Did they ever really exist?

 

Mysteriously, a week or two before the election, the flood of violence in our major cities began downsizing to a tiny trickle. How strange that former angry throngs are now in nearly suspended animation. Are all those black kneepads, helmets, and umbrellas now in closets? Are all those whiny Pajama Boys on the barricades back teaching in their Zoom classrooms, or taking their college Zoom classes in their parents’ basements?

 

What changed? What in the world convinced committed revolutionaries to cease their long march to revolutionary justice?

 

Did COVID-19 suddenly remind them that shouting in the faces of others, mocking social distancing, marching in tight phalanxes, shunning hand cleansers and mass mask-wearing were dangerous — although such activities had apparently been safe and even good for civic health while protesting a few weeks before? Was newly found social responsibility the reason that the looting, arson, destruction, and defacement went into hiatus?

 

Is the calm — along with the 90–95 percent “turnout” in the major swing-state cities — the bargaining chips by which the Left claims responsibility for the Biden “win”?

 

And just as suddenly, the evil elixir hydroxychloroquine is in the news again — but this time not as more proof that Trump indulges in conspiracist quackery to force down your throat everything from bleach to lethal, heart-stopping, anti-malarial drugs. Abruptly, a few studies, especially from abroad, in the past month “suggest” that hydroxychloroquine could be efficacious in treating and ameliorating the symptoms of early COVID-19 illnesses—and at the egalitarian cost of about 7 cents a pill.

 

Who knew that the destitute of India and Africa suddenly are attesting that the cheap and available medication has somewhat slowed some of the lethal manifestations of the coronavirus? What happened to rehabilitate this old drug — whose advocacy recently had become synonymous with career destruction and that “science” condemned as worthless in treating COVID-19? Was there worry this December that thousands worldwide might have been sickened or might have died from not considering its medical efficacy in early stages of the disease? A media study just released from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that over the past year news stories about Trump and hydroxychloroquine (overwhelmingly negative in tone) were more numerous than all stories combined that reported on the research and development of all the COVID-19 vaccines.

 

Speaking of COVID-19, has CNN had a sudden change of heart about “China bashing”? Why are the media now reporting that the Chinese were duplicitous in misleading the world about the much earlier origins of the virus and its contagiousness? Does this new post-election realism mark another mysterious change from the old edict of “Trump bashing the Chinese” to “President Biden soberly and judiciously cracking down on egregious Chinese behavior”?

 

Why a few days after November 3 were vaccines suddenly in the news, with praise that they are now safe and efficacious, and that even Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have dropped their pre-election suspicions of the jabs? Was news of their safety and utility a late-breaking discovery of the first week of November?

 

We, of course, had been winked and nodded by Pfizer that in early September important announcements would be coming in late October — in part because Pfizer was becoming afraid that the denigration of the vaccine by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden (who wished to discredit the efforts of Operation Warp Speed) might harm its rollout?

 

And yet, Pfizer, this past summer, told neither the media nor the president of the United States about its ongoing progress with the vaccine but instead, strangely, contacted the Biden campaign. A few days before the election, Pfizer announced it would not announce any success pre-election, so as to avoid playing Election Day politics — all so that it could play politics a few days afterwards by boasting that indeed millions of doses were soon on the way to the American people.

 

How miraculous that a vaccine that was the culmination of nine months of nonstop work was abruptly declared still experimental, with no specific date in sight for its approved roll-out; and yet, about three weeks later, it was transmogrified into a safe, effective, and life-saving remedy.

 

It was almost as if Pfizer were claiming — after taking millions in Trump-administration funding guarantees for logistics, and exemptions from legal liability for their multibillion-dollar risk — that they, well, had never been a part of Operation Warp Speed after all. Or were they? Sort of? It depends?

 

Lockdowns? Amid a late-fall spike that has hit the Western world hard, why suddenly is there renewed national dialogue about the damage done by closing schools, businesses, and commerce? Did the national consciousness in early November abruptly decide that COVID-19 versus quarantines was a lose/lose situation, or is it that President-elect Biden will single-handedly soon be responsible for every COVID-19 fatality? Is it now in retrospect wrong to tag any president with 100 percent culpability, since others might begin in late January blaming a Typhoid Joe for each coronavirus death, a Hoover Joe for each closed business, and a Bull Connor Joe for each accusation of local police excess?

 

Hold on: Perhaps in late January we will learn that COVID-19 deaths were in the past somehow improperly calculated, given lethal comorbidities — suggesting perhaps that many patients die with the coronavirus rather than solely because of it? Will we learn that case numbers are, well, subject to interpretation, given that the better indicator of lethality rates suggests that people younger than 70 who catch the virus have a 99 percent-plus survival rate? And will our late-January COVID death tolls be more or less similar to those in Europe, suggesting an effective, collective, and unifying Biden amelioration?

 

Will our new Biden-approved COVID-19 advisers now come from a range of disciplines, rather than being faulted for not strictly being a virologist or an epidemiologist? After all, oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel, a Biden pandemic consultant who will be advising the nation on a contagious disease that is most lethal to those over 65, in the past had declared that people older than 75 were mostly superfluous. He has vowed to skip his own medical care when he reaches that nearly terminal age, given the comorbidities that make mid-septuagenarians marginalized. Are these perfect credentials to adjudicate COVID-19 care for our vulnerable elderly?

 

Unity and brotherhood have magically sprouted. What happened to Biden’s condemnation of Trump supporters as “ugly folk” and “chumps” and “dregs”? On November 4, did we suddenly realize that these pejorative terms were really ones of endearment, part of Joe’s ecumenical calls for “unity” that is to end the nasty “divisiveness” for those who for years have tossed around the repugnant slur of “Nazi” and worse?

 

Who knew that unproven voting machines, early voting, and mail-in voting were vital proofs of our confidence in democracy? Were we not told by Elizabeth Warren and warned by foundations and universities in 2019, after the “hacked” 2016 election, that computers would be unsecured, and that valid ballots required signatures and addresses and witnesses? And then suddenly in November 2020 — not so much?

 

Is Jill Stein now a saint or demon to have sued — into December 2016 — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to overturn their recorded votes? Was it still legitimate, à la Hillary Clinton’s recent advice to Biden to “never” concede a presidential election “under any circumstances” — or was Hillary too a threat to the republic?

 

Will the Trump “recession” and “depression” suddenly in a few more weeks become an astounding “recovery” or even the “Biden boom” after the “Biden vaccine” ends the “Trump lockdown”?

 

And can we return to media normality again, when reporters cease attacking the president but instead legitimately question the commander in chief about the existential issues of the day, such as Joe Biden’s favorite socks or milk shake, or why is he not showing even more anger at — Donald J. Trump? Or why and how he controlled his temper so masterfully when provoked by — Donald J. Trump? Or can he repair the global damage wrought by — Donald J. Trump? Or what does Biden think about the future of the soul — of Donald J. Trump?

 

When did special counsel go from deified to expendable? Sometime in early December 2020, when John Durham was rebranded as such? Is all praise of the idea of a Mueller special counsel erased, replaced by new slogans on the barnyard wall to the effect that special counsels are merely highfalutin hired partisan guns who should be summarily dismissed?

 

Given Joe Biden’s mental robustness and sharp-as-a-tack repartee, it will be nice again to have no more conspiracy theories floating about the cognitive disabilities of the commander in chief — no demands for the president to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test, no Ivy League psychiatrists diagnosing as nuts a person whom they have never met or talking about interventions to remove the demented president by force. It will be nice not to have to guess what remedies the non-transparent president is taking for his infection, or his cholesterol, once the new chief executive is an open book about his medications.

 

Likewise, it will be a relief to hear no #MeToo accusations about our president, no stories of prior sexual assaults, no fights over whether “every survivor” has the “right to be believed,” no female alleging a past presidential sexual “incident.”

 

As the world turns post-November, so do policy realities. Did Donald Trump really make a mess of the Middle East — one that can be cured by lifting sanctions on Iran, reentering the Iran deal, and resuscitating the funding of Hezbollah terrorism?

 

Or will we hear that the Biden plan alone has enticed Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel? And will the Biden plan subsidize, refresh, and re-empower Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to ensure they are central to a Mideast peace? Or will Biden’s team shrug that the Palestinians are “essential” and then more or less do what Trump did?

 

Is Vladimir Putin still the evil colluder, enemy of all human decency, or is he to be rehabilitated by a liberal reset 2.0, given that Joe Biden “understands Putin” and thus forges a new “correct” partnership for peace with Russia?

 

Do we now have sudden “allies” and a new “multilateral framework” in which NATO partners finally — either in fear of Mighty Joe Biden, or in reference to his Old Joe from Scranton decency — pony up their 2 percent of GDP contributions to NATO defenses? Or will it be wiser to accept that it is our sacred duty to protect rich NATO allies and let them worry about what they wish to contribute to their own defense?

 

In our brave new media/Silicon Valley world, we are rebirthing post-November realities and truths. The past is being erased or refabricated. The present is malleable, as it searches to create the absolute “truth” of our near future.

Trump’s Outrageous Pressure Campaign against Bill Barr

National Review Online

Sunday, October 11, 2020

 

So, what crime would you charge, Mr. President?

 

The closing weeks of the campaign find President Trump berating William Barr, the attorney general who has served him and the country well. Trump’s increasingly strident complaints relate to the probe of his 2016 campaign, launched by the Obama administration. At Barr’s direction, the genesis and conduct of that probe have been under investigation since early 2019 by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham, a well-regarded career prosecutor.

 

Trump is ballistic that Barr and Durham have not prosecuted top Obama-administration officials, not least Vice President Biden, Trump’s opponent in this election, as well as the former president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the last election.

 

It is increasingly clear that Clinton had a large hand in driving the Trump-Russia narrative, which Obama intelligence and law-enforcement officials inflated into a counterintelligence and criminal probe. She accused Trump of engaging in a cyberespionage conspiracy with the Kremlin to sabotage her campaign. The allegation was based largely on Russia’s suspected hacking of Democratic National Committee emails, to which no evidence tied Trump.

 

Even before the DNC hacking, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, had joined Clinton in beating the Trump-Russia “collusion” drum; and after the hacking, Obama’s FBI director James Comey formally leapt in to investigate. The probe relied heavily on bogus political opposition research generated by the Clinton campaign — specifically, by its retention of Christopher Steele, an incompetent and stridently anti-Trump former British spy, who churned out a “dossier” rife with unverified innuendo, obvious material errors, and, quite likely, Russian disinformation.

 

Attorney General Barr has described the Trump-Russia probe as a “travesty” because it was triggered on the thinnest of predication and carried on long after the lack of proof was manifest. The probe continued well into Trump’s presidency, forcing him to endure the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller and govern under a cloud of suspicion until Mueller finally cleared him, 27 months into his term. Democrats cited the existence of an investigation as grounds against allowing Trump to exercise normal powers of his office, such as nominating Supreme Court justices. To this day, congressional Democrats comb Mueller’s report for grounds for another impeachment.

 

The Obama administration and federal investigators clearly abused their powers in this matter. Yet, abuses of power do not often translate into prosecutable offenses codified by the federal penal code. That fact was illustrated to the president’s advantage during his Ukrainian misadventure in 2019, when he exploited his authority over the conduct of foreign relations to pressure an ally to undertake an investigation politically favorable to him. Congressional Democrats were frustrated in their effort to find a crime that fit the abuse.

 

In “Russiagate,” the Justice Department can’t seem to find one either, at least not fast enough or high enough up the political food chain for Trump. The president ranted on Twitter last week about the “TREASONOUS PLOT,” and inveighed against Barr in friendly talk-radio interviews over the failure to indict Obama officials.

 

Trump’s wayward invocation of treason brings the problem into sharp relief. Besides being unhinged political rhetoric, as a legal matter — which is what Barr has to consider — it is sheer nonsense. The presidency is not the nation. A president is a public servant, and a presidential candidate a mere public figure; neither of them is the United States, on whom war must be waged to trigger treason. Under federal law, treason’s close cousin sedition, also touted by Trump supporters as a potential charge, similarly requires proof of conspiracy to use force against the nation and its government.

 

There’s a reason that the checks against abuses of power in our system are predominantly political, not legal. The discretion to exercise government’s police and intelligence-collection powers must necessarily be broad because the potential threats to national security and public safety are infinite. If a presidential candidate actually was conspiring with a hostile nation against vital American interests, an incumbent administration would have not only the legitimate authority but the duty to investigate, regardless of political considerations. Fear of prosecution after the fact would paralyze an administration, to the nation’s peril. If the executive’s awesome powers are abused, the Constitution arms Congress with the means to discipline an administration and even remove wayward officials from office.

 

Prosecution is obviously appropriate only if there have been unambiguous violations of the law. The one official thus far prosecuted by Durham is a former FBI lawyer who tampered with a document critical to the Bureau’s sworn application to the FISA court for a surveillance warrant. Correctly, Barr has insisted that only such “meat and potatoes” crimes will meet the Justice Department’s standards; there will be no extravagant reaches, no prosecutorial “creativity” to sweep Obama officials into the net. Weeks ago, in fact, Barr announced that Obama and Biden are not subjects of Durham’s criminal investigation.

 

Barr, meantime, has vowed that there will ultimately be a narrative report about the Trump-Russia investigation. That is appropriate in accounting for government misconduct, particularly where the Justice Department and FBI are implicated. It is consistent with the attorney general’s duty to oversee the conduct of law enforcement, which in the case of the Hillary-email investigation was carried out by DOJ’s inspector general in issuing a public report.

 

The attorney general remains admirably mindful of his role within our system of government and determined to honor the norms that inform that system. We wish the same could be said of the president of the United States.

Yes, Hillary Clinton Orchestrated the Russia-Collusion Farce

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, October 10, 2020

 

 Did she or didn’t she?

 

Of course she did. In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton, in an effort to divert attention from the email scandal that was haunting her presidential bid, directed her campaign to peddle a political narrative that Russia’s suspected hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails was in furtherance of a conspiracy between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to swing the election to Trump.

 

That is, as I argued in Ball of Collusion, the Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump–Russia collusion farce. And in promoting it, President Obama’s former secretary of state had a willing and able partner in the Obama administration — very much including its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus.

 

Democrats Change Their Tune

 

It was amazing to watch Democrats play Twister this week, as National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe added documentary corroboration to the disclosure he’d made the week before. In that first revelation, via letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ratcliffe explained that, because our spy agencies have very effective foreign-intelligence-gathering methods, they were able to “obtain insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis that concluded Clinton orchestrated the damaging political narrative. That is, Clinton actually did what she accused Trump of doing: She colluded with Russians (through yet another foreigner she recruited to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign: the ludicrous former British spy Christopher Steele) in order to damage Trump’s campaign and cinch the election for herself.

 

As ever with the Clintonistas: When they’re moving their lips, they’re projecting.

 

Ratcliffe’s initial revelation came with a caveat: While our spy agencies judged Moscow’s analysis about Clinton to be authentic (in the sense of truly being a Russian intel product), they could not vouch for its accuracy (i.e., it might reflect what the Russians really believed, but it might alternatively be exaggeration or fabrication). This was not a wobble. Intelligence agencies sweep up scads of information, and they must always grade its reliability with a skeptical eye to avoid deluding themselves.

 

But this was all Democrats needed . . . at least at first. At a Judiciary Committee hearing, former FBI director James Comey and Senate Democrats scoffed at Ratcliffe’s frank, professional concession, claiming it discredited his disclosure in its entirety, and called his competence into question. He’d clearly been duped by Russian disinformation . . . said the people who seem to have made a habit of being duped by Russian disinformation.

 

Did the Russians have a window into the Clinton campaign? It sure looks that way, between Secretary Clinton’s security practices (which even Comey has described as irresponsible) and her retention of Steele, with his stable of Russian oligarch clients and his dossier “primary subsource,” whom the FBI suspected (with copious reason) to be a Russian asset.

 

But the point here is not whether Russian spies, thanks to Clinton’s own carelessness, had effectively infiltrated her campaign. The point is: Clinton was undeniably doing what, it turns out, the Russians were contemporaneously detecting.

 

Want to play epistemological acrobatics? Okay, fine. We can spend hours pondering whether Russian spies generated an assessment about what Clinton was up to because they legitimately wanted to inform their Kremlin superiors, or whether they did it because they wanted our spies to see it and to wonder whether the Russians knew that we knew that the Russians knew . . .

 

I’d prefer to keep my eye on the ball, which has precious little to do with spy games and Russian disinformation. The Russians were able to deduce what Hillary Clinton was up to because it was patently obvious. It did not take a super sleuth to figure this one out. Just eyes to see and ears to hear.

 

That’s why you might have noticed a shift in Democratic tone when Ratcliffe released more documents.

 

The second set of disclosures showed that the CIA had taken the Russian information seriously enough that (a) then-director John Brennan quickly briefed President Obama and his administration’s national-security team about it and (b) the agency included the Russian intel about Clinton in a memo to the FBI, which laid out information gleaned by the “Crossfire Hurricane fusion cell” that Brennan had assembled to promote the Trump–Russia storyline.

 

After Ratcliffe published these documents, we were no longer hearing much about disinformation. Now the talking point became: Well, there was nothing criminal in what Clinton did; she was simply worried about a potentially corrupt conspiracy between Trump and Putin — and who wouldn’t be?

 

Right . . . worried based on absolutely zero evidence. There was not a shred of proof that Donald Trump and his campaign had any foreknowledge of, much less complicity in, the suspected Russian hack of DNC emails. That, you may remember, was the sinkhole on which the collusion farce was constructed.

 

Clinton Retains Steele to Craft Trump–Russia Narrative

 

At this point, Democrats have no choice but to concede Clinton’s catalytic role in the collusion narrative because there is no other rational way to look at what happened — not for any sentient person, never mind Russian intelligence agents.

 

Let’s look at the timeline.

 

In spring 2016, the Clinton campaign, through their lawyers at Perkins Coie (an activist Democratic firm that also represents the DNC), retained Steele to compile opposition research connecting Trump and Russia. By June 20, Steele had produced the first of his dossier “reports.” It sets forth the infamous “pee tape” farce, at which any competent investigator would have rolled his eyes, especially if he knew anything about Steele’s self-professed Trump derangement. For Steele, the rumor that Putin has a video of Trump cavorting with prostitutes is not good enough; he figures the story is better if he adds that Trump went out of his way to stage the “golden shower” performance on a bed in which the Obamas — “whom he hated” — had slept.

 

It’s melodrama, in the now familiar genre of Trump fever-dream. Beyond that, Steele’s “report” could have been written by Clinton or Brennan themselves. It frets over Trump’s by-then-well-documented skepticism about NATO, surmising that such thinking couldn’t possibly be explained by anything other than Trump’s being blackmailed by Putin.

 

As usual, what’s actually interesting about a Steele “report” is what’s not in it. There’s nothing about emails. That this is a Steele pattern would also have been a red flag for the FBI if its top officials, like other devotees of the progressive international order, had not been as repulsed by Trump’s candidacy as Steele was. None of the seemingly important things Steele reports are verifiable (and some of them are plain false); by contrast, the actually important things that happen are never in Steele’s “intelligence reporting” until after they happen. He was not unearthing information as an intelligence professional; he was a paid political hack conveniently folding reported news into Clinton’s anti-Trump campaign narrative.

 

Assange Issues a Threat as the Clinton Emails Scandal Intensifies

 

As Steele might have noted had he been paying attention, over a week before his June 20 “report,” WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange had publicly said, “We have emails pending publication,” which were “in relation to Hillary Clinton.” Western intelligence services have long observed that WikiLeaks has a collaborative relationship with Russia.

 

At the time, it was not common knowledge that the DNC had been hacked. Nor was it widely known that the FBI and the DNC had been slow to react to the hack, or that the DNC would deny the FBI access to its servers (with the support of the Obama Justice Department, which did not take action to seize them for forensic examination). Thus, anyone who was focused on Assange would have assumed that the emails he was talking about were Clinton’s personal emails — the 33,000 she had declined to surrender to the State Department even though they were rife with official business.

 

The start of summer was a time of frenzied activity regarding Clinton’s email scandal. The FBI, driven by the political calendar and the Obama administration’s determination that the putative future Democratic president would not be charged with a crime, raced to close its probe-for-show before the Democratic national convention, scheduled to begin on July 25.

 

In rapid succession: On June 27, Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch had her tarmac tête-à-tête with Mrs. Clinton’s husband (the former president who had first brought Lynch to prominence by appointing her U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York). On Saturday, July 2, the FBI and the Justice Department did their cursory close-out interview of Clinton (which was such a sham that she was permitted to have two other subjects of the investigation present and assisting her as “counsel”). And on July 5, FBI director James Comey held his infamous “exoneration” press conference, which illustrated that there was damning evidence of Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and destruction of government records, and of her promotion of a culture of national-security recklessness at the State Department; but, nevertheless, that the Obama administration would not charge her, even though her conduct violated the literal terms of the espionage statute.

 

If Director Comey thought his press conference was going to put the email scandal behind the Bureau and the Clinton campaign, it had the opposite effect. Republicans were outraged that the fix was in. Democrats were outraged at the director’s misconduct in going public with the evidence against an uncharged person. At the congressional hearings that immediately ensued, Republicans questioned Comey in excruciating detail about all the disclosures he’d made concerning Clinton’s mishandling of classified information. It emerged that he’d begun preparing his exoneration speech months earlier, even though Clinton had not been questioned, other central witnesses had not been interviewed, and key evidence had not been obtained, let alone analyzed.

 

Heading into the convention that she’d hoped would be a coronation, Clinton was reeling. Her email scandal was intensifying rather than dissipating. And Assange seemed to be threatening to leak the very emails she had taken pains not just to delete but to destroy — employing the BleachBit program so no one could ever read them. (Of course, as the Clinton campaign had to realize, if a foreign intelligence service had hacked into her non-secure homebrew system to copy the emails and slip them to WikiLeaks, an after-the-fact BleachBit treatment would not have helped.)

 

The DNC Emails

 

On July 22, Assange pulled the trigger, but it was not the shot anyone was expecting. He began rolling out thousands of emails. But not Secretary Clinton’s emails. These were the DNC’s emails.

 

For Clinton, this was manna from heaven.

 

Even though Assange had characteristically sought to drum up attention by promising emails “in relation to Clinton,” the Democrats’ nominee was not an active participant in the DNC emails. Nor could the hacking of the DNC be blamed on her reckless use of a non-government server system. Although Assange had implied that the emails he was about to release would damage Clinton, they did not damage her at all.

 

To the contrary, they helped her. Clinton was able to pose as the victim, targeted by a WikiLeaks-Russia scheme; yet she suffered none of the harms of such a scheme, since her own emails were not at issue. In addition, the fact that emails were at the center of the controversy would enable her to conflate her email scandal with the hacking of the DNC. Now, if Trump or other Republicans referred to her destroyed emails, it would be spun as a reference to the DNC emails that Russia was suspected of hacking. When Trump foolishly chided that he hoped Russia found Clinton’s emails, it would be spun as a plea that Russia hack the DNC — even though he was obviously referring to the emails Clinton had purged, and doing so under circumstances where Clinton’s private servers had long been decommissioned and in the FBI’s possession.

 

Steele and the Campaign Get On-Message

 

Naturally, publication of the hacked DNC emails was included, post facto, in the Trump-Russia narrative that Steele, at the Clinton campaign’s urging, had already been fabricating for weeks. The well-paid former spy got busy, writing a new “intelligence report.” He thundered about an “extensive conspiracy between TRUMP’s campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned at the highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff based in the US,” which explained the Kremlin’s responsibility for the “recent appearance of DNC-emails on WikiLeaks.” This, of course, had been done “with the full knowledge and support of TRUMP and senior members of his campaign team” — a quid pro quo for Trump’s supposed agreement “to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue.”

 

After the lurid “pee tape” story, should we be surprised that Steele was just getting warmed up? He related that this “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and “the Russian leadership” was being coordinated on the Trump end “by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy adviser, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries.”

 

In fact, Manafort and Page do not know each other. Oh, and what about that “Russian diplomatic staff based in the US” that Steele touted? He pointed to the Russian consulate in Miami as a conspiratorial hub. Alas, there is no Russian consulate in Miami — as any competent FBI agent who was actually interested in assessing Steele’s credibility would have figured out in about five minutes (that’s about how long it took a State Department official to figure it out when Steele subsequently spun this yarn for her).

 

While Steele was scrivening away, the Clinton campaign staff at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia was wasting no time. On July 24, with revelations from the hacked DNC emails still breaking and the convention about to begin, Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook told CNN:

 

What’s disturbing to us is that we — experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that they are — the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention here.

 

That was the narrative. We didn’t need to get it from Russian intelligence. We got it from the spokesman for the Clinton campaign itself: Russia hacked emails and strategically leaked them with the intention of undermining Clinton and promoting Trump’s candidacy.

 

It was a great story for Clinton: She would be delighted to have Americans reading Democratic emails she was not party to, rather than speculating about her own emails. The DNC emails were basically a dud, making explicit the already manifest fact that the party was in the tank for Clinton against Bernie Sanders. More consequential was that they helped the media push the Clinton email scandal out of the limelight for a few days, between the embarrassment of a few top Democrats whose emails were published and the convention drama — speeches by the Obamas and Clintons, and Khizr Khan, the father of a heroic fallen Muslim American soldier, Captain Humayan Khan, blasting Trump’s proposed restrictions on Muslims entering the U.S.

 

The Political Narrative Seamlessly Becomes an Investigation

 

Getting her own email scandal out of the public eye was what Clinton wanted. And the Obama administration went right along for the ride.

 

At exactly the time Clinton was rolling out the Trump-Russia narrative, based on the DNC email hacking, Alexander Downer — an Australian ambassador who once arranged a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation, and who was closely tied to Steele’s British intelligence colleagues — suddenly remembered a conversation two months earlier with a nondescript Trump campaign adviser. That young fellow, George Papadopoulos, had made a vague remark about hearing that the Russians had some kind of compromising information about Mrs. Clinton. Eureka, Downer exclaimed to himself, Papadopoulos must have meant the DNC emails! Whereupon the diplomat sauntered over to the U.S. embassy to alert officials from the Obama State Department that Secretary Clinton used to run.

 

Quite the leap of logic. Remember, the DNC emails did not involve Clinton. Plus, even Downer admits that Papadopoulos never mentioned the word emails in their barroom conversation. There is not a scintilla of indication that Papadopoulos knew anything about DNC emails or Russia’s suspected hacking of them. Months earlier, he says he had been told by the mysterious Maltese academic, Josef Mifsud, that the Kremlin might have Mrs. Clinton’s own emails from her non-secure homebrew server — which, if the conversation really happened, would have made Mifsud about the zillionth person to so hypothesize on that subject. (See, e.g., Director Comey’s July 5 remarks: “We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.”)

 

No matter. At the same time that Hillary Clinton had her campaign proclaim that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump-Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump, and Steele dutifully reported that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump-Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on — you’ll never guess! — suspicion that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump–Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump.

 

What a coincidence.