Those behind the dirty dossier on Trump
Kimberley Strassel:
This is the dark side of politics that too rarely gets exposed. Instead, the media focuses on the "seriousness of the charge." That same media seems frustrated that Trump will not play their game. They are going to have to get used to his counter attacks when they go along with the dumpster diving Democrats.
It appears that VanderSloot was the subject of Obama's abuse of office in siccing federal agencies lie IRS and Labor Department on him and it was just a prelude to the wholesale Irs abuse of Tea Party groups. It became another aspect of the corrupt Chicago Way politics as practiced by the Obama White House.
I would not be at all surprised to hear that the source of the leaks about the dossier came from the White House and not the intelligence agencies.
...There is more.
“Fake news” doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s created by people with an agenda. This dossier—which alleges that Donald Trump has deep backing from Russia—is a turbocharged example of the smear strategy that the left has been ramping up for a decade. Team Trump needs to put the scandal in that context so that it can get to governing and better defuse the next such attack.
The more that progressives have failed to win political arguments, the more they have turned to underhanded tactics to shut down their political opponents. (For a complete account of these abuses, see my book, “The Intimidation Game.”) Liberals co-opted the IRS to crack down on Tea Party groups. They used state prosecutors to launch phony investigations. They coordinated liberal shock troops to threaten corporations. And they—important for today’s hysteria—routinely employed outside dirt diggers to engage in character assassination.
This editorial page ran a series in 2012 about one such attack, on Frank VanderSloot. In 2011 the Idaho businessman gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. The following spring, the Obama re-election campaign publicly smeared Mr. VanderSloot (and seven other Romney donors) as “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.”
This national shaming, by the president no less, painted a giant target on Mr. VanderSloot’s back. The liberal media slandered him daily on TV and in print. The federal bureaucracy went after him: He was ultimately audited by the IRS and the Labor Department. About a week after the Obama attack, an investigator contacted a courthouse in Idaho Falls demanding documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as any other litigation involving him. We traced this investigator to an opposition-research chop shop called Fusion GPS.
Fusion is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson. When we asked how he could justify dumpster-diving into the divorce records of private citizens, he said only that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target. He refused to tell us who’d paid him to do this slumming, and federal records didn’t show any payments to Fusion from prominent Democratic groups or campaigns. The money may well have been washed through third-party groups.
Why does this matter? Guess who is behind that dossier against Mr. Trump: Fusion GPS....
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This is the dark side of politics that too rarely gets exposed. Instead, the media focuses on the "seriousness of the charge." That same media seems frustrated that Trump will not play their game. They are going to have to get used to his counter attacks when they go along with the dumpster diving Democrats.
It appears that VanderSloot was the subject of Obama's abuse of office in siccing federal agencies lie IRS and Labor Department on him and it was just a prelude to the wholesale Irs abuse of Tea Party groups. It became another aspect of the corrupt Chicago Way politics as practiced by the Obama White House.
I would not be at all surprised to hear that the source of the leaks about the dossier came from the White House and not the intelligence agencies.
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