Russia hoax was biggest scandal in US history

 Peder Zane:

Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history.

Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief.

Its notorious predecessors – L’Affaire Lewinsky, Iran-Contra, Watergate, Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier, the XYZ Affair – involved relatively small numbers of malefactors engaged in specific acts of illegality and corruption (we still don’t know who, if anyone, planned the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol)

Russiagate, by contrast, is a vast conspiracy involving innumerable powerful forces, including the Democratic Party, NeverTrump Republicans, the Obama administration, the FBI, Department of Justice and the nation’s most prestigious news outlets.

Where previous scandals often ended with public accountability for the perpetrators – Watergate saw the imprisonment of top White House aides and President Nixon’s resignation – and public reforms, Russiagate has produced no such reckoning.

Russiagate began with a kernel of truth: Someone – probably Russians, though we still don’t know for sure – hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s private server. Fearful of what might be released, the Clinton campaign tried to discredit any damaging material by raising dark questions about its source. (Joe Biden executed this same strategy to great effect when he falsely described the evidence of corruption found on his son Hunter’s laptop as “Russian disinformation.”)

In response, the Clinton campaign financed an absurd collection of conspiracy theories involving peeing prostitutes and billion-dollar bribes, the so-called Steele dossier. Its importance cannot be overstated – it was the dossier that linked the Trump campaign to the hacking. No dossier, no collusion theory.

During the summer and fall of 2016, Hillary’s henchmen fed this preposterous concoction to Obama administration officials in the DOJ, FBI, CIA and State Department. Everyone knew it was a political operation: Declassified notes showed that then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama in July 2016 that Clinton planned to tie Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Clinton staffers – including Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser – tried to interest the mainstream press in its scurrilous accusations, but got little traction because they could not be verified. Instead of laughing it all off as transparent campaign mud-slinging, however, the FBI joined the conspiracy. The bureau took the extreme step of opening a counter-intelligence probe into an ongoing presidential campaign – and its agents perjured themselves to obtain wire-tapping warrants.

Days after the November election, Hillary’s campaign focused on “Russian interference” as a chief reason for her defeat. On Jan. 5, 2017, President Obama, Vice President Biden and other key leaders met with FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office to discuss Russia-related matters. We do not know what was discussed in that meeting, but the next day, Comey briefed President-elect Trump on some allegations in the Steele dossier. Four days later, on Jan. 10, CNN used that briefing as a news hook to report the collusion conspiracy theories as high-drama news.

Over the next few months and years, current and former officials illegally fed misleading classified material and partisan anonymous quotes to the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News and other sympathetic press outlets to advance the narrative. Brennan and former National Director of Intelligence James Clapper became a constant presence on cable news, using the top-secret authority of their previous positions to assure the public that collusion was real – although in sworn testimony, Clapper admitted he had not seen such evidence.

Congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff – who falsely claimed to have seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of Trump/Russia collusion – amplified the smears.

The appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the fantasy in May 2017 fueled the fire. His effort became part of the scheme: He only looked for evidence that might implicate Trump, ignoring questions about who cooked up the conspiracy theory, how they disseminated it throughout the government and media, and the laws they might have broken in the process.
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There is more.

The failure to hold people accountable for this fraud is a stain on the history of this country.  After the fraud was exposed little has happened to the perps.  Some of the perps have gone on to new assignments in the Brandon i.e. Biden administration including Jake Sullivan one of the purveyors of the false information.

Hillary Clinton who was primarily responsible for the fraud just read a weepy version of the speech she had planned for her election "victory."  She should be crying in the dock instead.  The media has barely been held accountable for its own participation in the fraud.