Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling investigation into “Trump-Russia collusion” has devolved into a ludicrous media spectacle, a meandering situation comedy “about nothing” that is in quest of something, anything to be about.
If, after all of these months of investigation, he has no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, then the conclusion is clear: it simply didn’t happen.
In recent weeks and months, the media has been busy dumpster-diving in Moscow for Russian Facebook bots, and chasing hot tips from a Russian prostitute turned part-time sex seminarist resisting extradition to Russia from a Bangkok jail.
They have been faithfully “reporting” as fact every illegal, anonymous leak from the conflicted special counsel’s office about its supposed next moves, which they assure their viewers and readers are getting closer and closer to Trump’s inner circle. Because OMG! RUSSIA!
Meanwhile, Mueller’s crack team was reduced to scouring the seashores of Seychelles for the next nothingburger “bombshell,” and then (when that didn’t blow up) they promptly pivoted to investigating the ominous possibility that some officials in the United Arab Emirates may have sought political influence with the new administration. Can you imagine?
The absurdity of it all has finally reached a point where it is doing irreparable harm to the reputation of America’s once-vaunted justice system. (The reputation of the press is too far gone at this point to hope for rehabilitation.)
Mueller’s partisan inquisition is based on a pack of lies. Its remit isn’t tied to a particular statute believed to have been violated and it is written in an open-ended way that it is, in fact, unprecedented for invocation of the special counsel law.
It is time, somehow, to end it. Now.
You Can’t Eat the Fruit of a Poisonous Tree
Every indictment of the Mueller investigation, now or in the future, rests on a three-legged stool of legal first causes:
- The breach of Democratic National Committee servers that lead to the WikiLeaks revelations of Hillary’s collusion with the DNC to rig her nomination, and other dirty political tricks.
- The FISA warrant granted against George Papadopoulos for his drunken blabfest about alleged personal knowledge of Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton while libating at a bar in London with former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. Unbeknownst to anyone until very recently, Downer was previously a $25 million donor to the Clinton Foundation.
- The multiple FISA warrants granted to monitor Carter Page, based on outlandish claims alleged in a sketchy dossier contrived by a British spy claiming (but of course not revealing) first-hand sources close to Vladimir Putin. The so-called Steele Dossier was the product of Democrat opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, and paid for by the Clinton campaign through Democrat law firm Perkins-Coie.
All three legs of the “Trump-Russia collusion” stool are roots of the same poisonous tree: Obama-era DOJ and FBI determination to meddle in the American election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
The Real Collusion
There wouldn’t be a WikiLeaks disclosure, or (more to the point) the political impact of any such disclosures would have redounded entirely to Hillary’s benefit, had the contents of those purloined emails not proven the worst suspicions about her willingness to put ambition over integrity.
WikiLeaks delivered proof of the Clinton campaign’s collusion with the DNC to block Bernie Sanders’ path to the Democratic nomination. Those email revelations also contained allusions to her use of the Clinton Foundation for influence peddling.
At a time when Hillary herself was under separate investigation for mishandling classified secrets on her private email server—and receiving unprecedented and possibly illegal deference even as she was caught destroying evidence—the FBI inexplicably allowed the DNC to hire its own third-party firm to investigate the breach. Worse, the FBI accepted without question its predetermined conclusion that the Russians had hacked the committee, without insisting on examining the DNC server firsthand.
This, despite the fact that hacker-celebrity Kim Dotcom claims to have physical proof in the form of a thumb drive and the motive of who carried out the hack from inside the DNC, as a first-hand participant in the transfer of the data to WikiLeaks. He has offered this information to Mueller publicly, yet neither the media nor Mueller’s office seem terribly interested in his evidence.
But dumpsters in Moscow and whores in Bangkok get them excited for some reason.
From the time Michael Isikoff ran an article infused with Steele’s fictitious “information” and the FBI used Isikoff’s so-called “reporting” to “corroborate” Steele’s “information” before a FISA court judge, the legacy media has been a willing, eager and active participant in the real collusion with actual enemies, both foreign and domestic, of our Constitution and electoral process.
A Lie Repeated Often Enough is Still a Lie
The Steele dossier was an outrageous work of political fiction concocted by a foreign spy as partisan opposition research. It was then whitewashed by pro-Hillary agents in the FBI and Justice Department to obtain otherwise unobtainable FISA warrants on someone, anyone—even a minor and tragicomic character like Carter Page—under false pretenses.
How false? Well, consider: Page is in no apparent legal jeopardy and seems well-poised to sue numerous media outlets for defamation and slander. He has been painted as a stooge of the Kremlin, when, in fact, far from being a Russian spy, he helped the FBI nab a Russian oligarch in 2013 by working secretly as an informant.
The voluminous communications generated by these fraudulently obtained FISA warrants led to a frantic effort by high-level members of Obama’s inner circle—especially, but not only, Susan Rice and Samantha Power—in the final moments of his administration to expose the names of Trump officials in thousands of highly irregular unmasking requests.
These included Michael Flynn, and his private conversations with Russian officials, even in his official capacity as Trump’s future national security advisor during the transition.
Someone in the administration then unlawfully leaked transcripts of these communications to the press, turning the audacious fiction that Trump colluded with Putin to defeat Hillary into conventional opinion, when in reality it was Hillary who colluded with foreign agents and rogue Justice Department and FBI partisans to throw and then attempt to undo the 2016 election.
Eclipsing Watergate
This is orders of magnitude worse than anything that happened during Watergate, and yet the media, the beneficiaries of illegal leaks of these conversations and their contents from those very officials implicated in the unmaskings, have created an entirely false narrative that Donald Trump is on the verge of Nixon’s fate. The so-called “blue wave” supposedly coming in 2018 is fueled entirely by the negative energy of this lie.
All the evidence we have after 16 months of 24/7 “Trump-Russia collusion” hysteria is that Barack Obama is the real Richard Nixon of Russiagate and Hillary Clinton is its G. Gordon Liddy.
It is becoming clear that the sanctions about which Flynn was “caught” talking to the Russian ambassador were not punitive for any new effort of the Russians to interfere in our elections, but rather—and much more serious—part of an elaborate effort by the Obama Justice Department to conceal FISA abuses, first to prevent and then to reverse Trump’s election.
When the Inspector General Michael Horowitz finally releases his report on FBI misdeeds, and the dots are ultimately connected to Uranium One (which very well may implicate none other than Robert Mueller himself) and efforts of Russian oligarchs to bribe and cajole Hillary Clinton and others into approving a dangerous and stupid decision to let a Kremlin-controlled firm acquire 20 percent of America’s uranium supply, we will be forced to confront a far more terrifying possibility.
Namely, that Russiagate is nothing more than a cover-up of FISA-gate, itself a desperate hail-mary attempt to protect an array of high-level government officials involved in the scandalous sale of America’s national and security interests during the Obama Administration.
An unhampered Trump Administration could have prosecuted these crimes almost immediately with some sense of a mandate to “drain the swamp,” after soundly defeating Clinton by breaking down the “blue wall” with his populist message. In other words, without these three legal “root causes” of the Russia hysteria, President Trump’s historic election victory would be untainted by scandal of this existential, impeachment-threatening variety.
We could be enjoying (or debating) Trump’s remarkable and unprecedented foreign and domestic policy wins, instead of continually fretting (or hoping for) the next shoe that never drops from Mueller’s stealthy partisan hatchet job. Our national attention would be on real things, and not on false whispers and anonymously sourced rumors.
So Far the Laugh is on Us
Foreign intervention in our elections and economy is always to be expected, and was a major concern of the framers of our Constitution. But there is nothing more shocking or more harmful to the rule of law than our own Justice Department meddling directly or even indirectly in domestic politics, much less using foreign spies to do it.
Any pretense by Obama-era officials to care about the rule of law in light of current evidence should be the subject only of derisive laughter. Perhaps Jerry Seinfeld has a spare laugh track we can borrow, because none of this investigation into nothing, about nothing, is actually funny, no matter how glib and snarky the tweets of Holder, Brennan, Power, Comey et. al. may be today.
The real investigation should be of the conspirators in and around the Obama White House, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Clinton campaign and foundation, boldly trying to hang their own lawbreaking collusion around the neck of President Trump.
And that would be no laughing matter, either. Because it really happened.
Photo credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images