Trump Russian Collusion Probe: Nonsense

The New York Times story this weekend, that senior FBI personnel took it upon themselves two years ago to open a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president of the U.S. was a Russian agent, reveals again both the putschist institutional megalomania of the Comey FBI and the national political media’s addiction to defamation of the president — that is, the willful intent to defame him. The Steele dossier, commissioned by Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, a pastiche of lies, invented smut, and wild surmises, was used by the FBI as the basis for its rogue unconstitutionality, even though at least some senior Justice Department officials knew the dossier was just mud-slinging propaganda from the defeated party. The rejected candidate, Hillary Clinton, cited the dossier as evidence of her opponent’s “treason” (which now is deemed to occur in the U.S. only in war or equivalent conditions of international hostility), which cost her the election, and a few weeks after her book about the election emerged and the Steele dossier was exposed, Mrs. Clinton blandly changed her description of it from the credible effort of a retired British intelligence officer to “campaign information” but pretended its probative value was intact.

The moral of the story is that the intelligence and investigative agencies were compromised in their partisanship and illegally attempted to influence and then undo the 2016 election. There is no evidence that the Russian government did much beyond ineffectual social-media advertising debunking the U.S. generally, to no quantifiable effect on the outcome. What the CIA, DNI, and FBI and some in the Justice Department did, by contrast, was illegal and dangerous, and the incoming attorney general and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman (William Barr and Lindsey Graham, respectively) are refreshing in their expression of determination to get to the bottom of it. The gelatinous sanctimony of incoming Democratic House committee chairmen that they will continue to explore impeachable offenses by the president is so fatuous and repetitive it is becoming hard even for the unctuous babbling heads at CNN and MSNBC to work up much appetite for another round of the Russian collusion fable.

About the Author

Conrad Black

Conrad Black is the author of Donald J. Trump, A President Like No Other.

The New York Times story this weekend, that senior FBI personnel took it upon themselves two years ago to open a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president of the U.S. was a Russian agent, reveals again both the putschist institutional megalomania of the Comey FBI and the national political media’s addiction to defamation of the president — that is, the willful intent to defame him. The Steele dossier, commissioned by Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, a pastiche of lies, invented smut, and wild surmises, was used by the FBI as the basis for its rogue unconstitutionality, even though at least some senior Justice Department officials knew the dossier was just mud-slinging propaganda from the defeated party. The rejected candidate, Hillary Clinton, cited the dossier as evidence of her opponent’s “treason” (which now is deemed to occur in the U.S. only in war or equivalent conditions of international hostility), which cost her the election, and a few weeks after her book about the election emerged and the Steele dossier was exposed, Mrs. Clinton blandly changed her description of it from the credible effort of a retired British intelligence officer to “campaign information” but pretended its probative value was intact.

The moral of the story is that the intelligence and investigative agencies were compromised in their partisanship and illegally attempted to influence and then undo the 2016 election. There is no evidence that the Russian government did much beyond ineffectual social-media advertising debunking the U.S. generally, to no quantifiable effect on the outcome. What the CIA, DNI, and FBI and some in the Justice Department did, by contrast, was illegal and dangerous, and the incoming attorney general and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman (William Barr and Lindsey Graham, respectively) are refreshing in their expression of determination to get to the bottom of it. The gelatinous sanctimony of incoming Democratic House committee chairmen that they will continue to explore impeachable offenses by the president is so fatuous and repetitive it is becoming hard even for the unctuous babbling heads at CNN and MSNBC to work up much appetite for another round of the Russian collusion fable.