USA 2024 Elections Thread

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Russiagate: The Scandal That Became Business As Usual

https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/06/08/russiagate_the_scandal_that_became_business_as_usual_149331.html

Special Counsel John Durham may have issued his final report last
month, but the Russiagate scandal is far from over. This is not
because there is no more to learn about the years-long effort by the
Democratic Party, the FBI, CIA, and major news outlets to advance the
conspiracy theory that Donald Trump teamed with Vladimir Putin to
steal the 2016 election.

Rather it’s because Russiagate never ended. Unlike political scandals
of the past – from the XYZ Affair to Watergate and Iran-Contra – it is
not a discrete set of events with a beginning, middle, and end.
Instead, it has become a form of governing in which the entrenched
forces of the Washington bureaucracy punish their enemies, protect
their friends and interfere in elections with impunity.

A continuous thread connects the schemes to deny the results of the
2016 election, to cover up the Biden family’s influence-peddling
schemes during the 2020 election, and the ongoing effort to tar
President Biden’s opponents as extremists or racists.

Ironically, all of this is especially dangerous because it is out in
the open. The profound misdeeds are not hidden in the dark web; they
are part of the public record. And yet, none of the major malefactors
– including Joe Biden, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, former
FBI Director James B. Comey, and former CIA Director John Brennan,
among others – have been held to account. Rather, they are lionized,
and in some cases employed, by leading media organizations.

The breadth of these machinations is so extensive that I would need a
book, rather than a column, to detail it. But here is a brief recap
that can serve as a reminder of key events of this dark period of our
history.

On July 28, 2016, then CIA Director John Brennan informed President
Obama about intelligence reports indicating Hillary Clinton’s campaign
“plan” to tie Donald Trump to Russia in order to distract the public
from the growing controversy over her use of a private email server
while Secretary of State. Notes in the margin – “JC,” “Susan,” and
“Denis” – almost certainly refer to then FBI Director James Comey,
National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Obama’s chief of staff,
Denis McDonough.

On July 31, Comey’s FBI launched a counterintelligence probe into
whether the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia to damage
Clinton through the release of her emails.

On Jan. 3, 2017, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer warned the
president-elect not to challenge the intelligence community’s claims
of Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Let me tell you, you
take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at
getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “So even for
a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb
to do this.”

On Jan. 5, 2017, in his finals days in office, Obama held an Oval
Office meeting with Brennan, Comey, Rice, Vice President Biden,
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and others to
strategize responses to alleged Russian election interference and
Trump’s victory.

On Jan. 6, Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the Steele
dossier – a series of absurd and salacious memos paid for and
disseminated by the Clinton campaign that sought to tarnish Trump’s
character while tying him and his campaign associates to the Kremlin.

On Jan. 10, CNN used a leak it received about Comey’s briefing to
broadcast the dossier’s smears, fueling a partisan feeding frenzy that
led to the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as
Special Counsel to investigate Trump/Russia ties. Buzzfeed News
published the entire dossier the same day.

On Jan. 28, after assuring Trump privately that he wasn’t under
investigation, Comey wrote a memo recounting that he’d boasted to the
new president, “I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do
weasel moves.” He then went to his car and typed up his version of the
conversations. When Trump fired him on May 9, Comey immediately leaked
the memos, in violation of FBI rules, to a sympathetic college
professor in hopes, he conceded later, of prompting the appointment of
a special prosecutor. On May 17, Robert S. Mueller III, a longtime
Comey friend and ally, was appointed special counsel to investigate
potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

On April 18, 2018, the New York Times and Washington Post shared the
Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for their “deeply sourced,
relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that
dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to
the Trump campaign.” This work, much of which was based on leaks from
anonymous government sources, was filled with “false and misleading
claims” which, my RealClearInvestigations colleague Aaron Maté
reported, the newspapers have still refused to correct.

On March 22, 2019, Mueller submitted a report on his investigation
which “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired
or coordinated with the Russian government in its election
interference activities.” Mueller, however, claimed that the source of
these falsehoods was beyond his mandate, so he did not look into the
role Clinton, Comey, Brennan, Obama, and other high-ranking Democrats
played in ginning up charges of treason against a duly elected U.S.
president.

On May 13, it was reported that Attorney General William Barr had
appointed John Durham to examine the origins of the Russia probe. Barr
upgraded Durham to a Special Counsel role on Dec. 1, 2020. Durham’s
final report, issued last month, detailed the Clinton campaign’s
central role in the Russiagate conspiracy while concluding that "the
FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections
between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election"
because it relied on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated
intelligence.” Durham’s investigation also undermined the other pillar
of the Russia hoax, endorsing earlier findings that there was no
conclusive evidence that the Russians had hacked DNC servers. Like the
Trump/Russia collusion theory, this claim also originated from
associates of the Clinton campaign.

On Sept. 24, the Mueller report a bust, House Democrats began
proceedings to make Trump just the third president in history to be
impeached based on the claim that he sought foreign influence in
America’s elections by holding up aid to Ukraine for a short period to
pressure the country into looking into its potential connection to the
Russiagate hoax and the Biden family’s work in Ukraine. The aid
package was later delivered, and no investigation was undertaken.
Nevertheless, the House approved two articles of impeachment on
December 18, 2019, along party lines – all Republicans and three
Democrats opposed the measure – and sent them to the GOP-controlled
Senate, which acquitted Trump on Feb. 5, 2020, on another party-line
vote (only Republican Mitt Romney crossed party lines to convict Trump
on a single charge).

On Oct. 14, 2020, the New York Post reported “that Hunter Biden
introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top
executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder
Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a
prosecutor who was investigating the company.” The article, based on
email from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair
shop, suggested an influence-peddling scheme while flatly
contradicting Joe Biden’s claim that he never discussed his son’s
foreign business dealings.

On Oct. 17, Biden campaign official and future Secretary of State
Antony Blinken discusses the laptop with former acting CIA Director
Mike Morell.

On Oct. 19, Politico reported that a letter signed by Morell and 51
other former intelligence officials – including Brennan and Clapper –
claimed that allegations in the Post article had “all the classic
earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Echoing the false
Russiagate claims, the letter continued, “For the Russians at this
point, with Trump down in the polls, there is incentive for Moscow to
pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to
weaken Biden should he win.” Major news outlets and social media
companies relied on this letter to downplay and suppress the
revelations. The FBI, which had taken possession of Hunter Biden’s
laptop in December 2019, refused to comment on its authenticity.

On Oct. 22, Joe Biden invoked the letter in his final debate with
Trump to dismiss the laptop as “a Russian plant.” On November 3, Biden
became president through razor-thin margins in key swing states.

On March 30, 2022, the Washington Post reported that it had
authenticated thousands of emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop. CBS News
subsequently verified almost all the contents of the laptop.

On May 15, 2023, the New York Post reported that the Internal Revenue
Service removed “the entire investigative team” in its years-long tax
fraud investigation of Hunter Biden at the behest of President Biden’s
Department of Justice. This purge came after several whistleblowers
stepped forward claiming the probe was being slow-walked. The move
also came after a series of revelations showed how the Biden family
used a series of shell companies to funnel millions of dollars from
foreign sources to at least nine family members – including Joe
Biden’s young grandchildren. As Andrew C. McCarthy recently noted in
the National Review, it is still not clear what the Bidens provided in
exchange for this money, other than access to Joe.

On June 4, former FBI Director Comey, noting the long string of cases
being brought against Trump by Democratic officials, told MSNBC that
“it’s a crazy world that Donald Trump has dragged this country into,
but he could be wearing an ankle brace while accepting the nomination
at the Republican convention.”