| Richard Nixon was just ahead of his time |
How many words have been spent in the last seven years about Trump colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election? It’s been the political story of the century and in the beginning many of us older folk were having flashbacks to Watergate.
Remember the famous Saturday Night Massacre? As the walls were closing in on Nixon for his Watergate coverup, the embattled president ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Richardson refused and immediately resigned. Nixon then ordered Deputy AG Bill Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. But the Deputy AG also refused, and immediately resigned. The number three guy in line did carry out the firing. Impeachment proceedings began several days later but Nixon resigned soon thereafter
Jump ahead to May 2017. The FBI had been investigating the possibility of Trump having colluded with Russia to win the election, and Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey. Wow, it looked like another Saturday Night Massacre: a besieged president, with the walls closing in, tries to stay alive by firing those who are onto him. A few days later Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed by the Justice Department to get to the bottom of Trump’s Russian Collusion.
And that’s where the comparison ends. Watergate was a real crime. Some errant campaign workers on the staff of the Committee To Re-Elect The President broke into their opponent’s office and stole files. Rather than expose the petty burglary, fire the workers, apologize to the nation, make some focus-group-tested statement about how such dirty tricks cannot be tolerated in our Great Republic—and enjoy a bounce in the polls for such moral and decisive action, Nixon tried to cover it up. And the cover up is what famously killed him.
So how’d that Russian Collusion thing turn out? First, after spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, and years of digging, Mueller couldn’t find any evidence of Trump colluding with Russia.
Huh.
Well then what the heck had the FBI been investigating, and why? How did the investigation even get started if there was nothing to it?
These were important questions because on the face of it having the nation’s most powerful law-enforcement agency investigating the president of the United States for alleged treason was a pretty big deal. Had the FBI gone rogue? So another special counsel, John Durham, was appointed to find out how the hell all this happened.
And now we know. Here’s the short version.
Hillary Clinton and her campaign made the whole thing up. They used campaign dollars (hidden improperly as legal fees which they later had to pay a fine for having done), to create something called the Steele Dossier which was the start of all the allegations about Trump/Russian Collusion. The Steele Dossier was carefully fed to the FBI which pretended to believe it. The FBI then leaked it to the media (Buzzfeed) which promptly published a story on it. This story was then used by the FBI to convince a FISA judge that there must be something to it, as “articles are being written,” and so they needed to start wiretapping the Trump campaign. Never having been told that the articles were being written because the FBI itself had leaked the material to those writing the articles, the FISA judge approved the surveillance, and the investigation was launched.
When Trump later claimed the FBI was wiretapping his campaign 100% of the mainstream media howled with laughter at such paranoid nonsense, and used it as further evidence of how mentally unbalanced Trump obviously was. To date, even though we now know Trump was correct, not a single media outlet has apologized for their derision.
What the HTM (Hate Trump Media) did do, during all this, was salivate gleefully every night, feeding one salacious detail after another to American voters about Trump’s awful Russian Collusion, making endless comparisons to Watergate, using the “walls closing in” metaphor ad nauseum, and in general doing everything possible to jam the made-up story down the throats of its viewers.
There are two utterly shocking facts that the Durham Report confirms beyond doubt. The first, again, is that the Hillary Clinton campaign made up the whole Russian Collusion myth as a dirty trick to take down their opponent. The second, and arguably far worse fact, is that the FBI knew the whole thing was bogus from the beginning, and ran with it anyway to try to damage Trump.
In short Hillary Clinton’s team fabricated lies about Trump and the Department of Justice was used to make people think the lies were true so as to ensure Trump lost the election or—if he somehow won—to utterly disrupt his presidency with a Special Counsel investigation that would keep him permanently under a cloud.
OK, fine, but everyone involved is now in jail serving long sentences, right?
Uh, not exactly.
What do you mean, not exactly?
No one went to jail for this.
How is that possible?
Because it’s not clear any of this was technically illegal. Was it illegal for the Hillary Campaign to make up fake charges about her opponent? Of course it should be, but apparently it’s not. There’s precedent. In 2012, then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the press that Mitt Romney (Obama’s presidential opponent), hadn’t paid taxes in ten years. This was later determined to be a lie, but when Reid was confronted about the lie, his response was: “They can call it whatever they want, but Romney didn’t win, did he?” Translation: “Yeah, it was a lie, but it worked!” (Consequences for Reid? After he retired local politicians in Las Vegas renamed the airport after him.)
Meanwhile I’m not aware of Hillary Clinton telling anyone: “Hell yes, I made up the whole damned Russian Collusion thing, but it sure fooled the nation for years, and damaged Trump hugely, didn’t it!”
In fact, she’s never even apologized for it, let alone been prohibited from ever seeking elected office because of it, let alone been forced to reimburse the US Treasury for all the taxpayer dollars spent investigating it, let alone been castigated by the media for the utter moral decay exhibited by it, let alone been disbarred over it, let alone been sent to prison for it.
Apparently, perpetrating the greatest political hoax in American history comes with no consequences to Hillary. (Although she lost the election so maybe at some point the Karma God put his hand on the scale, in disgust. Who could blame him?)
Well, at least the FBI learned its lesson, right?
What they learned is that dirty tricks work. Jump to October, 2020, just weeks before Trump’s re-election bid. The NY Post broke the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the vastly incriminating evidence it contained of the Biden-Family-Global-Influence-Peddling-Racket that Joe Biden (the “Big Guy” who got 10% of the proceeds) had been running as Vice President.
It was so damaging that a conspiracy was quickly organized by Tony Blinken (later rewarded with a cushy SecState position) to bring together 51 intelligence agents who signed a letter stating the whole thing was Russian Disinformation. (Boy, they sure love tying Russia into their dirty-tricks don’t they?) We now know that this conspiracy was put together to give Biden a “talking point” to use in his televised debate with Trump. And did he ever. Trump brought up the laptop, and Biden flattened the charge by pointing out that pretty much the entire intel establishment had determined it was Russian disinformation.
But at the time this happened, the FBI already had the laptop in its possession and knew it was not Russian disinformation. Of course, Biden knew it as well. Note that Biden didn’t actually lie and say the laptop was Russian disinformation. He said all these intel agents had determined it was Russian disinformation. See the difference? Very clever.
Here’s something else we know: polls have shown that if voters had known the laptop story was real, it would have changed enough votes in swing states in the 2020 election to have put Trump back in the White House.
In short, by not revealing the truth about the laptop, the FBI changed the 2020 election.
Or put another way, they used the (known-to-be-fake) Russian Collusion story to try to stop Trump in 2016—but failed—and then deliberately suppressed the (known-to-be-true) Biden Corruption story to try to stop Trump in 2020, and succeeded.
Back in a simpler, more innocent time, Richard Nixon’s dirty political tricks outraged both Republicans and Democrats and “Tricky Dick” paid the price. Far worse tricks were and are being played against Trump, yet today’s political establishment shrugs its shoulders and adopts the Harry Reid standard: “Well, he didn’t win, did he?”
Turns out Nixon was just ahead of his time.
Jacques Voorhees 