SFC13557
NES Member
Article written by Holman Jenkins Jr. in today's WSJ. Yes the FBI is corrupt and was all in on Hillary because they feared Trump would blow the whistle on them and they are the epitome of the DC swamp. We have met the enemy and it's our govt. and it's minions.
"If special counsel John Durham didn’t get the verdict he wanted in the Michael Sussmann case, it’s because he did a better job of convicting the victim than he did the culprit—the victim being the FBI, the agency to which the Democratic lawyer allegedly lied when claiming he wasn’t acting for the Clinton campaign while peddling slime about Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.
In the indictment filed eight months ago, Mr. Durham went out of his way to show why the FBI would not have been fooled by Mr. Sussmann, who was acquitted by a jury Tuesday. The trial itself piled on the evidence that the FBI leadership was both embarrassed to be seen carrying water for the Clinton campaign and willing to carry it. By the end, Mr. Sussmann’s alleged lie seemed more aimed at obliging the agency than deceiving it.
The Durham evidence comes on top of the 2016 misfeasance cataloged in multiple reports of the Justice Department’s inspector general. Both candidates in 2016 have legitimate beefs with the agency, but only Mrs. Clinton can say its misbehavior caused her loss or that the FBI violated its own rules eight ways from Sunday to publicize what should have been its confidential actions in her case.
I once noted that Mrs. Clinton kept her fingerprints off the Steele dossier, unlike some of Mr. Trump’s foolish attempts at oppo research. This needs modification because it emerged at trial she directly approved feeding the press the Alfa Bank evidence (about a supposed secret link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin) that her own allies had invented.
Campaigns are usually fine with trafficking in unfounded lies about their opponents. Mr. Trump’s own chief political quality has been bottomless cynicism about the political game. But a different order of sin was the continued promotion of the collusion hoax after Election Day, based on evidence the Clinton campaign itself had concocted, to excuse Mrs. Clinton’s loss and sandbag the victor whatever the damage to the national interest.
If you don’t see this act for what it is, you may be Washington Post reporter Philip Bump, who recently spent 1,400 words trying to refute a claim an editorial in this newspaper didn’t make while ignoring the claim it did: “The Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country.”
A neuroticism permeates the media on this point and revolves especially around the FBI’s formal premise for opening a Trump investigation, citing a vague conversation between an Australian diplomat and minor Trump campaign helper.
See, it had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton or the Steele allegations that were already in the agency’s possession. But short of a time-space paradox the FBI must have matters under consideration before opening an investigation. Further, you probably don’t belong in the media if you don’t understand why, having decided to open a Trump inquiry, the FBI would search high and low for a pretext that didn’t originate with the Hillary campaign.
Mr. Bump does stumble into one important truth. The airwaves were already saturated, and so were voters, with Trump-Russia innuendo. “Google searches and mentions on cable news channels show that a lot of attention was being paid to Trump’s possible interactions with Russia well before the Alfa Bank rumor became public at the end of October,” he writes.
Exactly. By any realistic estimate, this innuendo cost Mr. Trump millions of votes compared with any handful he supposedly gained from Russia’s Mickey Mouse hacking and social-media activities. You might even call this rough justice for the many foolish things he said about Vladimir Putin during the campaign. But a corollary is overlooked: Without Russia to hang around Mr. Trump’s neck, Mrs. Clinton’s loss would certainly have been bigger—maybe a lot bigger. Her grievance isn’t with Russia or even the FBI so much after all. It’s with herself.
After Election Day, two people would find solace in the collusion hoax, which increasingly has come to seem a lot closer to treason than many of the things imagined or alleged against Mr. Trump.
One was Mrs. Clinton, who nevertheless was clearly divided over whether to blame Russia or the FBI for her loss.
The other was FBI chief James Comey whose bizarre actions, in response (let’s remember) to dubious Russian intelligence, probably cost Mrs. Clinton the race. Without the collusion rabbit hole to fill the next three years, the story to end all stories about 2016 would have been Mr. Comey being snowed by Russia into ill-judged actions that decided a presidential election.
Most of this remains outside Mr. Durham’s remit, though his evidence is helping. The real question is: When will our national media decide they want to get out of the cover-up business and into the news business?"
"If special counsel John Durham didn’t get the verdict he wanted in the Michael Sussmann case, it’s because he did a better job of convicting the victim than he did the culprit—the victim being the FBI, the agency to which the Democratic lawyer allegedly lied when claiming he wasn’t acting for the Clinton campaign while peddling slime about Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.
In the indictment filed eight months ago, Mr. Durham went out of his way to show why the FBI would not have been fooled by Mr. Sussmann, who was acquitted by a jury Tuesday. The trial itself piled on the evidence that the FBI leadership was both embarrassed to be seen carrying water for the Clinton campaign and willing to carry it. By the end, Mr. Sussmann’s alleged lie seemed more aimed at obliging the agency than deceiving it.
The Durham evidence comes on top of the 2016 misfeasance cataloged in multiple reports of the Justice Department’s inspector general. Both candidates in 2016 have legitimate beefs with the agency, but only Mrs. Clinton can say its misbehavior caused her loss or that the FBI violated its own rules eight ways from Sunday to publicize what should have been its confidential actions in her case.
I once noted that Mrs. Clinton kept her fingerprints off the Steele dossier, unlike some of Mr. Trump’s foolish attempts at oppo research. This needs modification because it emerged at trial she directly approved feeding the press the Alfa Bank evidence (about a supposed secret link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin) that her own allies had invented.
Campaigns are usually fine with trafficking in unfounded lies about their opponents. Mr. Trump’s own chief political quality has been bottomless cynicism about the political game. But a different order of sin was the continued promotion of the collusion hoax after Election Day, based on evidence the Clinton campaign itself had concocted, to excuse Mrs. Clinton’s loss and sandbag the victor whatever the damage to the national interest.
If you don’t see this act for what it is, you may be Washington Post reporter Philip Bump, who recently spent 1,400 words trying to refute a claim an editorial in this newspaper didn’t make while ignoring the claim it did: “The Russia-Trump narrative that Mrs. Clinton sanctioned did enormous harm to the country.”
A neuroticism permeates the media on this point and revolves especially around the FBI’s formal premise for opening a Trump investigation, citing a vague conversation between an Australian diplomat and minor Trump campaign helper.
See, it had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton or the Steele allegations that were already in the agency’s possession. But short of a time-space paradox the FBI must have matters under consideration before opening an investigation. Further, you probably don’t belong in the media if you don’t understand why, having decided to open a Trump inquiry, the FBI would search high and low for a pretext that didn’t originate with the Hillary campaign.
Mr. Bump does stumble into one important truth. The airwaves were already saturated, and so were voters, with Trump-Russia innuendo. “Google searches and mentions on cable news channels show that a lot of attention was being paid to Trump’s possible interactions with Russia well before the Alfa Bank rumor became public at the end of October,” he writes.
Exactly. By any realistic estimate, this innuendo cost Mr. Trump millions of votes compared with any handful he supposedly gained from Russia’s Mickey Mouse hacking and social-media activities. You might even call this rough justice for the many foolish things he said about Vladimir Putin during the campaign. But a corollary is overlooked: Without Russia to hang around Mr. Trump’s neck, Mrs. Clinton’s loss would certainly have been bigger—maybe a lot bigger. Her grievance isn’t with Russia or even the FBI so much after all. It’s with herself.
After Election Day, two people would find solace in the collusion hoax, which increasingly has come to seem a lot closer to treason than many of the things imagined or alleged against Mr. Trump.
One was Mrs. Clinton, who nevertheless was clearly divided over whether to blame Russia or the FBI for her loss.
The other was FBI chief James Comey whose bizarre actions, in response (let’s remember) to dubious Russian intelligence, probably cost Mrs. Clinton the race. Without the collusion rabbit hole to fill the next three years, the story to end all stories about 2016 would have been Mr. Comey being snowed by Russia into ill-judged actions that decided a presidential election.
Most of this remains outside Mr. Durham’s remit, though his evidence is helping. The real question is: When will our national media decide they want to get out of the cover-up business and into the news business?"
