It is obvious that Donald Trump as President will be a serious threat to the status quo. It is understandable that those who are doing quite well with the status quo will do anything they can to undermine his efforts to drain the swamp. However, I really didn’t think it would be this bad.
Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posted a story with some details about some recent attempts to undermine the Presidency of Donald Trump.
Evidently the current ‘fake news’ scandal about Donald Trump has its roots in the Republican Party during the Republican Primary Election.
The article reports:
This Politico story looks at the Paul Manafort angle. It reports that “a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia.” These efforts affected the campaign, says Politico, in that Manafort had to step down and assertions of Trump ties to Russia were advanced.
This amounts to foreign meddling in the election, though not through any cyber-intrusion (an important distinction). Unlike Russia’s meddling, there is strong evidence that the DNC was involved with Ukraine’s.
The Politico story doesn’t bear directly on the infamous dossier, but this article in the New York Times does. According to the Times, in September 2015, a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Donald Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm — Fusion GPS — run by former journalists to compile a dossier about the tycoon’s past scandals and weaknesses.
After Trump emerged as the presumptive nominee in the spring of 2016, the Republican interest in financing the effort ended. However, “Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton” paid Fusion GPS to keep doing the same basic anti-Trump research.
In June, according to the Times, Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with whom he had worked before. Having previously carried out espionage inside Russia, Steele was in no position to travel to Moscow to study Trump’s connections there. Instead, he hired native Russian speakers to call informants inside Russia and made surreptitious contact with his own connections in the country.
The result was the infamous dossier which was peddled to news organizations during the Fall of 2016 without much success.
This was obviously a smear campaign. I suspect that there are some Americans out there who have heard the story and choose to believe it. That is their privilege. However, it really is time to realize that if Donald Trump is successful in draining the swamp in Washington, all of the people who are not getting rich because of the political corruption in Washington will prosper. That would be nice.