{"id":36035,"date":"2019-05-06T11:26:33","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T15:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=36035"},"modified":"2019-05-06T11:26:33","modified_gmt":"2019-05-06T15:26:33","slug":"the-saga-continues-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=36035","title":{"rendered":"The Saga Continues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew McCarthy has an article up at The National Review<\/a> today about the roots of the Russian collusion investigation. The title of the article is, “The FBI\u2019s Trump-Russia Investigation Was Formally Opened on False Pretenses.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, CNN<\/a> is reporting today:<\/p>\n

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If Democrats are not careful, they will end up in the worst of all political worlds.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since the release of the Mueller report, the party’s leadership in Congress has been extraordinarily hesitant about taking the logical next steps. Faced with a 400-plus page report documenting extensive efforts by the President of the United States to obstruct justice, House Democrats have punted — making it pretty clear that impeachment proceedings will not be happening any time soon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even as the attorney general takes extraordinary steps to obstruct the subsequent hearings into obstruction, Democratic leaders remain tepid about any conversation that involves impeachment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Okay. Let’s go back to some basic tenants of American law. First of all, you are innocent until proven guilty. The Mueller Report specifically stated that they could not find the evidence to prove President Trump guilty of anything. That means according to our laws, he is presumed innocent. Second of all, how can you have obstruction when there was no crime involved?<\/p>\n

The CNN report is totally misleading and divisive. It states that the President obstructed justice when the Mueller Report concluded that there was no evidence to support that claim.<\/p>\n

So let’s look at what Andrew McCarthy has to say about the root of this witch hunt:<\/p>\n

C<\/span>hicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI\u2019s Trump-Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign\u2019s purported knowledge to the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andrew McCarthy points out in his article that in order to begin surveillance on the Trump campaign, the State Department and the FBI had to find something other than the Steele Dossier to base their claims on. They set up George Papadopoulos.<\/p>\n

The National Review article lists some of the connects of the people involved in setting up the scam:<\/p>\n

The State Department (very much including the American embassy in London) was deeply in the tank for Clinton. Downer has a history with the Clintons that includes arranging a $25 million donation to the Clinton Foundation in 2006, when he was Australia\u2019s foreign minister and then-senator Hillary Clinton was the favorite to become U.S. president in 2008. For years, furthermore, Downer has been closely tied to British intelligence, which, like the British government broadly, was anti-Trump. (More on that in the future.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The State Department\u2019s Dibble immediately sent Downer\u2019s information though government channels to the FBI.<\/strong><\/p>\n

About three weeks earlier, Victoria Nuland, the Obama administration\u2019s top State Department official for European and Eurasian affairs, had supported the FBI\u2019s request to meet former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele in London. Steele was the principal author of the Clinton-campaign-sponsored faux intelligence reports (the unverified \u201cSteele dossier\u201d), which claimed \u2014 based on anonymous sources and multiple layers of hearsay \u2014 that Russia was plotting to help Trump win the election, and that it had been holding compromising information about Hillary Clinton.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On July 5, Agent Michael Gaeta, the FBI\u2019s legal attach\u00e9 in Rome (who had worked with Steele on the FIFA soccer investigation when Steele was still with British intelligence), met with Steele at the latter\u2019s London office. Steele permitted him to read the first of the reports that, over time, would be compiled into the so-called dossier. An alarmed Gaeta is said to have told Steele, \u201cI have to report this to headquarters.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is inconceivable that Gaeta would have gone to the trouble of clearing his visit to London with the State Department and getting FBI headquarters to approve his trip, but then neglected to report to his headquarters what the source had told him \u2014 to wit, that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin to undermine the 2016 election.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I have previously detailed<\/a>, after the hacked DNC emails were published, Steele (whose sources had not foretold the hacking by Russia or publication by WikiLeaks) simply folded this event into his preexisting narrative of a Trump-Russia conspiracy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prior to early July, when the FBI began receiving Steele-dossier reports (which the State Department would also soon receive), the intelligence community \u2014 particularly the CIA, under the direction of its hyper-political director, John Brennan \u2014 had been theorizing that the Trump campaign was in a corrupt relationship with Russia. Thanks to the Steele dossier, even before Downer reported his conversation with Papadopoulos to the State Department, the Obama administration had already been operating on the theory that Russia was planning to assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Clinton. They had already conveniently fit the hacked DNC emails into this theory.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Downer\u2019s report enabled the Obama administration to cover an investigative theory it was already pursuing with a report from a friendly foreign government, as if that report had triggered the Trump-Russia investigation<\/em>. In order to pull that off, however, it was necessary to distort what Papadopoulos had told Downer.<\/strong><\/p>\n