Mueller and the fatal flaw of the Trump-Russia affair

[anatta]

It's not unusual to hear House Democrats vow to "get to the bottom" of the Trump-Russia matter — as if the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, with 500 witnesses, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search-and-seizure warrants, and nearly 300 records of electronic communications, was somehow unable to fully probe allegations that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to fix the 2016 election.

What really concerns Democrats is that Mueller's investigation, conducted with law enforcement powers that Congress does not have, failed to establish any Trump-Russia conspiracy or coordination.
And in doing so, Mueller exposed the fatal flaw of the Trump-Russia matter: It was driven entirely by the conspiracy/coordination allegation, which turned out to be false.

The backdrop of conspiracy and coordination made every Trump-Russia episode, including routine political activities, look sinister. The Trump Tower meeting looked ominous in the context of conspiracy and coordination. Donald Trump's public statements about Russia and Vladimir Putin looked incriminating. Michael Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador looked suspicious. And more.

If one believed that Trump and the Russians were conspiring or coordinating to influence the campaign, then any bit of information having anything to do with Russia and the Trump campaign looked portentous. The Russia frenzy became so intense that reputable news organizations published long stories cataloging all known "contacts with Russians" by anyone associated with the Trump campaign.

But it all depended on conspiracy or coordination. And when Mueller was unable to establish that any such conspiracy or coordination actually occurred, suspicious-seeming events could no longer be credibly cast as suspicious. The Trump-Russia bubble deflated.

That left Democrats with the allegation that the president obstructed the investigation. Some hope that will be enough to impeach Trump, but in recent weeks, they have discovered it might be a hard sell. While it is possible to pursue an obstruction allegation without an underlying crime, impeaching the president on that basis could prove politically difficult. So Democrats vow more investigation to "get to the bottom" of the Trump-Russia matter, or perhaps find something else, entirely unrelated to Russia, to pursue against the president.

The post-Mueller debate on Capitol Hill shows just how critically important the conspiracy and coordination narrative was. Without it, everything has changed. So now that Mueller has formally closed his office and left the Justice Department, it is worth looking at how conspiracy and coordination — often referred to by the widely used word "collusion" — came to dominate American politics for the last three years. Was it a hoax? Hysteria? Or simply partisanship on steroids?

In June 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee." The paper also noted that "the networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees." By the beginning of summer 2016, then, it was public knowledge that the Russians were up to something.

At the same time, and especially as the Republican and Democratic conventions approached in July, Democrats began suggesting that Trump might be up to something with the Russians.
Trump had expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin and indicated that if elected he would like to have better relations with Russia. Trump also vowed to press NATO countries to pay more for their own defense, a position Trump's adversaries interpreted as pro-Russian. Trump had also hired Paul Manafort, who had extensive business ties to pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine, as his campaign chairman.

[anatta]

n the days leading up to the Democratic convention, the Clinton campaign and its allies in the press saw Russia as a potentially valuable weapon for attacking Trump. On July 20, the New York Times' Andrew Rosenthal wrote a column headlined "Is Trump Obsessed With Putin and Russia?" Two days later, Rosenthal's Times colleague Paul Krugman wrote a piece entitled "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate" in which he asked, "If elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin's man in the White House?"

That same day, July 22, Wikileaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee. Two days later, on the 24th, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on television to claim that not only was Russia behind the hack but also that the Trump campaign was in league with Russia.

"Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian," Mook told ABC News, referring to a just-published Washington Post story that reported, incorrectly, that Trump aides had weakened the portion of the GOP platform regarding Russia and Ukraine.

"He has praised Vladimir Putin," Mook continued. "It's troubling."

Also on July 24, the Times published a news story headlined, "As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue." "Even at the height of the Cold War," the paper reported, "it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary. But the accusation is emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton's campaign."

In the next few days, there were reports that U.S. intelligence agencies had confirmed Russia's responsibility for the hack, followed by the first appearances of the c-word.

"Donald Trump said he has 'never spoken' to Vladimir Putin amid allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russian president," ABC reported on July 27.

"The Clinton campaign is basically saying that there's collusion between Trump and Russia," the New York Times' Maggie Haberman said on CNN on July 29.

The reporters did not present the allegation as fact but rather as news that Clinton people were accusing Trump of colluding with Russia. Over the next few months, the accusations grew and grew and grew.

At the same time, Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, retained the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn retained the former British spy Christopher Steele to search for dirt on Trump and Russia. On June 20, 2016, Steele finished the first installment of what became known as the dossier. It was a blockbuster, alleging that Russia had been "cultivating, supporting and assisting" Trump for at least five years, that Trump had accepted "a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin," and that Trump was the target of blackmail since Russian intelligence services taped him watching a kinky sex act with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013.

According to Russian Roulette, the book by reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Steele sent the first installment to Fusion GPS in June 2016. Fusion, in turn, "gave Steele's reports and other research documents to Elias," according to a Washington Post account. And Elias briefed the Clinton campaign.

"We were getting briefings that were put together by the law firm with information," Mook recalled in an interview with CNN in late 2017. "So our internal team was presenting information, our lawyer was presenting information, you know, and we — and we sort of learned things in pieces."

So as Clinton and her aides pushed the collusion narrative, with the help of an enthusiastic press, campaign officials were also being briefed on the newest, freshest allegations from Steele.

The problem, of course, was that the allegations were not true. Steele also gave his reports to the FBI, which tried to verify them "line by line," according to former FBI general counsel James Baker. It did not succeed. Nearly three years later, the Mueller report failed to corroborate any of the dossier's serious allegations. It was wrong at best, a fraud at worst.

The public did not know what was happening behind the scenes. All they heard — if they watched cable TV — was collusion, collusion, collusion. After the election, the allegations consumed reporting on the Trump transition and then the Trump presidency — especially after the dossier was published in its entirety in January 2017, following the decision by the nation's top intelligence chiefs to brief President-elect Trump on parts of it.

After that, each new revelation that appeared in the press — Flynn, Manafort, Trump Tower, Michael Cohen, all of it — appeared in the context of collusion. Ordinary events became shady scheming against the backdrop of Trump-Russia collusion.

As that was happening, Mueller was trying and failing to establish that collusion ever occurred. From interviews with various players in the investigation, it now seems clear that by the end of 2017 Mueller knew that he could not establish conspiracy or coordination. That part of his investigation effectively ended when 2017 did.

Yet Mueller continued his probe for more than a year, mostly focusing on obstruction allegations.
Collusion as a topic of investigation might have been dead and gone by that time, but the fact that the Mueller investigation was still going on kept the collusion narrative alive. And that fed the public perception that events Mueller secretly knew were not part of a collusion scheme were still in some way suspicious.

The collusion narrative became so entrenched in the minds of some commentators that even when the Mueller report was made public, with its repeated statements that "the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities," some simply would not accept the verdict.

So now Democrats are promising to carry on, to find that thing — collusion — that Mueller could not find. At the same time, others, most notably Attorney General William Barr, have decided to find out how the whole unhappy episode started and what role the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies played in the process. It is time to know what happened.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...-russia-affair

[jimmymccready]

Anatta has trouble that enough evidence existed of a possible collusion charge warranted the investigation.

That findings on other matters should not count does not make much sebse,

[archives]

It's not unusual to hear House Democrats vow to "get to the bottom" of the Trump-Russia matter — as if the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, with 500 witnesses, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search-and-seizure warrants, and nearly 300 records of electronic communications, was somehow unable to fully probe allegations that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to fix the 2016 election.

What really concerns Democrats is that Mueller's investigation, conducted with law enforcement powers that Congress does not have, failed to establish any Trump-Russia conspiracy or coordination.
And in doing so, Mueller exposed the fatal flaw of the Trump-Russia matter: It was driven entirely by the conspiracy/coordination allegation, which turned out to be false.

The backdrop of conspiracy and coordination made every Trump-Russia episode, including routine political activities, look sinister. The Trump Tower meeting looked ominous in the context of conspiracy and coordination. Donald Trump's public statements about Russia and Vladimir Putin looked incriminating. Michael Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador looked suspicious. And more.

If one believed that Trump and the Russians were conspiring or coordinating to influence the campaign, then any bit of information having anything to do with Russia and the Trump campaign looked portentous. The Russia frenzy became so intense that reputable news organizations published long stories cataloging all known "contacts with Russians" by anyone associated with the Trump campaign.

But it all depended on conspiracy or coordination. And when Mueller was unable to establish that any such conspiracy or coordination actually occurred, suspicious-seeming events could no longer be credibly cast as suspicious. The Trump-Russia bubble deflated.

That left Democrats with the allegation that the president obstructed the investigation. Some hope that will be enough to impeach Trump, but in recent weeks, they have discovered it might be a hard sell. While it is possible to pursue an obstruction allegation without an underlying crime, impeaching the president on that basis could prove politically difficult. So Democrats vow more investigation to "get to the bottom" of the Trump-Russia matter, or perhaps find something else, entirely unrelated to Russia, to pursue against the president.

The post-Mueller debate on Capitol Hill shows just how critically important the conspiracy and coordination narrative was. Without it, everything has changed. So now that Mueller has formally closed his office and left the Justice Department, it is worth looking at how conspiracy and coordination — often referred to by the widely used word "collusion" — came to dominate American politics for the last three years. Was it a hoax? Hysteria? Or simply partisanship on steroids?

In June 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee." The paper also noted that "the networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees." By the beginning of summer 2016, then, it was public knowledge that the Russians were up to something.

At the same time, and especially as the Republican and Democratic conventions approached in July, Democrats began suggesting that Trump might be up to something with the Russians.
Trump had expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin and indicated that if elected he would like to have better relations with Russia. Trump also vowed to press NATO countries to pay more for their own defense, a position Trump's adversaries interpreted as pro-Russian. Trump had also hired Paul Manafort, who had extensive business ties to pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine, as his campaign chairman.

No source, but don't worry, not difficult imagining where it came from

The first two paragraphs completely blows anything that follows, "it was driven entirely by the conspiracy/coordination allegation," which we know is false because none of it has ever been proven outside of a Hannity monologue, and, Republican Mueller was appointed by the Trump Justice Dept by a Trump appointee in that Trump Justice Dept to investigate Russian involvement in the election

Knowing now you are going to deny all that and regurgitate the predictable innuendos, lets move beyond to the single silliest line in the article, "made every Trump-Russia episode, including routine political activities, look sinister.

Tell me, when was the last political campaign for President that sought the aid of a foreign nation antagonistic to the United States for assistance in getting their candidate elected? If you read the report rather than listening to some demogogue, in particularly pages 64-128, you'd see that the Russians were all over the Trump campaign, over a hundred documented contacts. Prior to 2016 your side would have quickly labeled that "unAmerican"

And if you still don't think that isn't wrong from the jump, explain the fact that the campaign attempted to hide their involvement when the facts surfaced? Why would they have to lie about if it they actually believed it wasn't "sinister?"

[LV426]

Anatta still hasn't read Mueller's report and never will.

That's because Anatta is a propagandist with 1000s of IDs that they switch between to create a sense of more broad support than actually exists.

[Heff]

Yeah it was all a big elaborate hoax. Under the justification that Russia meddled in the election (in reality they posted stuff on twitter, which the useful idiots call "an attack on our democracy"), they duped the American public, who are still entranced in a sort of mass hysteria. Now they want to get Trump for exposing it and the parties involved.

Anti-Trumpers should be thanking him, but instead they are spending their time licking the boots of those who used them.

[Stretch]

n the days leading up to the Democratic convention, the Clinton campaign and its allies in the press saw Russia as a potentially valuable weapon for attacking Trump. On July 20, the New York Times' Andrew Rosenthal wrote a column headlined "Is Trump Obsessed With Putin and Russia?" Two days later, Rosenthal's Times colleague Paul Krugman wrote a piece entitled "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate" in which he asked, "If elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin's man in the White House?"

That same day, July 22, Wikileaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee. Two days later, on the 24th, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on television to claim that not only was Russia behind the hack but also that the Trump campaign was in league with Russia.

"Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian," Mook told ABC News, referring to a just-published Washington Post story that reported, incorrectly, that Trump aides had weakened the portion of the GOP platform regarding Russia and Ukraine.

"He has praised Vladimir Putin," Mook continued. "It's troubling."

Also on July 24, the Times published a news story headlined, "As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue." "Even at the height of the Cold War," the paper reported, "it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary. But the accusation is emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton's campaign."

In the next few days, there were reports that U.S. intelligence agencies had confirmed Russia's responsibility for the hack, followed by the first appearances of the c-word.

"Donald Trump said he has 'never spoken' to Vladimir Putin amid allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russian president," ABC reported on July 27.

"The Clinton campaign is basically saying that there's collusion between Trump and Russia," the New York Times' Maggie Haberman said on CNN on July 29.

The reporters did not present the allegation as fact but rather as news that Clinton people were accusing Trump of colluding with Russia. Over the next few months, the accusations grew and grew and grew.

At the same time, Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, retained the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn retained the former British spy Christopher Steele to search for dirt on Trump and Russia. On June 20, 2016, Steele finished the first installment of what became known as the dossier. It was a blockbuster, alleging that Russia had been "cultivating, supporting and assisting" Trump for at least five years, that Trump had accepted "a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin," and that Trump was the target of blackmail since Russian intelligence services taped him watching a kinky sex act with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013.

According to Russian Roulette, the book by reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Steele sent the first installment to Fusion GPS in June 2016. Fusion, in turn, "gave Steele's reports and other research documents to Elias," according to a Washington Post account. And Elias briefed the Clinton campaign.

"We were getting briefings that were put together by the law firm with information," Mook recalled in an interview with CNN in late 2017. "So our internal team was presenting information, our lawyer was presenting information, you know, and we — and we sort of learned things in pieces."

So as Clinton and her aides pushed the collusion narrative, with the help of an enthusiastic press, campaign officials were also being briefed on the newest, freshest allegations from Steele.

The problem, of course, was that the allegations were not true. Steele also gave his reports to the FBI, which tried to verify them "line by line," according to former FBI general counsel James Baker. It did not succeed. Nearly three years later, the Mueller report failed to corroborate any of the dossier's serious allegations. It was wrong at best, a fraud at worst.

The public did not know what was happening behind the scenes. All they heard — if they watched cable TV — was collusion, collusion, collusion. After the election, the allegations consumed reporting on the Trump transition and then the Trump presidency — especially after the dossier was published in its entirety in January 2017, following the decision by the nation's top intelligence chiefs to brief President-elect Trump on parts of it.

After that, each new revelation that appeared in the press — Flynn, Manafort, Trump Tower, Michael Cohen, all of it — appeared in the context of collusion. Ordinary events became shady scheming against the backdrop of Trump-Russia collusion.

As that was happening, Mueller was trying and failing to establish that collusion ever occurred. From interviews with various players in the investigation, it now seems clear that by the end of 2017 Mueller knew that he could not establish conspiracy or coordination. That part of his investigation effectively ended when 2017 did.

Yet Mueller continued his probe for more than a year, mostly focusing on obstruction allegations.
Collusion as a topic of investigation might have been dead and gone by that time, but the fact that the Mueller investigation was still going on kept the collusion narrative alive. And that fed the public perception that events Mueller secretly knew were not part of a collusion scheme were still in some way suspicious.

The collusion narrative became so entrenched in the minds of some commentators that even when the Mueller report was made public, with its repeated statements that "the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities," some simply would not accept the verdict.

So now Democrats are promising to carry on, to find that thing — collusion — that Mueller could not find. At the same time, others, most notably Attorney General William Barr, have decided to find out how the whole unhappy episode started and what role the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies played in the process. It is time to know what happened.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...-russia-affair

Excellent article. Indeed. "They are going to carry on". Who are they going to hire now? A private eye? Inspector Clousseau? Hercule Poirot? Sherlock Holmes?
There was some other news regarding the early days of the investigation that came out today. I've got to find it and I'll post it in here as well.

[archives]

Yeah it was all a big elaborate hoax. Under the justification that Russia meddled in the election (in reality they posted stuff on twitter, which the useful idiots call "an attack on our democracy"), they duped the American public, who are still entranced in a sort of mass hysteria. Now they want to get Trump for exposing it and the parties involved.

Anti-Trumpers should be thanking him, but instead they are spending their time licking the boots of those who used them.

Total uninformed view

Read pages 1-128 of Mueller's Report, not some demogogues interpretation of pages 1-128, but the actual report and they get back to us and tell us it was just "posting stuff on twitter."

[archives]

Excellent article. Indeed. "They are going to carry on". Who are they going to hire now? A private eye? Inspector Clousseau? Hercule Poirot? Sherlock Holmes?
There was some other news regarding the early days of the investigation that came out today. I've got to find it and I'll post it in here as well.

Probably inforwars

[Heff]

Total uninformed view

Read pages 1-128 of Mueller's Report, not some demogogues interpretation of pages 1-128, but the actual report and they get back to us and tell us it was just "posting stuff on twitter."

He mostly cited his own indictment, none of which has gone through a court of law, and all of which Mueller said was innocent until proven otherwise.

[Stretch]

Did Brits warn about Steele's credibility, before Mueller's probe? Congress has evidence
By John Solomon, opinion contributor — 05/29/19 07:00 PM EDT

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

One of the deepest, darkest secrets of Russiagate soon may be unmasked. Even President Trump may be surprised.

Multiple witnesses have told Congress that, a week before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Britain’s top national security official sent a private communique to the incoming administration, addressing his country’s participation in the counterintelligence probe into the now-debunked Trump-Russia election collusion.

Most significantly, then-British national security adviser Sir Mark Lyall Grant claimed in the memo, hand-delivered to incoming U.S. national security adviser Mike Flynn’s team, that the British government lacked confidence in the credibility of former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s Russia collusion evidence, according to congressional investigators who interviewed witnesses familiar with the memo.

Steele, of course, was the political opposition researcher-turned-FBI informant whose dossier the FBI and Obama Justice Department used to justify spying on the Trump campaign in the final days of the 2016 election cycle. The dossier was funded by Fusion GPS, a research firm hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Congressional investigators have interviewed two U.S. officials who handled the memo, confirmed with the British government that a communique was sent and alerted the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the information. One witness confirmed to Congress that he was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller about the memo.

Now the race is on to locate the document in U.S. intelligence archives to see if the witnesses’ recollections are correct. And Trump is headed to Britain this weekend, where he might just get a chance to ask his own questions.

“A whistleblower recently revealed the existence of a communique from our allies in Great Britain during the early days of the Russia collusion investigation,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, told me.

“Based on my conversations with that individual, and the credible timelines that are supported by other events, I made a referral to Attorney General William Barr and Inspector General Michael Horowitz for further investigation,” he added. “There now is overwhelming evidence to suggest that on multiple occasions the FBI was warned that Christopher Steele and the dossier had severe credibility issues.”

The revelation of a possible warning from the British government about Steele surfaces less than a month after a long-concealed document was made public, showing that a State Department official in October 2016 met with Steele and took notes that raised concerns about the accuracy of some information he provided.

Those notes, as I have written, quoted the British operative as saying he had a political deadline of Election Day to make his information public and that he was leaking to the news media — two claims that would weigh against his credibility as an FBI informant. They also flagged a piece of demonstrably false intelligence he provided.

The British Embassy in Washington did not return a call or email seeking comment. Grant, who left his post in April 2017, did not respond to a request for comment at the university where he works. His former top deputy, Paddy McGuinness, declined comment.

Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, also did not return a call, email and text seeking comment.

A source familiar with Flynn’s account, however, told me the former Trump national security adviser has no recollection of receiving the British communique or what might have happened to it, meaning that President Trump likely was not told about it.

Flynn first heard about the memo when Mueller’s team questioned him about it last year during debriefings after reaching a plea bargain on a charge of making false statements to the FBI and a cooperation agreement with the special prosecutor, the source said.

Mueller’s team apparently learned about the memo from some of Flynn’s former national security team members, the source said.

Congressional investigators say one former Flynn team member approached them recently as a whistleblower and disclosed the existence of the communique because the person believed it was relevant to the ongoing review of the FBI and intelligence community’s conduct in the Russia probe.

The whistleblower told Congress he personally delivered the memo to Flynn on Jan. 12, 2017, was aware of its content about Steele and later ensured the document was sent for preservation in the national security archives of the Trump transition team, the investigators say. The whistleblower also claimed to overhear Flynn’s team discussing the memo.

The investigators interviewed a second former National Security Council staffer who claimed to have read the memo in Flynn’s office. That person, who requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to talk to the press, told me in an interview that the document contained an explanation from Grant that British authorities assisted the early U.S. investigation into Trump-Russia collusion and later concluded Steele’s intelligence was unreliable.

“The message was clear: the Brits were saying they may have done some stuff to assist the investigation that they now regretted after learning the whole thing was based on information from Steele,” the former U.S. official told me. “They wanted Trump’s team to know they did not think Steele’s information was credible or reliable.

“They also wanted Trump to know whatever they had done, they did only at the Americans’ request and didn’t want it to get in the way of cooperating with the U.S.”

Congressional investigators say they have created a timetable of who saw and handled the document in Flynn’s office and confirmed with a British government official that Grant sent a memo to Flynn in January 2017, though the British would not discuss its content with congressional investigators.

The information has been turned over to Barr and Horowitz, who are investigating whether FBI, DOJ and intelligence agency officials misused their spy powers or misled a federal court when securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to monitor former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The congressional investigators believe the communique may have been prompted by BuzzFeed’s unexpected publication on Jan. 10, 2017, of Steele’s unverified dossier.

American media were engulfed in the budding scandal over whether Trump and Russia colluded to hijack the 2016 election — something Mueller has concluded was not proven by the evidence — and the Brits likely wanted to distance themselves from the document and Steele, investigators believe.

Shortly before Grant’s communique arrived, a subordinate national security official in Britain sent a shorter message to Flynn’s office. That email didn’t address Steele’s credibility but communicated that the British had nothing to do with leaking or reacting to the dossier.

A source familiar with Flynn’s account said the Grant memo would have arrived just as the national security adviser and president-elect were consumed with standing up a new government, a week before Inauguration Day.

Soon Flynn would be engulfed in new revelations, when intelligence community intercepts of his conversations with the Russian ambassador were leaked to the media.

If the British memo exists, it was never shared with the House Intelligence, House Judiciary, House Oversight and Reform or Senate Judiciary committees, despite their exhaustive investigations into the Steele dossier, congressional investigators told me. These investigators learned about the document in the past few weeks, setting off a mad scramble to locate it and talk to witnesses.

If the witnesses’ recollections are correct, the British communique could become one of the most significant pieces of evidence to emerge in the investigation of the Russia-collusion investigators.

It would mean that Trump was never told of the warning Flynn’s team received, and that the FBI and DOJ continued to rely on Steele’s uncorroborated allegations for many months as they renewed the FISA warrant at least two more times and named Mueller as special prosecutor to investigate Russia collusion.

Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), whose staff has been fighting unsuccessfully to gain access to the British communique, told me Wednesday its public release would further accentuate "that the FBI and DOJ were dead wrong to rely on the dossier in the Russia investigation and to use it as a basis to spy on Americans."


https://thehill.com/opinion/white-ho...probe-congress

[archives]

I was close, an opinion piece by a commentator famous for his distortions

"John F. Solomon is an American media executive and political commentator. He has been accused repeatedly of biased reporting in favor of conservatives, and of repeatedly manufacturing faux scandals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S...l_commentator)

and the footnotes will give you additional documentation

[Stretch]

No source, but don't worry, not difficult imagining where it came from

The first two paragraphs completely blows anything that follows, "it was driven entirely by the conspiracy/coordination allegation," which we know is false because none of it has ever been proven outside of a Hannity monologue, and, Republican Mueller was appointed by the Trump Justice Dept by a Trump appointee in that Trump Justice Dept to investigate Russian involvement in the election

Knowing now you are going to deny all that and regurgitate the predictable innuendos, lets move beyond to the single silliest line in the article, "made every Trump-Russia episode, including routine political activities, look sinister.

Tell me, when was the last political campaign for President that sought the aid of a foreign nation antagonistic to the United States for assistance in getting their candidate elected? If you read the report rather than listening to some demogogue, in particularly pages 64-128, you'd see that the Russians were all over the Trump campaign, over a hundred documented contacts. Prior to 2016 your side would have quickly labeled that "unAmerican"

And if you still don't think that isn't wrong from the jump, explain the fact that the campaign attempted to hide their involvement when the facts surfaced? Why would they have to lie about if it they actually believed it wasn't "sinister?"

Source was shown at the end of the article.

[StoneByStone]

If you don't get why Trump should be impeached for this, just pretend it was Obama.

[Stretch]

Probably inforwars

You're having a rough time with sources today.