This morning in the Wall Street Journal, indispensable columnist Kim Strassel details the extent to which this entire storyline was manufactured in 2016 by then-CIA director John Brennan – the same John Brennan who was hyperventilating this week with claims that President Trump had committed “treason” in Helsinki.
When Brennan first started pushing the idea within the Obama Administration that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Russians to steal the election, even his colleagues there didn’t take him seriously. There were too many far more rational ways to look at what the Russians may or may not have been doing, and there was no real evidence of collusion. To make matters worse for Brennan, he was not permitted as CIA director to investigate American citizens. If that was going to happen, the
FBI would have to do it, and they weren’t buying his story.
So he needed to find someone else, with influence, who was willing to pressure the FBI to open an investigation – someone willing to completely disregard facts and truth and apply pressure for purely political reasons. Who is that horrible? As Strassel explains, that wasn’t hard to figure out:
More notable, Mr. Brennan then took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election specifically to help Mr. Trump—which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative. Team Clinton was eager to make the claim, especially in light of the Democratic National Committee server hack. Numerous reports show Mr. Brennan aggressively pushing the same line internally. T
heir problem was that as of July 2016 even then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t buy it. He publicly refused to say who was responsible for the hack, or ascribe motivation. Mr. Brennan also couldn’t get the FBI to sign on to the view; the bureau continued to believe Russian cyberattacks were aimed at disrupting the U.S. political system generally, not aiding Mr. Trump.
The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid. In a late August briefing, he told the Senate minority leader that Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that Trump advisers might be colluding with Russia. (Two years later, no public evidence has emerged to support such a claim.)
But
the truth was irrelevant. On cue, within a few days of the briefing, Mr. Reid wrote a letter to Mr. Comey, which of course immediately became public. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” wrote Mr. Reid, going on to float Team Clinton’s Russians-are-helping-Trump theory. Mr. Reid publicly divulged at least one of the allegations contained in the infamous Steele dossier, insisting that the FBI use “every resource available to investigate this matter.”
The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan-Clinton collusion narrative into the open. Clinton opposition-research firm Fusion GPS followed up by briefing its media allies about the dossier it had dropped off at the FBI.
On Sept. 23, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff ran the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Voilà. Not only was the collusion narrative out there, but so was evidence that the FBI was investigating.
The goal of Brennan and Reid wasn’t just to get an FBI investigation rolling, but also to make sure the public was aware of it. That’s why Christopher Steele ran to Michael Isikoff behind the FBI’s back and pushed this story, which was in turn used by the FBI to justify to the FISA court why they supposedly needed a wiretap warrant against Carter Page.
The point was to plant in the public’s mind the idea that Trump was under investigation for colluding with the Russians, and to let that notion set in six weeks ahead of the election. Apparently Brennan and Reid gave little consideration to what might happen with this investigation in the event Trump won the election and became the FBI director’s boss. But of course, that’s exactly what happened.
So
if you’re wondering why none of Robert Mueller’s indictments have anything to do with collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it’s because Mueller inherited from James Comey a dishonestly conceived investigation based on absurdities invented by Obama’s CIA director and pushed by Obama’s biggest ally in the United States Senate. Mueller has to indict someone for something so he can maintain the fiction that this investigation was ever about anything real. But none of these indictments support the original premise, because the original premise is wholly unsupportable.
The only question is when we will finally see some dot-connecting that reveals how Barack Obama himself may have been involved with pushing this phony investigation, and with seeking to wiretap a Trump campaign official based on premises he knew were completely false. The Nixon campaign used burglars to spy on their political opponents. The Obama Administration abused the authority of federal law enforcement to spy on theirs.
http://hermancain.com/how-john-brenn...n-the-fbi/amp/
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