The entire Trump-collusion-with-Russia narrative has now descended into incoherence.
For five months, dating back to the heated final stretch of the 2016 election, mainstream media — in particular Obama-administration pet reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC — ran creepy and occasionally near-obscene stories about “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
These published rumors were based on “unnamed sources” often identified generically as American intelligence officers inside the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
Soon that narrative went from ominous to hysterical — but only once Hillary inexplicably lost the election.
The anonymous allegations of collusion were used to convict the Trump circle of a veritable pre-election partnership with the Russians.
The collusion was to be followed, the story went, with a new reset with Putin — this time born not out of naïveté but of lucre and near treason.
We forget that the Democrats’ narratives of the purported Trump collusion also radically changed to meet changing circumstances.
Before the election, a sure and poor-loser Trump was pathetically cheating with the Russians to stop the fated winner Clinton.
Then, in the post-election shock and transition, the Russian-interference storyline was repackaged as an excuse for the poorly conducted Clinton campaign that had blown a supposedly big lead and sure victory.
“The Russians did it” was preferable to blaming Hillary for not visiting Wisconsin once.
Finally, Trump’s Russian connection served as a useful tool to delegitimize an abhorrent incoming Trump administration.
And the delegitimizing was made easier by Obama’s eleventh-hour order, days before his departure, to expand the list of federal officials who would have access to sensitive intelligence and surveillance transcripts.
But all such accusations of Trump-Russian complicity, based on admitted leaks from intelligence agencies, required some sort of hard evidence:
leaked transcripts of Trump officials clearly outlining shared strategies with the Russians, hard proof of Russian electronic tampering in key swing states, doctored e-mails planted in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove, travel records of Trump people in clandestine meetings with Russian counterparts, or bank records showing cash payoffs.
Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had as many financial dealings with pro-Russian interests as did Trump people.
Yet a hostile media, in collusion with intelligence-agency leakers, has so far provided no such proof. John Podesta had as much invested in Russian profiteering as did former Trump aides.
Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had as many financial dealings with pro-Russian interests as did Trump people.
The ubiquitous Russian ambassador had met as many Democratic grandees as he had Trump associates
The lack so far of hard proof gradually created a boomerang effect.
Attention turned away from what “unnamed sources” had alleged to the question of how unnamed sources had gathered surveillance of the Trump people in the first place —
as evidenced by media reports of General Flynn’s conversations, of Trump’s private talks with foreign leaders, and of allegations of electronic contact between Russian and Trump Tower computers.
I
n other words, the media and their sources had gambled that congressional overseers, law enforcement, and the public would all overlook surveillance that may have been illegal or only partly legal, and they would also overlook the clearly illegal leaking of such classified information on a candidate and a president-elect —
if it all resulted in a scandal of the magnitude of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate.
So far such a scandal has not emerged.
But Trump’s opponents continue to push the Russian narrative not because it is believable but because it exhausts and obfuscates likely illegal surveillance and leaking.
The real scandal is probably not going to be Trump’s contacts with Russians.
More likely, it will be the rogue work of a politically driven group of intelligence officers, embedded within the bureaucracy.
Either in freelancing mode, or in Henry II–Thomas Becket fashion (“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”) with Obama-administration officials, began monitoring Team Trump — either directly or more likely through the excuse of inadvertently chancing upon conversations while monitoring supposedly suspicious foreign communications.
Added to this mess is the role of three unsympathetic characters who are on record as either not telling the truth, deliberately obfuscating it, or showing terrible judgement.
Obama CIA director John Brennan, who assumed that role after the still mysterious and abrupt post-election departure of David Petraeus, has a long history of political gymnastics; he has made many a necessary career readjustment to changing Washington politics.
He is on record as being deceptive — he failed to reveal that the CIA intercepted Senate communications.
He also stated falsely that the drone program had not resulted in a single collateral death.
And, in the spirit of Obama’s new Islamic outreach, Brennan strangely suggested that jihad was a sort of personal odyssey rather than a call to use force in spreading Islamic influence.
Brennan is also on record as critical of Trump: Trump “should be ashamed of himself,” Brennan said the day after the inauguration, in response to Trump’s speech to CIA staffers gathered in front of the Memorial Wall of Agency heroes.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has in the past lied to Congress, when he assured that the NSA did not monitor the communications of American citizens.
Likewise, he bizarrely asserted that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely a secular organization.
And more than 50 CENTCOM officers formally accused Clapper of distorting their reports about the Islamic State.
Like Brennan, Clapper has been critical of Trump, asking, “Who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community?”
During the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comey popped up to assure the nation that while Hillary Clinton had conducted herself unethically, and probably in violation of federal statutes in using her private e-mail server for government business and wiping away correspondence, her transgressions did not rise to the level of indictable offenses.
It was as if the investigator Comey, rather than the appropriate federal attorney, was adjudicating the decision to charge a suspect.
Then in the final stretch of the race, Comey resurfaced to assert that “new” evidence had led him to reconsider his exculpation of Clinton.
And then, on November 6, 2016, just hours before the nation went to the polls, he appeared a third time in front of cameras to reiterate his original judgment that Hillary’s transgressions did not merit further investigation, much less criminal prosecutions.
The media contextualized Comey’s schizophrenia as see-saw reactions either to liberal Obama-administration pressures or to near revolts among the more conservative FBI rank-and-file.
Just as likely was Comey’s own neurotic itch to seek public attention and to position himself favorably with a likely new president.
How did Obama’s naïve pro-Putin reset and Clinton-family profiteering transmogrify into wild accusations that others had become even friendlier to such an unsavory character?
Comey’s weird election-era prominence was also apparently fueled by the fact that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was caught in an embarrassing private meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton — a meeting during the investigation of his spouse.
(The encounter was intended to remain secret, but a local reporter was tipped off.)
That unethical encounter had tainted Lynch’s pose of disinterested adjudication, and she accordingly de facto fobbed off her prosecutorial responsibilities to Comey.
Comey most lately has asked the Justice Department to refute Trump’s claims that he was subject to electronic surveillance by the government during the last days of the Obama administration.
Given the past assertions and political natures of Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, none are very credible in any future testimony they might give about the Trump-Russia narrative or the role U.S. intelligence agencies played in the possibly illegal monitoring of Trump associates.
All three men are even less credible when it comes to the illegal leaking of such classified information to media outlets.
Trump’s infamous and clumsy tweet (“just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower”) may well prove to be inaccurate — literally.
But it could also end up being prescient if revelations show that Obama-appointed officials or their underlings used surveillance on foreign officials — three years after the NSA got caught tapping Angela Merkel’s cellphone — in order to sweep up Trump communications and then leak them to the media to damage his candidacy and later his transition.
We are left in the end with paradoxes: How did Obama’s naïve pro-Putin reset and Clinton-family profiteering transmogrify into wild accusations that others had become even friendlier to such an unsavory character?
How did the image of a sacrosanct media speaking the “truth” of Trump’s collusion with Putin rest on the peddling of false narratives — many of them based on likely illegal surveillance and certainly unethical and unlawful dissemination?
And if Trump was unhinged for leveling wild allegations based on mainstream news reports, why were news outlets themselves — and those who quoted them chapter and verse — not unhinged for spreading such suddenly unreliable information?
What is the explanatory sword that cuts this Gordian knot?
Trump supposedly had zero chance of winning. But when he did, facts had to adjust to a bitter actuality — at first perhaps to explain away reality, but quite soon after to alter it by any means necessary.
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/artic...steria-diverts-attention-surveillance-scandal
