Russiagate: A Bright, Shining Lie

From Chronicles:

"The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia . . . to influence the 2016 US presidential campaign." So stated Attorney General William Barr in his Sunday letter to Congress summarizing the principal findings of the Mueller report. On the charge of collusion with Russia, not guilty on all counts.

After two years of hearing from haters in politics and the media that President Donald Trump was "Putin's poodle," an agent of the Kremlin, guilty of treason, an illegitimate president who would leave the White House in handcuffs and end his days in prison, we learn the truth. It was all a bright, shining lie.

Reeling from Trump's exoneration, big media are now scurrying to their fallback position: Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice. But Mueller was not obstructed. No one impeded his labors. As for Trump's rages against his investigation, they were the natural reaction of an innocent man falsely accused and facing disgrace and ruin for a crime he did not commit, indeed, a crime that had never been committed.

The House Judiciary Committee may try to replicate what Mueller did, and re-investigate obstruction. Fine. This would confirm what this whole rotten business has at root always been about: a scheme by the deep state and allied media to bring down another president. The Mueller investigation employed 19 lawyers and 40 FBI agents. It took two years. It issued 2,800 subpoenas. It executed 500 search warrants. It interviewed 500 witnesses. And it failed to indict a single member of Trump's campaign for collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

Which raises this question:

If Mueller could find no collusion, after an exhaustive two-year search, what was the compelling evidence that caused James Comey's FBI and Barack Obama's Department of Justice to believe that such collusion had occurred and to launch this investigation? Sunday, after Barr's summary of the Mueller report became public, Trump aired his justified anger: "It's a shame that our country had to go through this. To be honest, it's a shame that your president has had to go through this. . . . This was an illegal takedown that failed." Is there not truth in this? (Read more.)

From The Washington Examiner:

 Conservative commentator Mark Levin lashed out against the Democrats in the aftermath of special counsel Robert Mueller submitting his final report to the Justice Department. During his Fox News show Sunday, the nationally syndicated radio host blamed former President Barack Obama's government for seeding a Russian collusion frenzy and called for an investigation into their role in peddling the narrative. "The Democratic Party is not a pro-America party. They act like a third-world party because they want to destroy this presidency," Levin said. "It is time to focus on the Democrats in the House. It is time to focus on the media, the Hillary campaign, the DNC, Barack Obama — this was Barack Obama’s government that did all this when the Russians were interfering in our election." (Read more.)

The real scandal is just starting. From The American Thinker:

Looking back, we can say the media misreported what Robert Mueller was doing.  In other words, this was never an investigation of Donald Trump.  It was really about Russia and the 2016 election. Are you ready for the next scandal?  When will we see rats jumping ship or people saving their necks? As we've known for years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have a Russian story longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace. So let me add my speculation: what if Mueller picked up some information about the Clintons and Russia? Again, I don't know, but the Clintons do have their Russia connections. (Read more.)

From Bloomberg:

 “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” That single sentence, taken from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, calls for a reckoning.

It’s a reckoning for Democrats who saw almost every development in this almost-two-year investigation as another dot connecting a conspiracy Mueller has not found. It’s a reckoning for many in the media that dutifully passed along this theory without scrutiny or context. And it’s a reckoning for many national security officials who abandoned their traditional nonpartisan role as custodians of state secrets to engage in a campaign against a president they loathed.

Their suspicions, I should note, were not unwarranted. During the 2016 election, there was strong evidence that Russia had hacked the emails of leading Democrats, a fact supported by Mueller’s indictments. The country later learned from Mueller that Moscow conducted a social media campaign to flood Twitter and Facebook with fake news and propaganda to discredit Hillary Clinton. Trump, meanwhile, once publicly invited the assistance of the Russians.

But many people who should have known better went beyond suspicion and embraced conspiracy. Remember Senator Harry Reid’s explosive letter to James Comey, released just a few days before the election, alleging that the FBI director possessed devastating information about Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia? Reid did not provide many details. We now know that many of the allegations to which Reid referred echoed an infamous dossier prepared by a former British spy at the behest of an opposition research firm paid by the Democratic Party. (Read more.)

From The Hill:

As the “Impeach Trump” machine raged with fuel provided by Democrats and an errant media, a funny thing happened: More than three dozen Republican incumbents in Congress announced they were retiring in 2018, leaving the GOP with a gaping hole in the House that Democrats exploited. Polls showed the impact of the Russia coverage on voters. About half of American voters declared they believed Trump or his aides had colluded with Russia, even though they hadn’t. It is the most compelling proof in a long time that false information repeated long enough becomes truth for many people.

Although we are still coming to grips with the finality of the Mueller report, one thing has become increasingly clear: The Russia collusion narrative — fanned by foreigners, dirty tricksters and a willing media — did, in fact, impact an American election. Not the one in 2016, but the midterm that came two years later. (Read more.)

 Has irreparable damage been done? From The Federalist:

Yet once-respectable, if biased, mainstream outlets churned out one deceptive and faulty stories on the matter after the next. Even when corrected, these many debunked pieces helped foster an environment that allowed the Big Myth to fester.

For all the alleged reporters who spread tales of conspiracy—Ken Dilanian, Natasha Betrand, Ryan Lizza, Manu Raju, and Jason Leopold come to mind, although they certainly weren’t alone— there were an endless number of pundits and liberal writers who regularly accused the president, not of being merely mendacious or incompetent, but of sedition.

A bunch of crackpots were transformed into social media stars. Cable news paraded out officials with axes to grind, like John Brennan and James Clapper, and a slew of supposedly credentialed talking heads as experts. They all claimed that the most remarkable conspiracy in American history had transpired. (Read more.)

And now it's Trump's turn. From The Stream:

For all his supposed impulsiveness, President Trump has great patience when it counts. Be it real estate — waited years before he could get Mar-a-Lago at millions less than its appraised value. Be it the Presidency — waited decades to run. And certainly during this Mueller investigation. Remember all the leaks about Mueller investigating Trump’s children? Knowing collusion was a hoax, an effort was made to goad Trump into firing Mueller, which would have immediately been called obstruction of justice. He didn’t bite. He bided his time. In recent months, supporters have been clamoring for Trump to fully declassify the FISA Warrants the FBI/DOJ got on campaign adviser Carter Page. But Trump has held back. An old tweet, inspired by Sun Tzu, tells us why. (Read more.)

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