PROBE REACHES ITS TERRIBLE TWOS
It seems instructive to point out that two years ago last week, on July 31, 2016, to be exact, the FBI launched its investigation into the Donald Trump presidential campaign.
The Republican National Convention had been over for 10 days, the Democratic National Convention had been concluded for three, and nobody gave the New York businessman and his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a ghost of a chance of winning the White House.
Still, Democrats had to be sure.
On July 24, 2016, one day before the Democratic convention started and two days after hacked Democratic National Committee emails had been released, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, wanted to float a theory he knew friendly media would run with. So he told Jake Tapper of CNN he should look at the GOP platform on assisting Ukraine, Trump’s comments on NATO and the email hacking.
“I think when you put all this together,” he said, “it’s a disturbing picture, and voters need to reflect on that.”
Mook later repeated the indictment to ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, a former staffer for the candidate’s husband when he was president.
The Clinton campaign, at the time, was in the same position the re-election campaign of Richard Nixon was in in 1972 when Nixon’s campaign authorized the break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building. There was no way either one would lose the election, but …
So on July 31, 2016, the FBI’s now-disgraced No. 2 counterintelligence officer, Peter Strzok, opened the FBI’s investigation. The appointment of a special counsel followed the next winter — after Trump won the election in a stunning upset and after he had been inaugurated
As of late last week, no evidence of any collusion had been found between the Trump campaign and Russia.
CNN, where Mook had planted the theory, acknowledged last week, though 19 paragraphs deep in a story, “There has been no publicly available evidence that Trump or his subordinates knowingly conspired with a Russian effort to help him win power in 2016.”
The wording “publicly available” was intentional, of course. The left-leaning network news agency has gone down every rabbit trail, aired all manner of gossip and innuendo, and pursued the most minute angle in an effort to tie the president’s campaign with Russia’s attempts to influence the election.
Collusion conspiracy theorists would like the public to believe the indictments of Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn and Rick Gates indicate that where there is smoke there is fire. But none of the charges alleged against the four have anything to do with collusion between the campaign and Russia.
Indeed, Manafort, whose trial began last week, was charged with conspiracy to evade U.S. tax and banking laws. The charges pre-date the brief period in which he was Trump’s campaign chairman but cover a period when he was a political consultant working with Ukraine. Prosecutors did not even mention Trump or Manafort’s leadership of the Trump campaign in their opening statement of his federal trial.
Theorists also have pushed Donald Trump Jr.’s agreement to have a meeting with a lobbyist who supposedly had dirt on Clinton, and a recently revealed pre-planning meeting before the younger Trump’s meeting, but the lobbyist had nothing and only wanted to discuss furthering the ability for Americans to adopt Russian children. The elder Trump, though, says he did not know about the meeting or participate in it.
They’ve also tried to tie the president with adviser Roger Stone’s links to sites that published the hacked Democratic emails and Papadopoulos’ meeting with a Maltese professor who allegedly told of emails embarrassing to Clinton, but they found only broken links when it came to Trump.
Another Trump adviser, Carter Page, was alleged in an unverified dossier to have met with Russian officials, but he denied the charge under oath, and no evidence exists that the meeting occurred.
An even further stretch was the theorists pointing to a joke Trump made on the campaign trail, calling for Russia to find the 30,000 emails Clinton allegedly deleted. In the early days of the campaign to get the president, that stood as “hard evidence.”
Meanwhile, throughout the investigation of Trump and his campaign, what has become clear is that the Clinton campaign worked with a former British spy to collect allegedly damaging information on Trump. The dossier that resulted from that collection then was shopped around to the Obama administration intelligence community, to Democratic members of Congress and to the media, all willing accomplices.
How much the FBI investigation and the subsequent probe by the special counsel appointment of Robert Mueller have cost American taxpayers cannot be known, but the first year of the Mueller inquiry totaled $16.7 million.
Last week, Trump suggested Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop the two-year long investigation, calling the special counsel “conflicted” and saying “17 Angry Democrats … are doing his dirty work.”
Since recent reports have said Mueller is wrapping up or would soon wrap up his report, we believe he deserves time to finish it. But, to date, it only has served as a distraction for the public and one reason Democrats give for refusing to work with the president. At this point, it has all the appearances of the “witch hunt” he says it is. We hope it won’t see a third anniversary.