Shameless is as shameless does
by Tom Sullivan
Three days after the Washington Free Beacon reported that Democrats hired Fusion GPS in 2016 to further the opposition research begun “by an unknown GOP client” against presidential candidate Donald Trump, the publication disclosed to the House Intelligence Committee the Free Beacon was the GOP client.
The research compiled by the former British MI6 intelligence officer led to the famous Christopher Steele dossier outlining Russian attempts to influence the American presidential election and, subsequently, to the FBI investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Clinton Campaign and DNC Paid for Research Behind Russia Dossier https://t.co/yWHKPszMAj @cb0321— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) October 25, 2017
The sitting president and his allies have “sought to cast Fusion GPS as a shadowy, illegitimate outfit that produced a ‘fake’ dossier,” the Washington Post reports, noting that the Beacon, which published such allegations was itself a Fusion GPS client.
CNN reported last night that a federal grand jury in Washington has approved the first charges levied by Mueller’s team in its Russia investigation:
The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.
The White House would have been on notice the charges were coming, CNN adds:
Under the regulations governing special counsel investigations, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has oversight over the Russia investigation, would have been made aware of any charges before they were taken before the grand jury for approval, according to people familiar with the matter.
The imminent filing of charges against, potentially, one of the president’s campaign team, drove the presidents’s supporters this week into overdrive to discredit Mueller and to find anyone else to whom they could divert the public’s attention. Their strategy: offense. Their tactic, schoolyard: “I know you are but what am I?”
Jonathan Chait writes at New York magazine that Republicans have decided the real Russia colluders are the Democrats:
The Republicans have developed a theory of alt-collusion, centering on elements of these same facts. Their version of the story uses Steele’s research in Russia as evidence that Steele is a tool of the Russian government. Steele’s report, charges the The Wall Street Journal editorial page, is “based largely on anonymous, Kremlin-connected sources.” Ergo, “Strip out the middlemen, and it appears that Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate. Did someone say ‘collusion’?” Former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer has circulated the same bizarre theory.
Having Kremlin-connected sources is the point of such research, obviously. Otherwise, Republicans would simply claim the anonymous sources had zero credibility. Chait continues:
There are some important confounding facts that the theory of alt-collusion avoids. For one, Trump’s apparent collusion with Russia involved a crime: stealing Democratic emails. Steele’s “collusion” involves no crime at all. Second, while the Russian propaganda apparatus publicly amplified political messages generated by its email theft, it has done nothing of the sort with the Steele dossier. Indeed, Russia fervently denied the charges in the dossier and called them an attempt to smear Trump.
Nevertheless, Fox News, the Journal, other conservative outlets and the sitting president himself are throwing anything at hand against the wall to see what they can get to stick to anyone except the sitting president. (Did you notice he’s had another famously bad week?)
They even resurrected their July 2016 Uranium One narrative about Hillary Clinton (someone ask Fox News how much has been exported to Russia). The Daily Beast reports that “top Trump sycophant Sean Hannity” demands Clinton be indicted for charges arising in his own mind. It’s what desperation smells like.
On top of all that, more dots connected in the investigation into the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between the no-president’s campaign team and Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. The attorney promised the Trump team information damaging to the Clinton campaign, but has claimed she was operating as an independent actor.
The New York Times reported last night:
But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.
The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said.
The Trump team met with Veselnitskaya because she offered opposition research on Clinton. One thing lost in tales of Fusion GPS and the dark art of opposition research is that it is pretty standard practice in large campaigns. What’s more, prospective candidates often pay for opposition research on themselves before entering the race. They want to know what sort of dirt an opponent might unearth to smear them before committing, and to prepare responses in advance.
Finally, Rachel Maddow reported last night on a Wall Street Journal story that billionaire Trump-backer Rebecca Mercer directed Cambridge Analytica to offer to help Wikileaks disseminate stolen DNC emails after it was publicly known in mid-June the emails were the product of criminal activity by the Russian government.
Yet now, everything Fusion GPS, email, and dossier-related is somehow in fevered minds of the still-undrained swamp tied not to Trump-Russia collusion, but Clinton-Russia collusion. “This method can work if you have enough mouthpieces who are sufficiently devoid of skepticism or intellectual self-respect to be willing to spread your obviously absurd message,” Chait writes. The implied question answers itself.
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