There's more to the anti-Trump Russiagate plot — and Tulsi Gabbard will unravel it
The new material describes the role of the Obama administration's intelligence and investigatory directors — purportedly along with former President Barack Obama himself — in undermining the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
In addition, their efforts extended to sabotaging the 2016-2017 presidential transition and, by extension, the first three years of the Trump presidency.
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The released documents add some new details to what over the last decade has become accepted knowledge.
Congressional committees, special prosecutors and the inspectors general had all previously issued reports that largely confirmed the general outlines of the skullduggery that began in 2015-16.
Hillary Clinton's campaign, later aided by the top echelon of the FBI, CIA and the director of national intelligence, sought — falsely — to seed a narrative that Trump had colluded directly with Russia to win unfairly the 2016 election.
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When that campaign gambit failed to alter the 2016 results, the Obama administration doubled down during the transition to undermine the incoming Trump presidency.
Next, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's 'all-star' legal team found no evidence of direct Trump-Putin collusion to hijack the election.
But his investigation did sabotage 22 months of Trump's first term, marked by constant leaks and hysterical rumors that Trump was soon to be convicted and jailed as a 'Russian asset.'
By 2020, the frustrated intelligence agencies and former 'authorities' now absurdly further lied that Hunter Biden's incriminating laptop had 'all the earmarks' — once again — of Russian interference.
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So, what could be new about Gabbard's latest release?
One, after the 2016 election of Donald Trump but before his inauguration, Obama convened a strange meeting with his outgoing intelligence and investigatory heads — CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, National Security Advisor Susan Rice and a few others.
Contrary to a four-year Democratic Party narrative that '18 intelligence agencies' had long claimed Russian collusion, the top directors apprised Obama that their expert colleagues had found no such evidence.
Yet outgoing President Obama allegedly directed them to ignore such an assessment.
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Instead, they began spreading narratives that President-elect Trump had been colluding with the Russians.
Leaks followed. Media hysteria crested. And soon Mueller and his left-wing 'dream team' of lawyers targeted President Trump.
Further new information may confirm that Brennan's CIA — and those he briefed in the Oval Office — had known for some time that the Russians themselves were confused about why they were falsely being accused of colluding with Trump to rig the election.
Of course, Russian operatives, like their Chinese counterparts, often seek to cause havoc in American institutions, such as hacking emails or spreading online disinformation.
But they may have been nevertheless curious why Hillary Clinton was making such false accusations that they were working directly with Trump, and why the Obama administration was acting upon them.
Obama has now claimed these new charges are outrageous and beneath the dignity of the presidency.
He did not, however, flatly contradict the new information.
He should have issued an unambiguous denial that he had never ordered his intelligence chiefs in December 2016 to ignore their associates' assessments and instead to assume Trump's collusion with Putin.
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These sustained efforts of the Clinton campaign, Obama appointees, and ex-intelligence chiefs and their media counterparts between 2015 and 2020 severely undermined the 2016 Trump campaign.
They bushwhacked the 2017 presidential transition. They hamstrung the Trump presidency.
And they may well have hurt Trump's 2020 election bid.
Summed up, here is the damage caused by the Trump-Putin collusion lies:
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They emboldened 'experts' in 2020 to again lie blatantly and shamelessly to the American people that the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop was yet another fake product of Russian interference to help reelect Trump.
The media were equally guilty. Journalists partnered with current and ex-Obama appointees by disseminating fake documents like the Steele dossier and working with giants like Twitter and Facebook. During the 2020 campaign, the FBI and social media sought to censor accurate news stories that the laptop was indeed authentic and already verified as such by the FBI.
These operations may have had serious consequences for US foreign policy. Dictatorial Russia is a US adversary. By needlessly and falsely claiming that Russia had intervened in two elections directly to partner with Trump, Obama-era officials and Clinton-campaign activists destroyed Trump's own credibility to sustain a workable relationship with a nuclear Russia.
In addition, the lying and extra-legal operations of the FBI and CIA only further convinced the paranoid Russians that they could not trust the US government — given it had been engaging in the very conspiracy lies that were more akin to its own than America's.
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Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey and others will likely never face legal consequences for the damage they've done to our institutions and foreign policy.
But that does not mean they should be exempt from an ongoing and disinterested effort to find and finally expose the whole truth.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
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