Hillary’s dossier

The Trump Dossier was a fertile source of hysteria over Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Then FBI Director James Comey found the dossier of use, briefing President Trump on it at Trump Tower in New York two weeks before the inauguration. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Trump subsequently told the New York Times. When asked by the Times if it was as leverage, Trump responded: “Yeah, I think so. In retrospect.”

“When he brought it to me, I said this is really, made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal,” Trump said, denying the dossier’s claims. (Here I am drawing from the Hill’s account of events this past July.)

All of which undoubtedly contributed to the firing of James Comey and the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate all things Trump and anything else that captures his interest along the way. In the words of the Gershwin brothers’ song, let’s call the whole thing off.

After much pain — after much lying, Clinton style — the Washington Post reported on Tuesday evening that the Trump Dossier was commissioned by the smear outfit Fusion GPS at the behest of the Clinton campaign. It was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Tom Perez, the current chairman of the Democratic National Committee wants it to be known that the DNC’s “new [post-election] leadership” (Perez and Minnesota’s own fast-talking hustler Keith Ellison) know nothing. They all sound like Mafia types. Nobody knows anything.

The nobodies include Clinton presidential campaign spokesman Brian Fallon — the fallacious Brian Fallon. He knows nothing. However, he’s not too sure about Hillary (video below). As always, she must have maintained deniability, however implausible.

Query: who on Team Hillary signed off on it? How did the Obmaa administration use the dossier? These are questions that I seriously doubt will be entertained by Mueller and his team.

The Trump Dossier is the pure product of the Clinton campaign/Elias commission. Despite much confusion among media types such as FOX News’s Ed Henry, GOP money had nothing to do with the dossier. See Mollie Hemingway’s Federalist short course in the Trump Dossier for Dummies. See Ken Vogel’s New York Times version. See Aaron Blake’s Washington Post version.

The Trump Dossier was commissioned and paid for — the money was laundered and the payments for the dossier were concealed — through Washington’s Perkins Coie law firm and Perkins Coie partner Marc Elias. The Perkins Coie firm is a Democratic outfit. Marc Elias is a lawyer operative for Democrats. According to his firm bio, Elias worked as general counsel to Hillary for America, i.e., the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Americas PAC chairman Tom Donelon tells us that he has faced Perkins Coie in its work on behalf of Democrats threatening radio stations to get ads pulled. Tom reminds me that I wrote about Americas PAC’s close encounter with Perkins Coie in 2014 on Power Line here.

Elias tasked former British MI6 counterintelligence chief Christopher Steele with preparing the Trump Dossier. Steele’s work for MI6 reportedly included posting in Russia. In preparing the dossier, Steele drew on Russian sources who seem to have fed him disinformation, Putin style, during the period from June 2016-December 2016.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Steele also devised a plan to get the information to law-enforcement officials in the U.S. and Europe, including the FBI. We know that dossier made its way to Comey.

Mollie Hemingway refers to the sources as “senior Russian officials” quotes Howard Blum’s Vanity Fair article on the dossier: “Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was ‘a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.’ Source B was ‘a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.’”

As President Trump observes, the long sought campaign collusion with Putin’s Russia appears to have come courtesy of Hilary Clinton. What now?

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