2016 Election
April 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Whether or not justice is ever rendered in the Russia hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign, the Perkins Coie law firm, Fusion GPS, Rodney Joffe, Christopher Steele, and others, there is more to be learned. As Special Counsel John Durham approaches the trial of former Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussman next month, they are getting nervous in the Clinton service. So nervous that everyone who can is
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April 8, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Peter Van Buren looks back at the question of “disinformation” that was floated by 51 former intelligence officials to suppress the news extracted by the New York Post from Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election. Van Buren’s Spectator column notes in the subhead “The only disinformation op in 2020 was run against American voters by their own intelligence community” (the Spectator has taken the column out from behind its
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March 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg was one of the three reporters with a byline on the January 11, 2017 story “How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a Crisis for Donald Trump.” The story is a confused mashup of the facts as we have come to know them in connection with the Steele Dossier. The three reporters had the assistance of three more “who contributed reporting,” and they still couldn’t
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February 26, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Byron York’s February 21 Washington Examiner column provides a handy “Guide to Clinton dirty tricks” falsely tying Trump to Russia. Byron’s column is triggered both by the recent revelations from the Durham probe and Clinton’s response to them as reported by FOX News. The column does a good job summarizing information in the public domain (with relevant links) and breaking it down into three major dirty tricks. Taken together, with
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February 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In his Sunday morning email editorial report, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot writes: “For an example of media conformity in action, look at the lock-step reaction to Special Counsel John Durham’s recent court filing. Nothing to see here, so please don’t look, said the New York Times, whose line was picked up seriatim by Axios, Politico, and the rest.” Gigot briefly provides background and poses the relevant
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February 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Russia hoax must be the biggest political story of the past five years. I certainly have treated it as such. The details added by Special Counsel John Durham in his filing last week in the case of Michael Sussman add slightly to the story and to the questions surrounding it. The unnamed “tech executive” at the heart of the filing is Alex Joffe. On Monday Joffe released a statement
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January 4, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Democrats and their mainstream media allies express dismay, if not alarm, over a poll that shows 58 percent of Republicans don’t believe Joe Biden was elected legitimately. However, Byron York points out that in the Fall of 2017, the same pollster found that 67 percent of Democrats said Trump was not legitimately elected. Given the drumbeat of unfounded claims by mainstream media outlets of Russian collusion in the election of
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December 11, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Michaael Isikoff and David Corn were key media conduits for the Russia hoax fabrications wrought and disseminated by Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the Clinton campaign in the run-up to the 2016 election. Isikoff and Corn expanded their reporting into the 2018 bestseller Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. All in all, given the active
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December 9, 2021 — Scott Johnson
J. Peder Zane’s RealClearPolitics column makes the case “Why the Russiagate Scandal Outranks the Rest.” This I believe: Russiagate is the biggest scandal in American history. Nothing comes close in size, scope or harm to the republic than the years-long effort to cripple Donald Trump’s presidency by claiming he conspired with an enemy state to steal the 2016 election and then do its bidding as commander-in-chief. Its notorious predecessors –
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December 6, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Why won’t the prestige press come clean on its role in the Russia hoax? Crisis management consultant Eric Dezenhall sketches out the deterrents in his Wall Street Journal column “The media stonewalls on the Steele dossier.” Dezenhall frames the basic problem this way, in terms of incentives: The crisis confronting the news media post-dossier is rooted in disinformation. In the crisis business, we often do detective work to uncover the
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December 5, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t
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November 7, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In the scheme of things the indictment handed up by an Eastern District of Virginia grand jury against Igor Danchenko this past Thursday may be small potatoes, but the case is significant. I have embedded a copy of the 39-page indictment at the bottom. Check my summary of the allegations below against the indictment itself. I leave out a lot and the indictment conceals the names of key players in
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September 14, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Count American Jews among the minority groups that appear to be more disposed to vote for Donald Trump in 2020 than they were four years ago. A poll by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that Jewish likely voters favor Joe Biden over President Trump by a split of 67-30. Exit polling in 2016 found that Trump received only 25 percent of the Jewish vote, while Hillary Clinton garnered 70 percent
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December 24, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Gregg Jarrett’s Witch Hunt is one of this year’s good books on the Russia hoax. Jarrett’s subtitle — The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History — posits that the hoax may have derived from something other than intentional wrongdoing, but Jarrett leaves no stone unturned to make out willful misconduct. I find the book frustrating in certain respects. It lacks an index. It is argumentative. It
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August 13, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Today is the official publication date of my friend Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. Courtesy of Encounter Books I read an advance copy of the book last week and want to recommend it enthusiastically to Power Line readers. Even though I have closely followed the “collusion” story as it has come into public view since January 2017, I was reminded
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July 27, 2019 — John Hinderaker
What to do about the booming Trump economy is a problem the Democrats have yet to solve. Democratic presidential candidates always want to run as though it is 1932 and their mission is to end a depression, but that is hard to do when employment is at record highs, wages are rising, and in general the economy is perhaps the strongest in American history. For the most part, the Democrats’
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July 8, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The investigative affiliate of RealClearPolitics has posted Aaron Maté’s long examination of key findings in the Mueller report: “CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims.” Among other things, according to Maté, largely undisputed headline assertions that the Kremlin worked to secure Donald Trump’s victory are unsupported by evidence or other publicly available sources for that matter. As set forth in the summary provided by RCP, Maté finds that:
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