2016 Election
July 16, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Cast your mind back to 2016 for a moment, when it seemed a lock that Hillary Clinton would win the election, and nominate a leftist to succeed Justice Scalia. (Remember that Hillary refused to commit to re-sending the nomination of Merrick Garland—a clear signal to progressives that she’s pick someone younger and more progressive.) Mark Tushnet, one of the leading leftists at Harvard Law School, let loose with his id
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June 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
How about a congressional investigation of the perversion of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the service of the Russia hoax intended to take out Donald Trump? The FBI, FISA, and the FISA court should be shut down until we get some answers about the abuse of the law in the service of the hoax. It is all unfinished business, although the Democrats are doing their best to make
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May 31, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Well, of course, that didn’t take long. The guilty guilty guilty Perkins Coie/HRC attorney Michael Sussmann was acquitted by his District of Columbia peers/HRC campaign donors sitting in judgment on his case. I’m not sure whether the jury spent more time picking a foreman or deliberating over the evidence. Perhaps some enterprising reporter will get us inside the process. Thanks to the evidence introduced at trial by the lawyers in
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May 23, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I took the occasion of the testimony in the Sussman trial last week to weigh “Watergate in the balance.” John reviewed what we already knew in “Hillary did it.” On Saturday, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal — I think this is Kim Strassel’s beat as a member of the board — plays it straight in the editorial “Hillary Clinton did it.” The Journal editorial lays out the
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May 21, 2022 — Scott Johnson
With perfect timing Christopher Caldwell reviews what we have learned about Watergate in the past 50 years. Caldwell’s First Things essay is titled “Regime change, American style.” The occasion of Caldwell’s essay is the publication of Garrett Graff’s Watergate: A New History. Caldwell’s essay usefully reminds us that, 50 years later, we still have no idea what the Watergate burglars were looking for. Whatever it was, however, they came away
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May 12, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Jen Psaki is riding off into the MSNBC sunset, to be replaced by Karine Jean-Pierre, who, as we noted here, has freely engaged in both race-baiting and disinformation. The disinformation was about the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, which Jean-Pierre said was “stolen” by Governor Brian Kemp, who won by 54,000 votes. It turns out that Ms. Jean-Pierre has a broader affinity for election conspiracy theories. Today it came to light
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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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