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Eight days before the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times ran what I would describe as a memorable headline, except it seems to have been forgotten in recent days: “Investigating Donald Trump: F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”
The underlying report makes for fascinating reading. In hindsight, the Times undoubtedly regrets publishing it. Clearly, the paper believed that Donald Trump didn’t have a prayer of winning the then-imminent election. It would not otherwise have reported a determination by the nation’s premier law-enforcement and domestic-security agency that the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative – which the Times had spent so much energy hyping – was unfounded.
But the Times, like the FBI itself, was confident that Hillary Clinton would win comfortably. It was thus time to clear the decks and tone down the “collusion” chatter. Had Clinton prevailed, as everyone was so very sure she would, we’d never have heard another word about “collusion.” Having served its purpose, which was always political, the smear would be retired.
Nevertheless, the Times report is worth remembering in light of the Watergate comparisons that have filled the air waves since Russiagate special counsel John Durham’s revelation last week that Clinton campaign operatives pushed the CIA to investigate then-President Trump –allegedly based, in part, on Clinton-friendly tech executive Rodney Joffe’s privileged access to government records of White House internet-traffic.
As the Times explained on Oct. 31, 2016, the FBI had scrutinized but rejected the suspicion of “cyberexperts” that there was “a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to [Russian President Vladimir Putin].”
We now know, of course, that the “cyberexperts” in question were led by Joffe. Durham’s indictment of Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann elaborates that Joffe, who was hoping to land a job in the anticipated Hillary Clinton administration, collaborated with a group of fellow tech experts to mine and distort the internet data to which they had privileged access due to a government contract. The objective was to support the Clinton campaign’s project to portray Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee, as a Putin puppet.
The FBI’s performance in Russiagate was erratic, at best. At times it veered from malevolent to incompetent.
What the Clinton operatives were pushing the FBI, and later the CIA, to do was political spying. That is indeed scandalous. Although the media-Democrat complex would prefer to ignore or discredit the scandal, it deserves a lot more attention.
But the incident brings into sharp relief the flaw in Watergate comparisons so cavalierly tripping off the tongues of former President Trump and his supporters.
In Watergate, it was the executive branch of government itself that put the law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the government in the service of partisan politics. That’s what made the conspiracy so perilous. When government officials, behind the veil of “national security,” abuse these awesome powers to achieve partisan ends and maintain their grip on power, our democratic republic truly is threatened.
That, however, is not the case when a third party beseeches a government security agency to use its investigative authorities for the purpose of slandering a political enemy, and the government agency ends up clearing the political enemy of wrongdoing.
That is what happened to the Alfa Bank allegation that was sculpted by Joffe and peddled to the government by Sussmann.
To be sure, the FBI did conduct an investigation. We should be alarmed that an investigation of a presidential candidate could be triggered because politically connected insiders have trusted access to government data and chummy relations with government officials.
That said, though, this was not a Watergate situation. It was not a scenario in which the White House, based on no credible evidence, tasked the FBI to scrutinize the opposition party’s presidential nominee so a story could be spun that a communications back channel had been established between that nominee and a hostile foreign regime. It was not even a situation in which the FBI, because of the tight alliance between former Secretary Clinton and then-President Obama, collaborated with the Clinton campaign in framing Trump as if he had established a secret system for exchanging messages with the Kremlin.
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No, what happened here is the Clinton campaign tried to recruit the FBI into portraying Trump as having a back channel to Putin, but the FBI not only rejected the allegation but managed to get its rejection leaked to the nation’s most prominent newspaper. As the Times put it, “Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.”
Now, let’s maintain an even keel on this. The FBI’s performance in Russiagate was erratic, at best. At times it veered from malevolent to incompetent. The Bureau opened an investigation in which Trump was obviously the focus based on scant evidence. Even as the Bureau dropped the Alfa Bank investigation, it was eavesdropping on a former Trump campaign adviser based on warrants it obtained by representing to the FISA Court that Trump might be in cahoots with Putin. These warrants were continued for eight months into Trump’s presidency, and were based in part on bogus information (the Steele dossier) that the Bureau failed to verify and about which it made misrepresentations under oath to the court.
Presumably, Durham is giving the FBI’s performance a long look. Still, based on the cases he has indicted so far, his position is that the FBI was duped by Clinton operatives.
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I am skeptical of that theory; I suspect Durham will have a tough time convincing juries of it. But what I think is beside the point. Here’s what we know: (a) the FBI rejected the Alfa Bank suspicions against Trump that are the context of Durham’s prosecution of Sussmann, and (b) Durham, a well-regarded prosecutor who has unearthed the political spying evidence we should all find disturbing, is portraying the FBI as a victim of, rather than a participant in, the Clinton campaign’s deceptions.
That’s not Watergate.
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Source: www.foxnews.com