by WorldTribune Staff, November 3, 2017
As former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile was revealing on Nov. 2 that candidate Hillary Clinton rigged the primary in her favor, reports confirmed that Clinton and her campaign also propagated the salacious and discredited Trump dossier they paid for prior to the Nov. 8 general election.
In a Nov. 1 appearance on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Clinton insisted that the dossier “didn’t come out before the election as we all know.”
Not true.
“Some of the dossier’s more scandalous allegations did surface in the Washington news media before Nov. 8,” The Washington Times’ Rowan Scarborough noted in a Nov. 2 analysis. “And her campaign helped spread them around to bash candidate Donald Trump. The campaign used Twitter and TV surrogates to say the information was proof he and Russia were in cahoots” to defeat Clinton.
Clinton said on The Daily Show that the dossier is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election and it’s still being evaluated.”
Clinton did acknowledge the dossier was financed by her campaign and the DNC.
While the full dossier did not go public until BuzzFeed published it in January, the Clinton campaign “did in fact use dossier information, which has been dubbed fiction and a disgrace by President Trump and his men,” Scarborough wrote.
During the 2016 campaign, dossier author and ex-British spy Christopher Steele met in person with reporters from the Washington Post, New York Times, Yahoo News and others.
After the meeting, Yahoo News wrote a story sourced to unnamed intelligence officials. “The story perfectly matched the July 19 dossier memo that said Trump adviser Carter Page traveled to Moscow and met with two men linked to the Kremlin who happened to be under U.S. sanctions,” Scarborough wrote.
Yahoo ran the story on Sept. 23, 2016 under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin”.
The article said “U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. U.S. intelligence agencies have also received reports that Page met with another top Putin aide while in Moscow – Igor Diveykin.”
These are “the same allegations lodged by Mr. Steele in his memo briefed to Yahoo news and others,” Scarborough noted.
The Clinton campaign quickly picked up on the Yahoo story, using Twitter to allege that Page stood as evidence of Russian collusion with Trump.
Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, said on one broadcast, “Michael Isikoff had a piece yesterday about Carter Page, who is a foreign policy adviser of Trump‘s, and that he had met with someone from the Kremlin that, I mean, you know, according to Michael’s reporting that U.S. intelligence officials believe is behind the hack.”
Rep. Ron DeSantis, Florida Republican, told Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow that “We know now without a shadow of a doubt that the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, paid Fusion GPS and Steele to acquire this dossier, which required colluding with Russian operatives and Russian nationals. I called for the FBI, the Justice Department to declassify all the FISA applications involving Trump associates because what I think happened is, I think they used the information from this dossier to be able to get surveillance on Trump and his associates.
“And then the fruits of that,” DeSantis continued, “formed the basis of what had been leaked to the press over the first three or four months of Trump’s White House.”
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