by WorldTribune Staff, October 29, 2017
When then-FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in March that his agents were investigating “whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts” he was referring to the Trump campaign.
After the news of this past week, Comey’s testimony could more aptly refer to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
“What is known now that was not known in March: The Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for an opposition research operation against candidate Trump that relied almost exclusively on paid Kremlin sources and Russian spies during the 2016 election,” Rowan Scarborough wrote for The Washington Times on Oct. 28.
“The Russians plied ex-British spy Christopher Steele with what Trump people term lies and fiction that became part of a dossier. The dossier or its contents were spread around Washington by Steele and his employer, Fusion GPS, which got the money from the Clinton campaign and the DNC.”
The chain of money from Clinton and the DNC to Fusion to Steele to Moscow would seem to fit Comey’s definition of “coordination,” observers say.
Michael Caputo, a communications adviser to the Trump campaign, pointed out that “If there was enough Russia collusion evidence to warrant a special counsel for the president, there’s far more now on the Clinton campaign’s connection to a foreign spy ring that included Russians. That, coupled with the stymied investigation into the Russian bribery plot and donations directed to the Clinton Foundation, are grounds for a special counsel.”
Here is how Comey defined his investigation to the House Intelligence Committee in March.
“I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed.”
J.D. Gordon, a former Pentagon spokesman and a Trump campaign national security adviser, said that “Considering what we’ve learned in recent days about the sources of Fusion GPS funding, I imagine that Hillary’s campaign and the DNC will be investigated by the special counsel.”
“Those who committed crimes against Trump associates to include members of Congress, such as cyberstalking, libel and slander, should also be included in these far-reaching probes,” he said. “We must put an end to this neo-McCarthyism that’s swept over Washington.”
Meanwhile, since The Washington Post’s report that the dossier was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, “there’s been a subtle tweak in the coverage,” Andrew McCarthy wrote for National Review on Oct. 28. “Now, reports allude to the research that led to the Trump dossier. Why the shift in emphasis? Because the Democrats and their media accomplices are doing what they do best: controlling the terms of the public discussion in order to obfuscate.”
McCarthy noted that, on Oct. 27, “it was revealed that the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative publication, funded the original Fusion GPS project. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported, the Free Beacon retained Fusion GPS to do research on several Republican candidates, not Donald Trump alone. The project had nothing to do with Russia or Christopher Steele. It ran from fall 2015 until Spring 2016, with the Free Beacon dropping it once Trump had the nomination sewn up.”
McCarthy continued: “You can see the problem here for Democrats who, for a year, have chanted the ‘Trump campaign collusion with Russia’ mantra. Strip away the buffers (i.e., Steele and Perkins Coie) and the dossier is an exercise in Clinton-campaign collusion with Kremlin-connected sources to produce information that would cripple the Trump campaign and, failing that, undermine the Trump presidency. Those of us who were convinced long before November 8, 2016, that Russia was a hostile power can only shrug our shoulders at the Democrats’ folly. On the stage, they’ve spent the months since Trump’s election depicting a villainous Russia indistinguishable from its Soviet forbears. Behind the scenes, they’ve been cozying up to Putin. So now, at every turn, they get tangled in their own ‘collusion’ web.”
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