"The Donald Trump-Russia collusion scandal that first broke in December 2016 and roared on until April 2019 has no parallel in our history — it’s not even close.
As president-elect and later as sitting president, Trump was accused by the country’s intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus of conspiring with a hostile power to subvert the 2016 election and sneak a crooked path to the White House.
Along the way, a damning Intelligence Community Assessment was issued, a major FBI investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, targeted the president, and a special counsel, Robert Mueller, was
By one estimate, more than half a million articles were written about the collusion issue, the vast majority asserting or assuming criminality on Trump’s part.
For over two years, the first Trump administration was forced to conduct America’s business while in the fetal position.
How much truth, you ask, did the accusations of collusion with Russia contain?
None. Zilch. Nada.
The entire episode was concocted out of whole cloth by the Obama White House, with an assist from the Hilary Clinton campaign and the eager cooperation of the heads of the FBI (James Comey), the CIA (John Brennan), and NSA (James Clapper), plus various zealous underlings.
Mueller, in his final report, rather grumpily admitted that the two-year-plus investigation he led “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
In fact, as of Dec. 8, 2016, the intelligence agencies believed that “Russian or criminal actors did not impact recent US election results,” according to documents recently declassified by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Yet on Dec. 9, President Obama, in essence, tasked the agencies to change their minds and come up with the opposite conclusion.
They complied with a hastily-drafted ICA stating that “Russian President Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” and “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
On Jan. 17, three days before Trump’s swearing-in ceremony, an unclassified version of the ICA was made available to the public.
The lack of evidence was obscured with a tactic familiar to those who have worked in intelligence: The proof, the authors claimed, was super-secret and hyper-classified.
Gabbard’s declassification campaign has exposed the naked falsehood of that claim.
The Obama administration, Gabbard now maintains, was guilty of a “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Now, “treasonous” is a strong word — although, to be fair, former CIA chief Brennan applied the same word to Trump at the height of the collusion uproar.
One thing is certain: The corpse of the Trump-Russia scandal has risen like a zombie and is now shambling towards its originators in the hope of eating their brains.
Evidently, the Obama White House, in its waning days, aimed to “subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory,” as Gabbard has said. In that, it succeeded brilliantly.
Leaks to The New York Times and The Washington Post began as early as Dec. 9, before the intelligence people even had time to concoct their story.
Trump would be exonerated. The probability was much higher than zero that he, or some future Republican president, would demand an accounting for the fraud. The Obama and Clinton people would then trade places with the Trumpists.
The prosecutors would be prosecuted.
One possibility is that Obama and his people believed their own lies. They really thought Trump was a Russian operative, inserted into the Oval Office so he could destroy the country following the script of the 1962 movie, “The Manchurian Candidate.”
That’s unlikely, for a couple of reasons. If President Obama truly imagined Trump to be a foreign agent, he had every incentive to raise the alarm — not in an obscure intelligence report, but in public, before a national audience.
More to the point, when it came to American politics, Obama was a cold and calculating realist. He knew perfectly well when he was shading the truth to obtain a political advantage.
As the bizarre drafting process of the ICA demonstrates, the same was true of top bureaucrats like Brennan and Comey.
Trump’s victory in 2016 shattered all of these illusions.
Suddenly, Obama was no longer a political messiah ushering in a liberal golden age. He was a helpless failure and an object of repudiation." NYP
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