I have always bristled at descriptions of the Republicans as the “stupid party” (as opposed to Democrats who are the “evil party”). But, to be fair, there have been plenty of times when the stereotype fit. These days, however, the Republicans are fighting a spirited and often creative battle against the worst administration since James Buchanan’s–coincidentally, another Democrat.
I have no idea who Tommy Pigott is–it might even be a nom de guerre–but I get emails from him every day, on behalf of the Republican National Committee. And they generally are very good. Today I received two that are worth highlighting, both because of their sharp content and because they suggest that the Republican Party may finally be getting smart.
The first has to do with gas prices, about which the Democrats are hopelessly conflicted. The truth is that they want energy costs to rise so as to facilitate their “transition” to wind and solar energy. That is much like the “transition” of a car that drives off a cliff from the road above to a rocky ravine below, with attendant casualties. But the Democrats haven’t figured that out yet.
At the same time, they understand that voters want to be able to fuel their cars and heat their homes, so most of the time they don’t admit that they are trying to drive prices higher–although sometimes they do–and if gasoline prices dip they are happy to falsely claim credit. That gave rise to this email from Tommy P.:
Happy 6 month anniversary to this tweet that was so bad it would be hilarious if not so pathetic.
Let’s check in on how gas prices are going so we can give Biden his due.
Yikes…and it’s not just the DCCC who stepped in it. Biden has officially stopped claiming he is “making progress” on gas prices. Instead he’s saying there is nothing he can do to bring down the #BidenGasHike. If only Biden hadn’t attacked American energy from day one.
We agree with the DCCC on one thing: we all have Biden to “thank” for gas prices.
You have to admit, that is pretty darn good. Now on to today’s second Pigott email, on infant formula. But first, I note that while the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan started Biden’s collapse in public esteem, the formula fiasco might be the blunder that cements Democratic losses in the midterm elections. The current shortage is entirely an artifact of bad federal government policy, as we noted here. Nevertheless, the shortage came as a surprise to those who created it.
The indomitable Tommy Pigott was on top of the issue today with not one, but two emails. I will highlight this one, with subject heading “Biden insults mothers by claiming ‘progress.’” The email has copious links, which I have omitted here. Every statement is documented:
The Biden White House literally put out a website today BRAGGING about their response to the baby formula crisis.
On the website’s homepage, there are no resources for mothers, just the administration touting the “progress” they’ve made as mothers desperately search for food for their children.
According to Datasembly, baby formula out-of-stock rates have risen from below 5% in January 2021, to 43% at the beginning of last month, to 70% last week.
That graphic is crushing.
That is not “progress.” That is a complete and utter failure. As even CNN notes, “they should have seen this coming.” Biden is engaged in the most disastrous crisis response since Afghanistan – a desperate airlift is not a sign of success.
Call me an optimist, but I think the GOP may be on its way to being the Smart Party. And Tommy Pigott deserves some credit. If you are not yet getting these emails and would like to receive them–every day!–I think you can sign up by emailing tpigott@GOP.COM. Hopefully thousands of our readers will follow up. And maybe we will have Tommy himself on a VIP Live show or a PL Podcast before long. We like to promote effective Republicans.
Ghr…edited comments…discard previous…found a typo in the previous…thanks…I’m going back outside to dispose of pine logs and do some tilling of the soil to plant new grass…
—Impeach Joe Dumb…No. 46—
Why is anyone expecting the truth from the pathological liar Joe Biden?
For heavens sake, this ‘loco’ should be on the Frisco streets. Why allow this fool to continue shaming the USA? Can’t we see his words are trash for the dumpster?!
Even in Nigeria folks cannot contain their laughter watching our lost and confused president speak.
[CNN Evening News: This evening, President Biden will address the nation on why Putin is the cause for the rising cost of gasoline, food, crime, shortage of infant formula, et cetera, et cetera].
What speech? [Only fools listen to CNN’s garbage news, anyway] Tune out the fool, Joe Dumb!
Instead grow your own organic veggies and fruit in a greenhouse, to survive our ‘dull-witted’ Joe Dumb cannabis-induced’ eco-policies!
Why is anyone expecting the truth from the pathological liar Joe Biden?
For heavens sake, this ‘loco’ should be on the Frisco streets. Why allow this fool to continue shaming the USA? Can’t we see his words are trash for the dumpster?!
Even in Nigeria folks cannot contain their laughter watching our lost and confused president speak.
[CNN Evening News: This evening, President Biden will address the nation on why Putin is the cause for the rising cost of gasoline, food, crime, shortage of infant formula, et cetera, et cetera].
What speech? [Only fools listen to CNN’s garbage news, anyway] Tune out the fool, Joe Dumb!
Instead grow your own organic veggies and fruit in a greenhouse, to live through recover ‘dull-witted’ Joe Dumb and Kamala Dumber ‘weed induced’ eco-policy green deal!
Good day, Ghr. I hope all is well at your end. God bless you.
I am so disappointed to see how Hillary Clinton and her Demo-Rats continue to slide off the skids.
Cjack.
So good to hear from you, CJack….Hillary is one of the most crooked of all Americans over the past century. FASCISTIC OBAMA HAS HER PROTECTED! Nearly every state institution is a leftist working diligently with the permanent removal of President Donald J. Trump from anything and everything possible.
Have you been following the fascist Canadian Prime Minister lately? May God bless you! from ghr!
Theories aplenty are floating about the causes of the increase in mass shootings. The White House and the mainstream media (MSM) have zeroed in on the gun lobby and gun manufacturers. Others point to the physical isolation from the Teachers-Union-abetted world record for remote schooling, and its relationship with mental health problems. Unmentioned is the influence of the racialization of America that commenced early in the pandemic. On May 25, 2020, a Black man who’d ingested huge quantities of illegal drugs died while a White cop restrained him as an angry crowd threatened. Democrats seized this incident as an opportunity to reclaim the White House and dominate government by racially dividing the nation.
The strategy was easy to execute because, unlike many governments that prohibit collecting data on “race” due to prior nefarious applications, the U.S. government collects race data on every form. After May 25, Americans became inundated with unvalidated race-based data. The MSM reported on the racial disproportionality in arrests and incarceration, the chances of dying from COVID, infant mortality, educational outcomes, income, medical treatment, and more. The conclusion: all this disproportionality is due to White supremacy/oppression.
The MSM and social media buried data explaining the drivers of disproportionality. Drivers are primarily tied to Democratic strategies that encouraged the breakdown of traditional families and values. The data also negate the White supremacy/oppression driver. Buried were race-based statistics about disproportionate rates of marriage, children raised by a single mother, obesity, physical activity, commission of crimes, the presence of pre-existing health conditions, vaccination rates, training on sudden infant death syndrome, time spent studying, welfare recipients and discouraged workers, and medical students.
Publishing unopposed claims is un-American. It’s a characteristic of dictatorships but the MSM and social media voluntarily dispensed with journalistic integrity to racialize American and get rid of Trump.
Propaganda notwithstanding, the data on race is meaningless—unless it is given meaning. To explain, look at how the race hustlers have manipulated racist stereotypes using incomplete racial data. According to the left, there are 235 million U.S. residents who are racially White, irrespective of their points of origin from over 100 countries on five continents. These “people of Whiteland” are stereotyped as White privileged oppressors. Likewise, the “people of Blackland,” who number 47 million, come from over 70 countries. They have the racist stereotype of victim and so do the “people of Brownland” and the “people of Mixed-Race land.” These last two categories include 61 million people from 33 countries in Latin America; 24 million from 25 Asian countries; 5 million Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Alaskan natives; and 24 million mixed-race people. To impose blanket racial stereotypes on these many cultures is ludicrous—yet that’s what Democrats do.
In the tragedy of hundreds of mass shootings in America (defined as any shooting with four or more victims in close geographic proximity, a definition that describes hundreds of incidents annually, usually gang related), Democrats and the MSM have again leveraged the racialization strategy. Repetitive felon, Darrell Brooks, who is Black, was raised without a father on welfare. He was an unabashed, uncensored anti-White racist who promoted killing White people. A beneficiary of the post-May 25 law enforcement reforms, Brooks left jail and promptly killed six White people and injured 62 others, using his car as a weapon.
Brooks terrorized the 89% White population in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Still, he wasn’t charged with a hate crime or domestic terrorism, the media downplayed the racial aspects of his crime, and this horrific tragedy had a news life that rivaled reports that Brooks complained of racism in prison, or the April 12 shooting of ten people on a New York City subway by Black nationalist/supremacist Frank James, and the suggestion that murdering innocent White parade goers was justified because they were White supremacists, like all the people of Whiteland.
Significantly, the numerous reports of Buffalo mass murderer Peyton Gendron began with the descriptor “White.” It was easy to surmise he was a privileged supremacist. Like many locked-down kids, he contemplated suicide, grew paranoid about germs, and whiled away his time surfing the internet. His interest centered on White supremacy, and in 2020 and 2021, there was a media obsession with fingering White supremacy for the cause of racial disproportionalities plaguing America. Gendron ended up shooting thirteen people in a grocery store in Buffalo. Eleven were Black and two were White. He was charged with a hate crime and as a domestic terrorist.
There have been over 200 mass shootings so far this year but, unusually, President Biden flew to Buffalo to address the grieving Black community. Focusing on his strategy, he pummeled White supremacism, domestic [White] terrorism, and the White hatred that stains America.
To convincingly build a case for mass shootings and racial hatred, Biden should have flown to Waukesha. Blacks are five times more likely to engage in mass shootings and Blacks disproportionately perpetrate hate crimes to the tune of3:1 versus Whites (a ratio calculated to adjust for Whites being 4.96 times the population of Blacks) and the data on Whites are known to be overstated. “The FBI tabulates suspected offenders by race. This is White, Black, Asian, and American Indian.” Ninety-six percent of Latinos are categorized as White. The data are even more inaccurate because crimes minorities commit against Whites normally aren’t charged as hate crimes.
Notwithstanding known gross data inaccuracies, recorded hate crimes against Whites, Blacks, and Asians were up a minimum of 25%, and cross-racial murders were up similarly, following what Biden disingenuously called the unifying post-Floyd events. Skyrocketing hate is a foreseeable but inadvertent outcome of the racialization strategy.
Why do Blacks commit so many hate crimes? Is it far-fetched to say they can’t escape the daily indoctrination of being victims of White oppressors? Or the prophecies of government-aligned and -feted Ibram X Kendi teaching racism cures racism? His teachings undergird Project 1619 and Critical Race Theory, both of which support the Democrat’s racialization strategy.
Salvador Ramos was, like many boys, raised without his dad’s presence. He was a high-school dropout, a welfare kid, his parents had criminal records, and he became a criminal. He murdered twenty-one, mostly children. Seventeen were brown Latinos, and two were “non-Hispanic White.”
If children hadn’t been involved, this horrific event would have been just another mass shooting in America briefly covered by the local media. Whoopi Goldberg explained how non-racist mass casualties were less bad, a claim she supported with reference to the Holocaust. In fact, almost all victims and descendants (99%) of victims of genocides, ethnic cleansings, and massacres have the same race as their oppressors. This is also true of most of the 200+ mass murders in America in 2022. Most victims and oppressors are Black. Most people don’t know this because Goldberg, the MSM, and Democrats all hew to a party line to prevent damage to their strategy if Americans were informed of the realities of non-race-based mass murders.
As if trapped in the 1950s, the Democrats’ strategy has a Black and White framework (Blacks as victims of White oppressors). Brown people don’t fit the strategy. Indeed, they are a distraction. Their descendants weren’t enslaved or Jim Crowed in America. Worse, Latinos and Blacks are hardly brothers and sisters in arms. Mutual animosities tied to competition for jobs and other resources and long histories of cross-racism are rife.
The distraction of browns is something that irked former President Obama so much that he endeavored to shift the nation’s sympathies from Uvalde to the origins of the racialization strategy: a Black man killed by a White cop. Biden responded with an executive order to further discredit policing when race-driven anti-police reforms are a contributing factor to the increase in mass shootings.
Of all the changes that can influence the drivers of mass shootings, ending the racialization strategy is the easiest and most powerful. American children and adults have no concept of what it means to be American anymore. America is the world’s leading anti-racist nation, but Americans don’t know that. The government and MSM have fashioned America into an irredeemable racist pariah. Instead of a land of opportunity, America is painted more like Russia: a land of shameful oppressors and hopeless victims. The MSM and social media need to drop their slavish bias in support of Democratic strategies and return to journalistic integrity. This embodies American values, and it will be unifying at a time when America and Americans need it more than ever.
A Four Pinocchio lie, in fact, as Glenn Kessler reports this morning. Joe Biden has a very bad habit of exaggerating and confusing details, but this claim goes well beyond that into sheer fantasy. In his op-ed at the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Biden claimed that utility-company executives told him that his economic plan would save American households an average of $500 a year, starting immediately:
“A dozen CEOs of America’s largest utility companies told me earlier this year that my plan would reduce the average family’s annual utility bills by $500 and accelerate our transition from energy produced by autocrats.”
Not only do those numbers not add up, Kessler concludes, Biden’s flat-out lying about the conversation:
But when we located the transcript of Biden’s conversation with utility executives on Feb. 9, we found no reference to $500 in utility savings. The figure was also not mentioned in the White House readout of the meeting.
Biden’s also lying about the numbers. He pulled the $500 figure from a friendly analysis by the Rhodium Group that was prepared in October. That report predicted $500 annual savings in overall energy costs, not just utilities, and not until 2030. Most of that savings came from eliminating gasoline from family budgets as cars would go completely onto the grid. The actual projected utility savings would be, er …
Indeed, the report notes that, if the Biden climate plan were adopted, home electricity bills by 2030 would be between one dollar more and five dollars less than under current policy. That might pay for an extra ice cream cone over the summer.
This is fanciful for other reasons, too. Moving tens of millions of personal vehicles onto the electrical grid would create a vast spike in demand for electricity. We can’t keep up with current demand now, thanks to increasingly restrictive policies on sources for electrical generation. Several states right now are warning about plans for rolling brownouts and blackouts as a means to ration access to limited electricity, including car-happy California. Prices would go through the roof by 2030, as supply won’t match current demand without expanding the fossil fuels used for electrical generation. Expecting the transition to be cost-free to households ignores the large amount of kilowatt hours it will take to keep vehicles charged, too.
But even apart from that, the economic situation has changed since October. Much of the increase in energy costs for households has come with gasoline, but electricity costs are also rising — both in price and rationed access in a price-controlled environment. Energy costs money regardless of how it originates, and gas-powered vehicles at least allow consumers to operate independent of grid shortages.
Kessler drops four Pinocchios on Biden in his conclusion:
[H]e didn’t hear that from utility executives. And the report he is citing is not about household utility-bill savings. Most of the claimed savings comes from the reduced cost of driving. And the estimate is for 2030 — when he would no longer be president, even if he served a second term.
Is there any doubt the president earns Four Pinocchios?
No doubt at all. Four Pinocchios is the minimum allowance for Biden on a daily basis. And if Biden wants to keep the US from being dependent on “autocrats” for our energy needs, then he needs to work to expand exploration, extraction, and refining in the US, rather than doing the opposite over the last 17 months.
‘The FBI is our institution that should not be used as a political tool for anyone; not Republicans, not Democrats, not anyone.’
by MARGOT CLEVELAND
Yesterday, after less than one full day of deliberations, a D.C. jury stacked with pro-Hillary Clinton jurors acquitted former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, proving the FBI is not “ours” but the swamp’s.
Just more than two weeks ago, prosecutor Brittain Shaw began opening statements in United States v. Sussmann, by stating the obvious: “Some people have very strong feelings about politics and about Russia, and many people have strong feelings about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.”
“But we are not here because these allegations involve either of them,” Shaw continued. “Nor are we here because the defendant’s client was the Clinton campaign.” Rather, “we are here because the FBI is our institution that should not be used as a political tool for anyone; not Republicans, not Democrats, not anyone.”
But after hearing overwhelming evidence that Sussmann lied when he told the then-FBI General Counsel James Baker he was providing data and whitepapers about a supposed secret communications channel between Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank on his own behalf, when in fact Sussmann was representing both the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe, the 12 D.C. residents found Sussmann not guilty.
It was not the verdict, however, that confirmed that the FBI belongs to career bureaucrats, high-powered D.C. elites who revolve in and out of the government as political appointees, and the families and friends of all the above. Rather, it was the speed with which the acquittal came, coupled with the in-court testimony and other evidence exposed by the special counsel throughout the prosecution that proved the FBI isn’t America’s anymore.
After hearing from some 20 witnesses, all but a few testifying for the prosecution, the jury spent a couple of hours on Friday deliberating before the long Memorial Day weekend. Tuesday morning, the 12 jurors returned to the D.C. federal courthouse to continue deliberations. But after requesting to see a copy of Sussmann’s taxi receipt and one of the whitepapers Sussmann peddled to Baker, they delivered their verdict of “not guilty.”
In total, then, the jury did not even deliberate for a full day, which means not one of the 12 jurors pushed the other 11 to wade through the detailed evidence presented by the special counsel’s office. Who could blame them, though, if the government’s own witnesses registered more offense at Congress for investigating the Russia collusion hoax than they did at Sussmann for misleading the FBI.
Consider Baker, to whom Sussmann was charged with lying. The former FBI general counsel testified he was “100 percent confident” Sussmann said during their September 19, 2016 meeting that he was not representing a client. Baker also told the jury he likely wouldn’t have taken the meeting if he knew Sussmann represented the Clinton campaign.
Yet Baker blamed himself for throwing Sussmann “into a maelstrom” and expressed outrage at how the congressmen investigating the investigation into Trump and his campaign behaved when they questioned Baker about his meeting with Sussmann. Baker displayed not even a sliver of the same distress over his friend lying to him.
On the contrary, when asked why he had just discovered the text message Sussmann sent him the night before their meeting, in which Sussmann wrote, “I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company. [W]ant to help the Bureau,” Baker told prosecutors: “I’m not out to get Michael. This is not my investigation. This is your investigation. If you ask me a question, I answer it. You asked me to look for something, I go look for it.”
While Baker may no longer work for the FBI, he did at the time Sussmann fed him the Alfa Bank folly. As an American, he should have been appalled that the former Clinton campaign attorney would play the law enforcement and intelligence communities for political purposes. Also, had Baker pulled his cell phone records earlier, the text could have served as a separate false statement charge—one proven in black-and-white—but the delay in Baker finding the text allowed the statute of limitations to expire.
Bill Priestap, the assistant director of the Counterintelligence Division for the FBI in 2016, likewise displayed a grudging demeanor when testifying on behalf of the special counsel. When asked whether it was “important” for Sussmann “to fully disclose his ties to the Clinton campaign,” rather than provide a straightforward answer, Priestap sparred with the prosecutor, first saying it “would have been part of several factors.” Then, when pushed, Priestap said, “I’m struggling on your use of the word ‘important.’ It’s a motivation that is relevant, but not the only factor.”
Prosecutors, however, had ample other evidence that established the materiality of Sussmann’s misrepresentation to Baker. But the jurors didn’t care because the jury, in the truest sense, was a jury of Sussmann’s peers. Just as his actual colleagues, Baker and Priestap, shrugged off the Section 1001 false statement offense, so did the jury, who could easily envision their neighbors and friends sitting in his stead.
But the proof that the FBI is no longer “ours” came even before the jury verdict—months earlier, when Special Counsel John Durham revealed in a discovery update that the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General withheld evidence from Durham’s team.
The DOJ’s OIG is charged with conducting independent investigations related to DOJ employees and programs, including alleged misconduct by FBI agents. In preparing for the Sussmann trial, the special counsel’s office met with the OIG in October 2021 “to discuss discoverable materials that may be in the OIG’s possession.”
Even though the OIG possessed two of Baker’s FBI cellphones, prosecutors were not told of the phones’ existence by the OIG. Rather, the special counsel only learned of the two cellphones on January 6, 2022, when another FBI employee mentioned them.
The same discovery update that revealed the OIG had failed to mention Baker’s cell phones also noted that the OIG had falsely told Durham’s team that “a written forensic report” was the only information it possessed concerning a meeting between Sussmann and the OIG.
That meeting had occurred in early 2017, when Sussmann, on behalf of an unnamed client now known to be Joffe, went to the IG with a report that his client “had observed that a specific OIG employee’s computer was ‘seen publicly’ in ‘Internet traffic’ and was connecting to a Virtual Private Network in a foreign country.” The OIG provided the special counsel with the forensic report, but in doing so, also represented to prosecutors that it had ‘no other file[] or other documentation’ relating to this cyber matter.”
However, after Sussmann’s defense team informed Durham that Sussmann had personally met with the IG, the special counsel’s office circled back and, amazingly, the OIG discovered additional documentation related to Sussmann’s meeting with the IG. That the OIG—the entity charged with investigating FBI misconduct—withheld not one, but two pieces of evidence from the special counsel’s office until cornered should crush any remaining faith our country holds in the FBI.
And there was little trust left after the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on the most ridiculous of pretexts; after text messages revealed Lisa Page and Peter Strzok’s anti-Trump sentiments drove the Crossfire Hurricane team members; after the FBI and DOJ obtained four court surveillance orders based on fraud and then illegally surveilled Carter Page; after fired FBI Director James Comey leaked to the press, via an attorney friend, memos he had written following meetings with then-President Trump, to prompt the appointment of a different special counsel; and after FBI agent William Barnett told investigators that he believed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office used the prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn “to get Trump.”
The special counsel’s prosecution of Sussmann offered an opportunity for the country to see at least a small acknowledgment that the politicization of the FBI would not be tolerated. Instead, Americans witnessed confirmation by former FBI agents, the OIG, and the DC jury that the FBI is theirs, not ours.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
In the wake of the risible Sussman verdict, it has emerged that for the last ten years, the FBI has maintained a “secure work environment” within the offices of Perkins Coie, the Democratic Party’s law firm. Marc Elias, the DNC’s top lawyer, was until recently a partner in Perkins Coie. It was Perkins Coie that laundered the money the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS for what became the fraudulent Steele “dossier.”
And now we learn that not just in 2016, but four years earlier, dating to the middle of the Obama administration, the FBI had some kind of cozy relationship with the Perkins firm. I have never heard of the FBI maintaining a “secure work environment” inside a private law firm, let alone a private law firm that is best known for representing the Democratic Party. We need to know a great deal more about what was going on here. How was the Bureau collaborating with the Perkins firm? Was the Perkins firm a cut-out that concealed what actually was going on, i.e., collaboration between the FBI and the Democratic National Committee or other Democratic entities? The Bureau needs to come clean.
Andy McCarthy says that John Durham’s mistake was prosecuting Michael Sussman as though the FBI was the innocent victim of Sussman’s lies, a dupe, when in fact the FBI was a willing collaborator in the plot against Donald Trump. That case certainly becomes stronger with the revelation that the FBI has had a close, secret, decade-long relationship with the Democratic Party’s law firm. Michael Sussman’s law firm.
Every time you think you have plumbed the depth of Deep State corruption, it turns out there are more layers of corruption still to be revealed.
Clinton’s Plot Came Closer to Succeeding Than January 6 Ever Did
There’s only one rule in D.C. the Justice Department consistently enforces—all laws and norms exist to preserve and extend the Democratic Party’s monopoly over key institutions.
Kevin Clinesmith must feel like an idiot for pleading guilty without a trial after a D.C.-area jury acquitted Clinton co-conspirator Michael Sussman for his role in the plot to frame Donald Trump for colluding with the Russians, supposedly to steal the 2016 election. Sussman’s D.C.-based jury which featured partisan Democrat donors rendered a quick “not-guilty” verdict. While the Left undoubtedly sees the acquittal as another “lawfare” victory against the bad orange man, that victory did not come without cost to its enabling allies.
First, the acquittal further reinforces the impression of a two-tiered justice system in which the politics and privilege of the accused determine the outcome. As Julie Kelly continues to show, the FBI, which played a central role in the plot to frame Trump, is now viewed by a majority of Republicans and a large minority of Democrats as, “the personal gestapo” of Joe Biden. If the FBI frames its political opponents, as it attempted to do with Trump, then it can’t expect potential witnesses and jurors to cooperate with or trust its agents.
Second, we know a little more about the Russia collusion hoax plot and are therefore better-armed against the next dirty trick. That’s something. Special Counsel John Durham did uncover a few new puzzle pieces to the Russia Collusion Hoax. When you fit in the new information with what we already know, one sees the scope of Hillary Clinton’s astonishingly brazen and undemocratic effort to reverse the 2016 election following Election Day. Unlike the January 6 event, which a politicized FBI and Justice Department pursued with partisan zeal, the Clinton plot came much closer to undoing an election.
As we long suspected, Clinton personally authorized a complex operation to frame Trump. The case against Sussman involved a relatively tangential subplot of the hoax—the allegation that Trump had a secret back-channel with a Russian bank. While she initially may have run the scheme to win the 2016 election, the effort quickly pivoted to a serious and nearly-successful attempt to overturn the 2016 election before Trump could assume office.
During the Sussman trial, former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook testified that Clinton’s campaign directly asked Hillary Clinton to approve the dissemination of false accusations that the Trump campaign had a secret channel of communication through the Russian Alfa Bank. Clinton appears to have had the Trump-Russia hoax on her mind during the October 19, 2016 debate in which she directly accused Trump of being a puppet of Russia. Twelve days later, Slatepublished an article with the Alfa Bank story Clinton’s operatives had cooked up.
But much of the juiciest material remained unused on the night Clinton lost to Trump. Although Clinton’s allies and operatives circulated the infamous Steele dossier as part of the Washington, D.C. whisper campaign in November 2016, the public remained unaware of Clinton’s most explosive claims—namely, that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen paid Russian hackers for their election interference and that the Russians possessed video footage of Trump urging prostitutes to urinate on a Moscow hotel bed.
On December 12, 2016, a group of electors, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, wrote the director of national intelligence demanding a briefing on the Russia collusion accusation. The letter clearly indicated the purpose of the briefing, which was to change the votes of electors and deny Donald Trump the White House.
“We intend to discharge our duties as Electors by ensuring that we select a candidate for president who, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, would be ‘endowed with the requisite qualifications,’” they wrote. “Accordingly, to fulfill our role as Electors, we seek an informed and unrestrained opportunity to fulfill our constitutional role leading up to December 19th—that is, the ability to investigate, discuss, and deliberate with our colleagues about whom to vote for in the Electoral College.”
Within the government, Clinton allies sought to append the Steele reporting directly to a national intelligence assessment. In particular, the FBI, a contributing agency, “sought to introduce a summary of the material from . . . Christopher Steele . . .”
Although Clinton kept secret her role in creating the Steele smears, her campaign made no secret of their desire to reverse the election using the Russia hoax. Clinton campaign figure John Podesta said, “The bipartisan electors’ letter raises very grave issues involving our national security . . . Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.”
The plan to use the intelligence community (IC) to swing electors ultimately failed, but just barely. On December 18, just one day before the electors cast their votes, the director of national intelligence declined to provide the requested briefing. The final IC report was not published in time for the December 19 vote of electors and the appendix regarding the Steele dossier was kept from the public.
Nevertheless, Clinton came much closer to overturning the election than the January 6 protesters ever did. Clinton succeeded in capturing the FBI to lobby for the inclusion of her hoax in the official IC assessment. Even without the direct IC briefing to electors, the smear campaign succeeded in turning two Trump electors against their candidate. Had Clinton achieved her goal of getting the IC to directly sponsor the hoax to the electors, more defectors would have certainly followed.
Clinton, it now appears, will get away with it. Although she has now settled a complaint accusing her of illegally using campaign funds to pay for the hoax, the FEC charged her a mere $113,000 fine—a laughable pittance in comparison to the $1 billion raised for her campaign. Thus, one can add the FEC to the long list of politically-corrupt institutions which protected the plotters. There’s only one rule in D.C. the Justice Department consistently enforces—all laws and norms exist to preserve and extend the Democratic Party’s monopoly over key institutions. That’s why the 2016 plotters walk free while the January 6 defendants rot in jail without trial or bail.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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