Hannity, Jones, Stone, Assange, R.I.P. Ailes, Bannon,
and the Center Attraction
Basic subject: Conspiracy spreading like wildfire
“The ongoing effort to distract from Trump’s
corruption and lawlessness by Republicans and right-wing media joining his
calls to denounce the FBI claiming that the Russia investigation was a coup
against him.”
Some facts to dispute that line of
sick illogical hype:
That claim makes little sense on its face. The
investigation that FBI launched of Russian interference in the 2016 election (which
turned into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation overall), could not
have been a “coup” because Trump wasn’t even president when it was started.
Ignoring
that fact (the only way it would result in Trump being removed from office is
through the application of Congress’s impeachment powers) more so shows a real coup
not an orderly transition of power in our democratic system (which would, in
any event, leave in place Trump’s hand-picked vice president).
The idea
that the FBI and intelligence community were plotting a coup against Trump,
based loosely on some angry texts and a lot of distorted and baseless claims,
has taken hold on the right. It is not likely to dissipate any time soon.
With that in mind, consider the following facts, all
of which rest on uncontroversial evidence, that decisively show that the idea
that the FBI was working to block Trump’s presidency is nonsense:
1. The FBI then led by Director James Comey threw
the election to Trump: The most obvious reason to infer that there wasn’t
an FBI conspiracy to undermine Trump’s chances at getting elected is that and it
did the exact opposite. Instead of torpedoing Trump’s chances, it damaged Clinton’s
shot at the presidency. Since it was
announced less than two weeks before the election that Comey and the FBI was
reopening the investigation into her emails.
Impact: Trump thought that news helped him at the time
because he celebrated it and touted the re-opening of the email probe. Then when
Trump later fired Comey, he used the mistreatment of Clinton as
a justification for the termination. Not only did Trump admit that
Comey’s actions helped him win, but admitting the actions were wrong.
(Note: FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver,
analyzing the polling, concluded that Comey’s decision
indeed likely cost Clinton the election.)
It’s a startling state of affairs that the GOP can
base an entire conspiracy theory — which often focuses on Comey as a key enemy
of Trump — that flies in the face of one of the most significant historical
events in recent memory.
2. The FBI was not specifically investigating
Trump until he fired Comey: Even if Comey tanked Clinton’s chances, at
least some members of the FBI were plotting against Trump. Citing a cryptic
text message between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the conspiracists
sometimes argue that the investigation of Trump was an “insurance policy against the chance he would became president.” Perhaps they
assumed Clinton would win as most people did, but they wanted to keep the
investigation open to use as a weapon against Trump if he turned the tables.
But then there’s another unfortunate
fact for this theory:
As Trump had once boasted, there was, in fact, no FBI investigation of him
specifically during the 2016 campaign.
The FBI was investigating certain members of Trump’s
team — several of whom have since gone to prison — but not Trump himself. Trump
wasn’t put under investigation until months later after he fired Comey.
3. There appeared to be damaging leaks out of
the FBI — about Clinton: There’s also
the fact that, based on comments made by the person who would become Trump’s personal
lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, the FBI seemed to be leaking damaging suggestions
about Hillary Clinton.
The Washington Post
reported at the time:
Rudy Giuliani told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum on October 26 that Donald Trump
had “a surprise or two that you’re going
to hear about in the next two days,” and
he quickly added: “I’m talking about
some pretty big surprise.”
Two days
later, FBI Director James Comey revealed to Congress that his agents had
resumed their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server
while she was secretary of state, after agents in an unrelated case discovered
emails that could potentially be relevant to the server case.
Key Note: Those comments, which Giuliani later
clumsily walked back, later triggered a leak investigation.
Comey later told the House
Intelligence Committee:
“I was concerned that there appeared to be in
the media a number of stories that might have been based on communications
reporters or non-reporters like Rudy Giuliani were having with people in the
New York field office. In particular, in I want to say mid-October, maybe a little
bit later, Mr. Giuliani was making statements that appeared to be based on his
knowledge of workings inside the FBI New York. And then my recollection is there
were other stories that were in the same ballpark that gave me a general
concern that we may have a leak problem — unauthorized disclosure problem out
of New York, and so I asked that it be investigated.”
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch
told the DOJ inspector general:
“Comey said to me that it had become clear to
him (he didn’t say over the course of what investigation or whatever)
that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and
visceral hatred of Clinton that is deep and surprising or stunning to him.”
4. The investigation of Trump’s campaign was
largely secret: Despite urging from lawmakers, Comey kept the investigation
of Trump’s campaign secret during the 2016 campaign. Some of the details about
the investigation leaked at the time, but they were also heavily spun in
Trump’s favor, with the New
York Times printing the notorious headline on October 31, 2016: “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No
Clear Link to Russia.”
The second paragraph said:
“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. And even the hacking into Democratic emails,
FBI and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the
presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.”
It’s clear
from that story that, though the reporters had stumbled on something very real,
at least some portion of its FBI sources were trying to tamp down and
discourage the reporting. The report does not at all suggest that FBI agents
were trying to conduct a hit job on Trump through anonymous leaks.
It claimed
multiple times that the FBI believed Russia’s efforts to interfere in the
election were not designed to help Trump, though the bureau would later
conclude that, in fact, that was part of the intention.
5. At the same time that the FBI was
investigating the Steele Dossier, it used OPPO research to pursue another
investigation of Clinton: One of the biggest gripes Republicans have about
the Russia investigation was its supposed reliance on the infamous Steele
Dossier, a collection of raw intelligence documents.
Those
documents (not classified) came from
a former British MI6 intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, who made a range
of inflammatory and lurid claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. Because this was
funded as opposition research against Trump, the GOP argues that its use by the
FBI was illegitimate.
However, the extent of its use by the FBI in the probe
is still unknown, and the even the House Intelligence Committee, at a
time when it was run by Republicans, admitted that the investigation had
already begun before the bureau received the dossier.
However,
during the same period of this investigation, the Clinton Foundation became the
subject of an FBI inquiry that was spurred largely, it seemed, by a book called
Clinton Cash. That book was itself
a long-form version of opposition research, designed by opponents of Hillary
Clinton to hurt her electoral chances and now is mostly discredited, too.
The idea
that referring OPPO research against Trump in any way was somehow a major
partisan breach, while the same thing happened to Clinton, strains all credulity
My 2 cents: Not much to add except to say the Clinton
bashing, then Comey firing, and then efforts (via McGahn from Trump) to stop Mueller all point clearly in my mind
and apparently in the Mueller
Report of blatant obstruction of justice – both real
and attempted and headed up by Trump, or many on his behalf.
Also this latest from Trump: FBI
committed treason also bogus.
Thanks for stopping by.
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