Washington is such a stinking cesspool of filth, no one even notices that John "Deputy Dog" Mueller is the skunk at the picnic.
Well over a year after the FBI began investigating ācollusionā between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major indictment.
Trump campaign manager
Paul Manafort has been
charged with a series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President Donald Trump or 2016.
With a
leak to CNN that indictments were coming, Muellerās office
stole the weekend headlines. This blanketed the explosive news on a separate front, as the dots began to be connected on a bipartisan plot to
bring down Trump that began two years ago.
And like ā
Murder on the Orient Express,ā it seems almost
everyone on the train had a hand in the
plot.
The narrative begins in October 2015.
Then it was that the
Washington Free Beacon, a
neocon website, engaged a firm of researchers called Fusion GPS to do deep dirt-diving into Trumpās personal and professional lifeāand take him out.
A spinoff of Bill Kristolās
The Weekly Standard, the Beacon is run by his son-in-law. And its Daddy Warbucks is the GOP
oligarch and hedge fund billionaire
Paul Singer.
From October 2015 to May 2016, Fusion GPS dug up dirt for the neocons and never-Trumpers. By May, however, Trump had routed all rivals and was the certain Republican nominee.
So the
Beacon bailed, and Fusion GPS found two new cash cows to finance its dirt-divingāthe DNC and the Clinton campaign.
To keep the sordid business at armās length, both engaged the partyās law firm of Perkins Coie. Paid $12.4 million by the DNC and Clinton campaign, Perkins used part of this cash hoard to pay Fusion GPS.
Here is where it begins to get interesting.
In June 2016, Fusion GPS engaged a British spy, Christopher Steele, who had headed up the Russia desk at MI6, to ferret out any connections between Trump and Russia.
Steele began contacting old acquaintances in the FSB, the Russian intelligence service. And the Russians began to feed him astonishing dirt on Trump that could, if substantiated, kill his candidacy.
Among the allegations was that Trump had consorted with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, that the Kremlin was blackmailing him, that there was provable collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In memos from June to October 2016, Steele passed this on to Fusion GPS, which passed it on to major U.S. newspapers. But as the press was unable to verify it, they declined to publish it.
Steeleās final product, a 35-page dossier, has been described as full of āunsubstantiated and salacious allegations.ā
Steeleās research, however, had also made its way to
James Comeyās FBI, which was apparently so taken with it that the bureau considered paying Steele to continue his work.
About this āastonishingā development, columnist Byron York of the
Washington Examiner quotes Sen. Chuck Grassley:
āThe idea that the FBI and associates of the Clinton campaign would pay Mr. Steele to investigate the Republican nominee for president in the run-up to the election raises ⦠questions about the FBIās independence from politics, as well as the Obama administrationās use of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for political ends.ā
The questions begin to pile up.
- What was the FBIās relationship with the British spy who was so wired into Russian intelligence?
- Did the FBI use the information Steele dug up to expand its own investigation of Russia-Trump ācollusionā? Did the FBI pass what Steele unearthed to the White House and the National Security Council?
- Did the Obama administration use the information from the Steele dossier to justify unmasking the names of Trump officials that had been picked up on legitimate electronic intercepts?
In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Clinton campaign chair
John Podesta and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz
claimed they did not know that
Perkins Coie had enlisted Fusion GPA or the British spy to dig up dirt on Trump.
Yet, when Podesta testified, the lawyer sitting beside him in the committee room was
Marc Elias of Perkins Coie, who had engaged Fusion GPS and received the fruits of Steeleās undercover work.
Here one is tempted to cite Bismarck that, if you wish to enjoy politics or sausages, you should not inquire too closely how they are made.
Thus we have
Free Beacon neocons, never-Trump Republicans, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, a British spy and comrades in Russian intelligence, and perhaps the FBI, all working with secret money and seedy individuals to destroy a candidate they could not defeat in a free election.
If future revelations demonstrate that this is what went down, it is not only the White House that has major problems.
If you wish to know why Americans detest politics and hate the āswampā that has been made of their capital city, follow this story all the way to its inevitable end. It will be months of unfolding.
The real indictment here is of the American political system, and the true tragedy is the decline of the Old Republic.
Patrick J. Buchanan: That Other PlotāTo Bring Down Trump | VDARE - premier news outlet for patriotic immigration reform.
Any American who supports the Mueller campaign is either so god damned stupid they shouldn't be allowed to vote, or they are a flat out traitor to the old America.
My barber today said something about the "special prosecutor" and I asked him what made a prosecutor "special". Did he have a special set of laws to follow?
No, came the reply. He's special because he only investigates this one case.
But these indictments have nothing to do with what the investigation originally was looking at, I said.
Oh, says he, and anything connected to it.
Because it's connected to Russia, he said. (One despairs.)
I'll tell you what's special about a special prosecutor, I said. A special prosecutor is political, not judicial. His goal isn't justice. It's a political goal. It is the very Bolshevikian commandeering of the justice system for political aims, and when the law becomes the agent for a political faction, the law is tyranny's executioner.
One of the other barbers actually said, God, you are right. (Despair remains, nonetheless).