What collusion?

 

Well, here we are more than a full year away from the first claims that Russia hacked our election, and seven months into a very expensive excursion by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and what do we have to show for it?  Did I hear you say 'bupkis'?  Why, yes, I believe that's what several million dollars (your dollars to be precise) spent on top-notch Washington lawyers has gotten us.  Wait.  What?

As time marches on and no indictable offenses are forthcoming, it becomes more and more likely that there were no indictable offenses — at least in the direction Bob Mueller is looking.  If Bob Mueller (or his replacement or successor) looks through the other end of the telescope, however, the view changes dramatically.  The Obama administration's FBI and DoJ obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to spy on high-ranking members of the Trump campaign — before and after the election — based on the now-discredited 'Trump dossier'.  That document was produced by a company known as Fusion GPS, a well-known scandal-for-hire research (!) firm.  Fusion GPS was hired to dig up (or manufacture) dirt on the Trump campaign  by lawyers contracted to the DNC.  Wait.  What?  We now know that the Clinton Presidental Campaign was in de facto control of the DNC at the time, according to claims made by Donna Brazile who took over leadership of the DNC from Debbie Wassermam-Schultz after the latter's ignominious fall from grace.  In other words, the Clinton Campaign, through their hand-puppet DNC, hired lawyers to find someone to get dirt on Trump (and in the process provide plausible deniability), then fed the result to FBI and DoJ, which proceeded to (a) leak the dossier to friendly news outlets, and (b) go to the FISA court to get warrants authorizing spying on the Trump campaign.  Loretta Lynch, as AG, had to sign the applications for warrants before they could be presented.  Perhaps she didn't brief her boss, Barack Obama, on what was going on?  Maybe she briefed Bill Clinton during the 'tarmac meeting' in San Diego?

Now we have Andrew McCabe, a very high ranking employee of the DoJ, unable to recall exactly when he discovered the Trump dossier was a fabrication.  How odd.  Were I McCabe, I would have scheduled an emergency staff meeting that same day and there would be some record of the meeting notice going out in the DoJ's very professionally done email-handler and meeting-arranger system.  I would have scheduled that meeting to discover the 'root cause' of that dossier (Clinton), and to begin investigating whether the act of providing what the DNC almost had to know was bogus information to the FBI/DoJ for the purpose of undermining the Trump campaign rose to the level of a criminal offense.  If it were criminal for the Russians to do it, wouldn't it be criminal for anyone to do it?

But I'm not McCabe, and that may explain why I'm finding this all a little too hard to swallow.  After all, the original judgement of 'gross negligence' in Clinton's handling of emails (a criminal offense) was changed by a long-term Hillary-supporter on McCabe's staff to 'extreme carelessness' (a naughty-naughty) and subsequently used by Comey to explain why she was not being indicted.

How very, very odd.