RUTHFULLY YOURS

Have you been thinking lately that the more we learn about the Obama administration’s Russia hoax, the less sense it makes? For years now, the working hypothesis of conservative pundits has been that the narrative of Trump campaign collusion with Russia was a Deep State plot from the likes of Brennan/Comey/McCabe/Strzok to weaken and potentially remove Trump from office — a “soft coup,” if you will. That hypothesis was always hard to understand — why would such high ranking officials take big risks with such a transparently ridiculous narrative with little chance of succeeding? — and in my view has become even less consistent with what we know as more facts have recently come out.

So what was the Russia hoax really about? Here’s my alternative hypothesis. Its origin was entirely about giving Hillary an illicit assist in winning the 2016 election. Plenty of Democrat-partisan operatives in the intelligence community would be only too happy to use the government’s surveillance infrastructure to spy on the Trump campaign. As these operatives learned what Trump was up to, that information could be passed along to the Hillary campaign for strategic advantage. But the operatives needed a patina of legal authorization to point to in the off chance that the wrong side won, or there was a leak, and the spying got discovered. For that, the Hillary campaign and DNC ginned up the Trump/Russia dossier, to be used to open FBI investigations and/or get FISA warrants to authorize listening in on any member of the Trump campaign who had ever traveled to Russia or talked to a Russian, or maybe had used Russian dressing on a salad.

Note that my hypothesis implies something that we have as yet learned nothing about, namely: Somewhere, prior to the election, the fruits of the surveillance would have been systematically passed from the FBI, via some channels, on to the Clinton campaign. Likely these communications took place at the very highest levels. I would strongly suspect that Obama and Clinton were personally involved to at least some degree, although that was most likely not the exclusive channel of communication. Possibly the participants in these communications were careful enough to have made no written message, although that is quite difficult to accomplish in our current world. Even if all these communications took place by oral telephone calls between Obama and Clinton, I would suspect that the government has recordings of the calls somewhere in its vast intelligence archives. Anyway, if I were Barr and Durham, this is certainly what I would be looking for.

My hypothesis is consistent both with what we know about human nature, and also with the facts that have recently (and less recently) been revealed:

• In the early days when the Russia hoax had completely taken over the news cycle for weeks on end (February to April 2017) I had a series of posts (here, here and here) discussing what I called the “weird obsession” of the media with Russia. The third of those posts, dated April 7, 2017, had the title “Reasonable Inferences About The Weird Obsession With Russia.” It pointed out that incumbent politicians trying to maintain power for themselves or their faction had a powerful and nearly irresistible incentive to use the machinery of the government in the effort to beat the adversary: “Very few human beings, and maybe none, given political power and control of the apparatus of government, can resist the temptation to misuse the powers of the state to advance themselves and disadvantage their opponents politically.  When the government’s powers can be used in secret, the temptation becomes close to irresistible.” That post discussed the massive and systematic use by Lyndon Johnson of the FBI and CIA to spy on the Goldwater campaign, and also the attempted use by Richard Nixon of the IRS to go after his enemies. The Watergate burglary represented another instance of the same incentives, although the machinery of government surveillance was not involved. Anyway, do Obama, Brennan, Comey, et al., strike you as people with the kind of strong personal integrity to resist these powerful incentives? I didn’t think so.

• Clearly Obama and his people were well aware of the Watergate debacle, and were not going to make the obvious mistake of spying on the opposition campaign without a well-prepared cover story. The guy who came up with the idea of “Russian collusion” and FISA warrants as the cover story probably had them all rolling on the floor of the Oval Office with laughter when the idea was first floated. But with the imprimatur of the FISA court, how could anyone later make a claim of criminality stick?

• When the unthinkable happened and Trump got elected, it then quickly became important to be sure that tracks were carefully covered, and inherent flaws in the cover story didn’t get it promptly blown up. Look at the Justice Department May 7 memo moving to dismiss the Flynn case, and everything starts to make sense. OMG, on January 5, 2017 the FBI was about to close the Flynn branch of the Russia investigation, and in a few days Flynn would be waltzing in as Trump’s National Security Advisor! Flynn could quickly blow the whole thing sky high. No problem — within 24 hours, Strzok had maneuvered to keep Flynn’s case open on the preposterous ground of the Logan Act, and a couple of weeks later Flynn got ambushed with a perjury trap interview that took him out.

• But wouldn’t Comey, or someone else, have to give the incoming President a briefing on the whole “Russia” investigation? Or could that one somehow be finessed? That subject called for bringing in the big guns — the meeting that we now know occurred on the same January 5 in the Oval Office. Attendees included essentially all the top participants in the Russia hoax — Obama himself, Biden, Brennan, Comey, Deputy AG Sally Yates, DNI James Clapper, and Susan Rice. This is the meeting that Rice supposedly memorialized in a bizarre email to herself on her last day in office, January 20, in which she recorded that Obama counseled to do everything “by the book.” It is highly likely that the real advice from Obama was to dissemble and not tell the incoming President about the scope of the investigation. It was the next day, January 6, that Comey briefed Trump on the “pee tape” assertions of the Steele Dossier, but omitted most everything important about what the FBI was up to on “Russia.”

Coup? Clearly, some of these grifters tried to run with that idea when the whole Russia story got far more traction than anyone could have reasonably anticipated at the outset. But when the whole thing first got going back in about July 2016, that could not have been the idea. The far more likely scenario is that it was just a preposterous cover story for the usual spying on the opposition campaign.