When Hillary Clinton first accused candidate Donald Trump of being “Putin’s puppet,” she likely never realistically suspected that he would beat her in the election and be the president at a time when the Senate Intelligence Committee investigates her connections to Russia. She and her friends in the DNC also likely never suspected that their underhanded tricks would come back to bite them in their collective hind-parts.
Now, with investigations revealing evidence that it was Clinton and not Trump who was “Putin’s puppet,” the winds have shifted and — as President Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon — “the hoax is turned around, and you look at what’s happened with Russia and the uranium deal and the fake dossier, and it’s all turned around.”
The “fake dossier” to which President Trump referred is the Fusion GPS “dossier” that was circulated amongst Washington insiders for weeks before the election and “leaked” to the media in the wake of Trump’s victory. The “dossier” was rife with misspellings, poor grammar, worse formatting, and so many factual errors that it would cause any reasonable person to doubt the incredible claims it made about Trump’s connections to and control by Moscow.
Now that it is known that the document was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign, the document’s circulation and its subsequent leak and publication make perfect sense. As President Trump said Wednesday, “The whole Russia thing … this was the Democrats coming up with an excuse for losing the election.” He went on to say, “They lost it and they lost it very badly. And they didn’t know what to say, so they made up the whole Russia hoax.”
Democrats tend to lean on the rule: “If you can’t beat them, deligitimize them.” In this case, though, the missiles fired by Clinton and the DNC have circled back and found their true targets. In an effort to use the spectre of Russian collusion as a weapon against Trump, they appear to have unwittingly revealed actual Russian collusion in their own camp.
And Trump isn’t missing the opportunity to call Clinton out for her lies. “Hillary Clinton always denied” being behind the dossier, he told reporters Wednesday, adding “The Democrats always denied it, and now, only because it is going to come out in a court case, they said yes they did it. They admitted it and they are embarrassed by it. I think it is a disgrace.”
As The New American reported Thursday, Marc Elias, a Clinton campaign lawyer with the law firm Perkins Coie, brokered a deal between the Clinton camp, the Democratic National Committee, and Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on Trump when he began to close the gap on Clinton in the election. The “dossier” was the result of that opposition “research.”
For its part, the DNC is playing a rousing game of duck and dodge while still trying to play the Trump/Russia collusion angle. DNC Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa released a statement saying in part:
Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization. But let’s be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened.
Of course, claiming that the “new leadership of the DNC were not involved” is not the same as claiming that the prior DNC leadership was not involved. But that aside, Maybe Xochitl Hinojosa didn’t get the memo: The “dossier” is fake; there does not appear to any “ties to Russia” where the Trump campaign is concerned. And now the Clinton campaign and the DNC are under investigation as well.
Perhaps the director of DNC communications should consider never again using the words “Russia” and “investigation” in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence. After all, Senate intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told CNN Wednesday that the “revelation” that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for the dossier changes the direction of the investigation into Russian collusion. “This provides us the ability to connect some dots that we couldn’t do before this, Burr said, adding, “And any investigation when you have a revelation this big, it begins to clarify some pictures that you were already trying to understand.” He went on to say that this new information “will require us to dig a lot deeper in some areas that maybe a week ago we weren’t planning to.”
And while the current DNC regime claims that “the new leadership” was not aware and was not involved, the old regime is offering the same denials. A spokesman for Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) — who led the DNC until falling on her own sword for Clinton in the wake of WikiLeaks’ release of a trove of DNC e-mails showing that the DNC had fixed the primaries for Clinton — told Fox News on Wednesday that Wasserman Schultz “did not have any knowledge of this arrangement.”
And CNN reported that “Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz both privately denied to congressional Russia investigators that they had any knowledge about an arrangement to pay for opposition research on President Donald Trump.”
Now that it is known that the Clinton campaign and the DNC financed the research, Podesta, Wasserman Schultz, and others will probably have to answer a few more questions. Some of those questions will likely deal with their previous denials, since it is a crime to make false statements in a congressional investigation.
The stakes are especially high for Podesta, since CNN reports that when he denied any knowledge of the Clinton campaign’s involvement in a September interview with investigators, the lawyer he had sitting beside him was none other than Marc Elias, who acted as the intermediary in brokering the deal between the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Fusion GPS.
Since Elias’ firm, Perkins Coie, admitted that it had retained Fusion GPS on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC at a time when the campaign was led by Podesta and the DNC was led by Wasserman Schultz, their denials ring more than a little hollow. And Clinton, who got the ball rolling with her “Putin’s puppet” remark, is about as believable as her accomplices.
With at least two new congressional probes looking into Clinton’s involvement in the Russian UraniumOne deal (which transferred control of between 20 and 25 percent of U.S. uranium to Russian interests) and the way she was protected by ousted FBI Director James Comey during his supposed investigation into her e-mail scandal, and with the Senate Intelligence Committee shfiting its focus to look into her campaign illegally hiding its funding of the fake “dossier,” the future does not bode well for Clinton or the DNC.
Images of Hillary Clinton and Putin: UN photos
