Despite the fabrication of an elaborate hoax, the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign was unable to influence the election outcome, and so the now-debunked story of a conspiracy between former President Donald Trump and the Russians became one of the leading excuses for why Clinton failed in her bid to become the 45th president. The “collusion” lies steadily unraveled, and links between them and Clinton’s team have emerged – vindication for Trump and his supporters, though a lot of Americans will not learn the full extent of the subterfuge because the legacy media will never admit they were a part of it.
Now that the grand illusion has been shattered, who will answer for it? The senior elected and unelected officials and the lawyers who concocted the myth? That is unlikely, since there is too often a chasm between what is unethical and dishonest and what is illegal – particularly for anyone who is a member or a favorite of the political establishment.
Yet, since Democratic Party politicians and their media groupies so often decry “threats” to “democracy,” they should perhaps concede that the collusion hoax, by virtue of being one of the most orchestrated efforts in American history to subvert a U.S. presidential election, was indeed a threat to democracy.
Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey and his number two, Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence officer Peter Strzok, former British agent Christopher Steele, along with many others, should all, arguably, be held to account. They will not. Instead, the bit players are going down: former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, former Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann, and now Igor Danchenko, who was Steele’s primary source for many of the allegations against Trump contained in a collection of memos that became known as “the Steele dossier.”
That the whole conspiracy theory has Deep State fingerprints all over it is further demonstrated by the fact that one individual referred to in Sussmann’s indictment is now alleged to be none other than Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security advisor.
Despite claims to the contrary, nothing contained in the dossier was ever corroborated and certain salacious rumors were debunked. Even Steele distanced himself from some of the claims, as did at least one of his sources, who admitted to the FBI that these rumors about Trump were nothing more than that and no actual proof or witnesses existed to verify them.
Danchenko, who has been indicted for making false statements to the FBI, is a Russian national, so it certainly seems there was collusion between Russians and one of the 2016 presidential contenders – it just turned out not to be the candidate many expected.
Adam Schiff
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Then there is Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who once went as far as claiming he had seen evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had conspired with Russian officials to steal the 2016 election. To this day, Schiff has not revealed that evidence, and no one in the establishment media ever pressed him to produce it. That, in itself, is odd; one would have thought every Trump-hating journalist in the country would have been frantic to see and report on this evidence. Instead, they were happy to give Schiff a platform without requiring him to elaborate on his allegations.
Remarkably, Schiff is still trying to raise money off unfounded claims about Russian collusion – and perhaps, for him, raising money was really what it was all about. In a recent fundraising email paid for and authorized by Schiff for Congress, the California Democrat describes seeing “Russian tradecraft that targets Americans who are greedy and prone to extramarital affairs employed when an unscrupulous New York businessman became president of the United States.”
This is who Mr. Schiff is – speaking of unscrupulous. The congressman is still raising money off the back of the Russia collusion hoax even as some of the people responsible for creating it are facing indictment.
Still, the full unwinding of this dreadful and shameful matter will go largely unreported. In the end, a very great number of Americans will never be aware the political establishment, with cooperation from the so-called “mainstream” media, forced a fabricated conspiracy down their throats in an attempt to change the course of a presidential election – and also to destroy an outsider they hated for daring to enter their domain. If that is not a threat to democracy, then nothing is.
~ Read more from Graham J. Noble.
