The Patriot Post® · Perils of Fooling the Mother Nature Media

The Washington Post of all folks breaks a story that the infamous “Trump Dossier” — don’t you just love the word “dossier”? Makes the sordid document sound so chic and legit — was funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC. If you are wondering, like me, why the Post would do such a thing to its favorite pols, search no further than my pet theory about Democrats and the media. The media will cover for the Democrats and do their bidding right up to the time when they are made to look silly, and then they will turn. Big time.

It seems that for the last year or so Team Hillary has been lying repeatedly to the likes of the Post, New York Times and all the other usual suspects about its involvement in funding the dossier, and the Post got ticked. It gets worse when you factor in that Team Hillary spent months bad-mouthing the media before the election for not running the dossier story. Apparently, the fact that the media couldn’t verify anything in it wasn’t enough of an excuse. Remember, it was only after the election when BuzzFeed published the dossier — along with the utterly ridiculous statement that it couldn’t verify the contents either, but the charges were serious enough that the American people should be allowed to make their own judgments — that the mainstream media had cover to run the story as “commentary” on what BuzzFeed did.

The Times is also now on board, but there are holdouts like CNN that are still hedging. They are using phrases like “The dossier was partially funded by Team Hillary,” claiming that the GOP got the ball rolling by bankrolling Fusion GPS to do opposition research early in the primary, when they know full well that the guy who was hired by Fusion GPS to put the dossier together came into the picture after Hillary and the DNC started picking up the tab. They also dusted off the ridiculous claim that Trump was colluding with the Russians when he made the sarcastic comment that he hoped Russia might be able to find the 30,0000 missing Hillary emails. And for good measure, they are citing that a Trump associate tried unsuccessfully to get WikiLeaks to give them the Hillary/DNC emails that WikiLeaks supposedly obtained from the Russians, which supposedly proves that while Trump may not actually have colluded with Russia, he certainly “wanted to.” The Democrat pols are no better, characterizing Trump’s son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who offered dirt on Hillary as treason even though nothing happened while calling the dossier debacle “opposition research.”

The way Team Hillary executed this gem was to use its lawyers as cutouts. It paid the lawyers for “legal advice” and the lawyers then used the money to hire folks to do opposition research on Trump, including several Russians with ties to Moscow. This puts an attorney-client privilege wall up and theoretically gives Hillary deniability if the stuff ever hits the fan. It also put the hired gun under a non-disclosure agreement, so when questioned, the Fusion GPS folks took the Fifth. But a lawsuit that obtained access to the Fusion GPS bank records revealed the real payment source, and it was game on. Technically, Team Hillary may also have violated campaign laws by making filings that mischaracterized the nature of the legal fees, but that’s minor when compared to the embarrassment that comes with initiating/spreading a Trump/Russia collusion narrative that has no basis in fact as cover for the biggest loss in U.S. political history, all while Hillary funds were used to “collude” with Russian sources for the “dossier” through Fusion GPS and its favorite former Brit spy.

It seems to me though that as a purely legal matter, the Hillary quest for opposition research, while convoluted, probably wasn’t criminal. It may lose Hillary the cover of the mainstream media, but lying to the press doesn’t cross the legal line either. Both pale in comparison to the pay-to-play bribery activities of the Clinton Foundation in the Uranium One deal and other matters and is a rounding error next to the Hillary email scandal. But it sure makes life difficult for everyone involved. Even the top Hillary spokesman who usually takes “the best defense is a strong offense” approach, shielding the boss from everything, said he was “not sure” if Hillary was aware of the payments; and the current DNC leadership is running for the hills. Uh oh!

The real issue lies elsewhere, in the FBI and intel communities. Anyone with a spy merit badge from the Boy Scouts should have been able to figure out that the info in the dossier was bogus, and yet the FBI apparently wanted to continue funding the Fusion GPS opposition research after the Democrats stopped paying. I guess its staff was stretched too thin. And the Director of National Intelligence credited the dossier as a key source in convincing him to launch his own Trump investigation. Comey doesn’t look too good here either. In what is either an amateur hour waste of time or a cleverly designed ploy to give the media an excuse to cover the dossier matter, Comey requested a meeting with Trump to “alert” him that the dossier was the kind of stuff floating around that he might have to deal with. That gave the media an avenue to legitimately write about the dossier and keep the issue front and center. After all, it was important enough to be the subject of an FBI briefing for the president.

The dossier is also suspected of being the basis for sufficient suspicion to warrant unmasking requests from folks like Susan Rice and could possibly have been cited as fodder for other FISA Court rulings. If so, talk about circular! Team Hillary invents the Russian collusion idea as an excuse for losing, then hires a firm through a cutout to get bogus input from “Russians” supposedly confirming the accusations. The info lands at the FBI and Intel in boxes and is used to justify supposedly legitimate government intrusions into the Trump administration. Ultimately, it also plays a big role in the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Trump/Russia collusion, but could actually be simply a masked opposition research effort on All Things Trump for the 2020 Democrat campaign. And all the while, no one bothers to check if the info is legit in the first place.

As in the Uranium One and Hillary email matters, there isn’t a lot of history of aggressive investigation into things associated with the Clintons, and that usually comes gift-wrapped with media cover. But we may have the perfect storm brewing — a set of Hillary/Obama/Democrat scandals too big to ignore; zero evidence of anything related to Trump/Russia collusion; and a ticked off media. It’s not nice to fool the mother nature media. This could get interesting.