Hillary’s Last Laugh

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Feb 2018

Two expressions are being tossed around stupidly and recklessly by the media in respect of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.  They are “oppo research” and “corroborated” or “verified.”  Let’s put paid to these terms of Democrat resistance to the Trump presidency.

The important thing to know about opposition research is that the findings are true.  More than true, it is dirt on the candidate that can be demonstrated with video, court documents, or written records.  To illustrate, consider two examples from the career of George W. Bush.

When Bush was running for president in 2000, there was a DUI conviction in his record that, while known, was not widely known well enough outside of Texas to have been discounted in the course of the 2000 campaign.  The Gore campaign released and pushed this conviction into the media on the weekend before the election, and it almost cost Bush his victory.  The DUI conviction was true, and Bush couldn’t truthfully deny it.  Gore almost won on account of good oppo research.

In the 2004 campaign, CBS News anchor Dan Rather was given a document that purported to demonstrate that Bush had essentially skipped out of the last few months of his service with the Texas Air National Guard unit, tending to support the notion that Bush was a “chickenhawk” and nearly approximate to a Vietnam war draft-dodger.  It didn’t take long for the internet to discover that the document had been fabricated because the typestyle of the print was modern and did not match the typestyle then in use in 1974.  When coupled with the fact that the originator of the document had a history of anti-Bush activity, the document was deemed false in the public’s eye, and Dan Rather paid for his mistake with his career and reputation.

Oppo research – the finding of political dirt on the opposing candidate – has the characteristic of being true and readily verifiable in the public domain if you know where to look.

Now let’s turn to the matter of verifiability, and to do that consider the novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  It is a fictionalized account of the battle of Gettysburg, and Shaara did a tremendous job of research in putting the book together.  Shaara incorporated much detail that he had discovered from his historical research in the book.  But the book is not an historical account of the battle, but of a story woven around the battle.  Shaara included characters that did not historically exist, included conversations between characters that we know didn’t happen or couldn’t have happened, recorded conversations between characters that might have happened but for which no historical record exists, and provided thoughts from the minds of characters which are impossible for someone not that person to know.

In short, there is lots of stuff in Shaara’s novel that can be verified from the historical record, but that doesn’t change the fact that his book is a work of fiction.  No amount of verification of the true stuff can make the fictional stuff true.

Thus when were hear and read in the press about this or that element of the now notorious anti-Trump Steele dossier has been “verified” that doesn’t mean that the essential element of the case – that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats – is true or on the road to verification.  Yes, Russia is a country and Carter Page is an American citizen, and certain named Russians in the dossier may be considered oligarchs and might even be friends with Vladimir Putin.  Yes, Carter Page traveled to his old haunt Moscow in July 2016 to deliver a speech to some economic conference.  All or most of this can be verified from public records.

But the aspects of the dossier that say that Page met with oligarchs who are friends with Putin and that they discussed ways in which Trump could help by easing sanctions if Russia used its resources to tilt the election his way, are the writings of fiction.  Of a vivid imagination.  Sure, these things may be plausible if one is so inclined, just as the fictional conversations between characters in Shaara’s novel are plausible; but unless Page comes out and admits his guilt none of this stuff is “verified” in the significant sense of that word.

From the Nunes memo, the Grassley-Graham referral to the Department of Justice that Steele be charged with lying to the FBI, the discovery of the involvement of Sidney Blumenthal and Cory Shearer in the creation of a second dossier, and the admission by former State Department official Johnathan Winer that he passed the Blumenthal dossier to Steele, it becomes clear that the only sources of Russia-Trump collusion documentation were paid to create it by Hillary Clinton!

That ought to give a reasonable person pause.  Steele was not witness to any of the things alleged in his dossier.  His direct source didn’t witness the alleged event either.  What Steele reported as true was hearsay three degrees removed.  Even if Steele reported accurately what he was told, he appears to be set up as a patsy for the conveyance  to the media and to the FBI of Hillary-created fiction about Trump.  And if the material didn’t originate with Hillary, it came from the Kremlin.

No matter how much of the material can be verified, the essential element – that of Trump-Russia collusion – hasn’t been and cannot be – BECAUSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.

The Steele dossier is a work of fiction intended to smear Trump with falsehood and innuendo.  It need hardly be said that the Blumenthal dossier is a work of fiction intended to smear Trump with the same charge.  The public was supposed to be fooled because two supposedly different sources were alleging the same thing, when in fact the fiction all originated with Hillary.  It fooled the FBI because they wanted to believe it.  The leadership of the FBI wanted to run down anything that could bring down Trump – even after he was elected!

We are now in a position to understand that the Steele dossier is a work of fiction, paid for by Hillary, and was intended to smear Trump and prevent his election.  Perversely, the FBI so wanted to believe the dossier that it continued its surveillance of Carter Page in the desperate hope that something would turn up, and it deceived the FISC in order to keep up that surveillance of Page well into Trump’s presidency.

The Mueller investigation began after Comey was fired by Trump for implying one thing in public while saying another in private in respect to Trump’s guilt of collusion with Russia to steal the election from Hillary.  The Mueller investigation has turned up precisely nothing in respect of collusion because none happened, and all Mueller has been able to do is get convictions on process crimes from hapless victims whose memory was not as good as the documentary record.  He has charged Paul Manafort with a crime completely unrelated to Mueller’s mandate.

Now Mueller hopes to entrap Trump in “perjury”, that is another process crime of lying to the FBI because his memory is not as good as the historical record.  If Trump does meet with Mueller, Trump ought to insist that Mueller brief him first on the progress of his investigation.

Mueller’s brief is a counter-intelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation.  As president, Trump is entitled to be briefed on all counter-intelligence work, just as Obama was in September 2016 when Comey briefed him on the progress of the Trump investigation.  Trump ought to demand an accounting from Mueller, not the other way around.

The Steele dossier was a political ruse and dirty trick by Hillary against Trump and against the electorate.  The Mueller investigation is Hillary’s last laugh.

-30-