Hillary forgets her own stint as Russian propagandist
Appearing on the Rachel Maddow MSNBC show on Monday, and counting on the ignorance of her audience, Hillary Clinton managed to shove the guts of her 2016 campaign down the proverbial memory hole.
Clinton had chosen to revive the claims that the Russians were once again “engaged in direct election interference,” presumably to boost the chances of Donald Trump in November 2024.
Clinton argued that Americans who are “engaged in this kind of propaganda” should “be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.”
What Clinton seems to forget is her campaign’s recruitment of Russian agents in 2016 to discredit and very nearly derail the campaign of Donald Trump. The media have helped mightily in inducing this convenient amnesia.
In the way of background, BuzzFeed first published in January 2017 what became known as the Steele dossier, the foundational document of the Russia collusion hoax.
BuzzFeed claimed to publish the dossier “so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.”
As spelled out in its subhead, the dossier purports to detail “Republican candidate Donald Trump’s activities in Russia and compromising relationship with the Kremlin.”
This subhead hints at a pattern obvious throughout the document, namely that it appears to be written by a non-native English speaker. Evidence, in fact, strongly suggests it was written by a Russian.
More problematic is that the dossier introduced the narrative that would bolster the FISA applications and shape media coverage for the next three years: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years.”
The day after the dossier’s publication, the New York Times reported as gospel that Russia “intervene[d] on Trump’s behalf with hacks of Democratic operatives’ computers” – a gospel they would spend the next two years preaching.
Initially, at least, the media could claim ignorance. When British agent Christopher Steele started trotting his seamy material around Washington in July 2016, its provenance was still unknown.
During the 2016 campaign, inconvenient facts such as the funding of the dossier or its authorship had to drop-kick MSM journalists in the teeth before they noticed, let alone investigated.
Incredibly, it was not until October 2017 that the Washington Post finally reported what Devin Nunes and his House committee had discovered, namely that the DNC and the Clinton campaign commissioned the Steele dossier.
Bitter about being scooped, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted on the day the Post broke the story, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
Haberman was referring to the cutout on this scam, Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias. With the blessing of Hillary Clinton and the DNC, Elias pulled off the most comprehensive dirty trick in the history of American politics.
For Democrats, success absolves all sins. For Elias’ black magic, they tasked him with managing their legal apparatus in advance of the 2020 presidential election.
A year after the 2020 election, Russian analyst Igor Danchenko was arrested for lying to the FBI. Danchenko, the FBI revealed, was the principal source for Steele’s allegations about Donald Trump.
So Hillary Clinton was right after all. Russians were “engaged in direct election interference” in 2016 specifically to sabotage Donald Trump’s campaign. She seems to have forgotten, however, that she hired them.
If Clinton believes that Americans who are “engaged in this kind of propaganda” should “be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged,” she should head down to the local FBI office and turn herself in.
Admittedly, Hillary’s proven collusion with the Russians took place some years ago, but the crime of treason has no statute of limitations.
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is now available in all formats.