Like many people, I enjoyed reading the leaked John Podesta e-mails, back during the 2016 campaign. Most of it was nothing, but it offered a window into the smallness of the people who rule over us. These are people who put a lot of effort into telling us they are smart, sophisticated and engaged in important work. In reality, their inner lives are quite boring, because they are dull people, who have weaseled their way into the circus of national politics. Still, it was interesting to see who talks to whom in Washington.
The thing that has never made any sense to me is how the Clinton Crime Syndicate handled the situation. They instructed the press to ignore it, which they happily did, but the stuff was all over social media for weeks. It was like Team Clinton was unaware of the fact that the internet was where most people get their news. At the minimum they could have played the victim card and maybe got some sympathy points. Instead they went with blaming the Ruskies for hacking Podesta’s e-mail, which was obviously false.
It is easy to get confused about this stuff, as there is so much fake news blasted at us every day. The media has worked hard to rewrite the narrative so that the Russian hacking stuff was “discovered” after the election. In fact, Team Clinton started peddling this Russian hacking line in early October 2016. I recall the presser when Jennifer Palmieri appeared to have Tourette’s, as she kept blurting out “Russian hacking” to every question. It was as if she was having some sort of spasm during the presser.
That’s the main reason the event sticks in my mind. It was such a bizarre performance, I suspected the women was on drugs or possibly drunk. It sounded at the time like a ham-handed effort to shift the focus from Clinton’s troubles. Everything about the presser was odd and the claims made little sense at the time. People who had followed the release of the e-mails knew perfectly well it was a case of an old man using a simple password and letting someone get access to it. But, the press went along with it anyway.
The thing about Hillary Clinton and her people, is they lie a certain way. Most people either deny or provide an alternative narrative that is intended to lead the curious down some other path of inquiry, that avoids the truth. A politicians that gets in a jam will deny knowing about the issue or provide some alternative version of events, that shifts the focus onto some other bad actor. The thing with Hillary Clinton is she likes lying in a way that often reveals some unknown caper she and her people are currently plotting.
Reading the excellent site Conservative Treehouse the other day, I spotted a story on the time line of the FBI scandal. The one thing they do well is put all the news stories and known facts into easy to read timelines. Down in the post they have a screen shot of the text messages between some of the plotters who were manufacturing the fake FISA warrant, claiming Trump’s campaign was plotting with the Russians. Look at the dates. The Clinton Russian hacking claims started right in the middle of that timeline.
This explains that bizarre presser in the campaign and the decision to go with what seemed at the time to be a silly strategy. Someone, most likely Loretta Lynch, told Clinton about the wiretapping of Trump Tower and the spying on the Trump campaign, under the false pretext of Russian meddling. Hillary Clinton, being a notorious bungler, could not help herself. She and her flunkies decided to go with Russian hacking as their strategy to deal with the e-mail stuff. It is speculation, but it fits the timeline and the Clinton pattern of lying.
The other piece of this is the phony dossier the Clinton people paid for that was eventually used by the FBI to get the fraudulent warrants. The Nunes memo puts the date for when Christopher Steele shopped this to the FBI as early July, right after Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton in what was supposed to be a clandestine meeting. It was always assumed that Lynch was there to pass intel onto Bill Clinton, but it is entirely possible that the meeting was about Clinton giving Lynch information they could use against Trump.
I thought from the beginning that the Mueller investigation was an effort to conceal the FBI shenanigans from the public and the political class. Comey was proving to be mentally unstable, so Rosenstein engineered his firing and then recommended a special counsel to investigate the entirely farcical Russian hacking story. Mueller would then put the conspirators on his team, and they would hoover up the evidence of their crimes and keep it sequestered. In time, it would be quietly buried and everyone would move along.
What appears to have happened is someone was onto the caper before Trump took office, possibly the IG, and tipped off some members of Congress. The severity of the problem has scared the political class. If this was just one or two crooked FBI agents, leaders of both parties would grandstand on it and the agents would have been fired. With this case, only a few people appear to be willing to speak publicly at all about it. It’s as if no one wants to be within range of this if the facts every become clear.
That would explain Comey’s pointless book and media tour, obliquely pointing the finger at Loretta Lynch. It would also explain longtime Clinton henchman George Stephanopoulos doing his best to make Comey look like an idiot. Of course, Lynch has been out trashing Comey as well. The Clinton machine wants to make sure Comey is the bad guy in all of this and a desperate Comey is trying to paint himself as a tortured saint. All of which means this was a caper run at a higher level than Andrew McCabe.