Monday, September 08, 2025

Russia! Russia! Forever: An Anatomy of a Left-wing Obsession


From Victor Davis Hanson on AM Greatness.com (Feb. 26, 2024):

Collusion about Collusion

The more candidate Trump in 2016 trolled the Clinton campaign (e.g., “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press”), the more the irate left bought into hysterical conspiracy theories.

Finally, the left became completely unhinged after the 2016 victory. An Obama-era Pentagon lawyer published an essay exploring the chance for a military coup. Retired lieutenant colonels called for a Pentagon intervention. Retired four-stars could not decide whether he was Hitler-like, Mussolini, or the architect of Auschwitz. Celebrities competed to find the most savage image of eliminating Trump—whether by combustion, incineration, decapitation, lethal shooting, or stabbing.

Since then, the press has run with lurid stories about Trump, from having syphilis sores on his hands to “proof” of him beating up Melania. But amid the unhinged hatred, nothing has quite reached the absurdity of the Russia! Russia! obsessions.

In 2016, the country went through crackpot leftist charges of Russian collusion that helped to destroy the lives of innocents like Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lawyers (gushed over by pundits as the “dream team/all-stars/hunter-killer team”), despite all the pre-investigational hype and hagiography, spent 22 months and $40 million to find no evidence that the Russians swung the election to Trump.

But in that sordid process, we learned the following: that a felonious FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was convicted of doctoring a court document to mislead a FISA court in efforts to surveille an innocent man; that the FBI director James Comey recorded and leaked via a third party to the New York Times a private, confidential, and likely classified conversation with the President and lied to the president that he was not the subject of a federal investigation; and that he preposterously claimed amnesia or ignorance on 245 occasions under oath to a congressional committee about the various skullduggery of the FBI under his watch.

Comey was outdone by special counsel Robert Mueller. He claimed under oath that he knew almost nothing about Fusion GPS or the Steele dossier, the twin catalysts that had led to his very appointment.

We learned in addition that Christopher Steele was hired by Hillary Clinton (whose campaign was fined $113,000 for federal campaign finance violations), albeit behind three stealthy paywalls (the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS) to disguise her role.

The British ex-spy Steele’s mission was to find dirt on her presidential opponent, Trump. He did so by compiling a “dossier” of fakery and smears. Ironically, many of the most scurrilous charges might have reached Steele through Russian sources.

Yet the left and cable anchors cited as gospel the dossier chapter and verse—until they didn’t, once the weight of its ridiculousness finally crushed their assertions. Steele, remember, was at one time a paid FBI informant, and as a foreign national, was supposed to be barred by statute from being hired by a presidential campaign.

In one of the notable political scandals in recent history, the present National Security Advisor and former Clintonite campaign operative, Jake Sullivan, used various surrogates to promote the lie that there was some sort of secret “backchannel” electronic “ping” communications between the Russian Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign and Trump Organization. The concocted myth was considered useful in advancing the “collusion” lie throughout the media, until even MSNBC and CNN quietly dropped the accusation.

Note “Russian collusion” destroyed the careers of three former FBI chiefs and a host of others. The amnesiac Mueller was discredited to the point of embarrassment in his congressional testimony. James Comey’s machinations finally entrapped him in a web of deceit and partisanship. Andrew McCabe committed career suicide by lying on at least three occasions to federal officials and allegedly co-dreaming up the ridiculous “wire” caper with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to secretly tape the President of the United States in efforts to prove him unhinged and thus to remove him via the 25th Amendment.

FBI counsel James Baker was instrumental in trying to seed the fake dossier with the media before resigning and being hired by Twitter for a multimillion-dollar salary as deputy general counsel. Twitter, remember, was contracted in 2020 by the FBI to help suppress news accounts deemed unfavorable to the Biden project. Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee’s “minority report” on collusion is now regarded as one of utter fantasy, despite being treated at its release as the final word on collusion. [read more]

Another insightful analysis of the Left and Russiagate by VDH.

More articles on Russiagate:

Posted by Andy at 8:40 AM

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)