Rethinking the Russia Probe

Two weeks after President Donald Trump took office, the narrative that Russian operatives influenced the U.S. presidential campaign conveniently ignited. 

For 10 long months, the liberal media desperately tried to diminish Trump and his administration by reporting on any connection there was to the Russian espionage.  

But how did the Russian meddling story come to fruition?  

Obama administration intelligence chiefs “made public a unanimous assessment claiming Russian operatives, under orders from President Vladimir Putin, had orchestrated an influence campaign to help Mr. Trump win the presidential contest,” writes The Washington Times.

So the NSA, FBI and CIA made it clear from the beginning that there was significant doubt regarding Trump’s election win.

The “evidence” that was digged up during the Russia probe was provided in a 15-page document which included five pages “dedicated to charge that Moscow blended cyberhacking with state-backed propaganda and social media trolls to defeat Mr. Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton,” writes The Washington Times.

The rest of the document failed to connect Trump to the Russians, while also failing to show how Russian “gained access to” and “infiltrated large volumes of data” from the Democratic National Committee, which was used against Clinton’s campaign.

Even with the lack of evidence, Trump’s credibility was diminished.

“The five pages of the report have hung over Mr. Trump’s presidency ever since, hurting his credibility abroad and at home and shaping the narrative of five ongoing federal and congressional investigations into suspected Russian meddling, even though the document’s core conclusion looks increasingly weak in hindsight. Both Democrats and Republicans now say that Russian efforts were intended not to elect Mr. Trump but to sow chaos in American politics no matter who emerged as the victor,” writes The Washington Times.

It’s surprising that a narrative with so little evidence continued to be reported on by the media and discussed by politicians.  

Headlines like “8 times U.S. intelligence chiefs have unequivocally said Russia meddled in the U.S. election” and “Intel chiefs “even more resolute” on Russian election meddling findings” just continued to appear in newsfeeds online and on the cover of newspapers.

These articles would include statements from intel chiefs like “In 2016, the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, orchestrated cyberattacks on our nation for the purpose of influencing our election. That is a fact, plain and simple,” said the former Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson, but would not report any concrete proof. 

“I actually called them both the day after it came out and asked, ‘Why was it so thin?’” said a source that worked with the former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan. “The answer I got was simple: There was a serious counterintelligence operation going on.” 

Was there really an elaborate counterintelligence operation?

“From the moment the Russian security services initiated these ‘active measures,’ they would have monitored closely the U.S. government’s reaction to learn if their involvement had been detected — and how,” said Slick, a former CIA Clandestine Service Office. “In drafting the unclassified [Jan. 6 assessment], the authors were walking a fine line by including enough evidence to persuade readers that their conclusions were sound, but not enough data that would reveal the actual sources or the means by which they linked these activities to the Russian government.”

Trump saw it merely as a smear campaign by the Obama administration to delegitimize him.

So, there was already tension between the intelligence agency leaders and Trump. Trump had repeatedly said that these officials attempted to “rig the election” for Hillary Clinton.  

Then on January 6, Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers allegedly visited the president-elect at Trump Tower to brief him on the intelligence community assessment that would be soon released. This was likely an unpleasant meeting.  

Just prior to the meeting, Trump questioned why the DNC didn’t allow the FBI to investigate into how the committee was hacked.  

“The Democratic National Committee would not allow the FBI to study or see its computer info after it was supposedly hacked by Russia,” tweeted Trump. “So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?”  

After the meeting, Comey admitted to reviewing “personally sensitive” information after while alone with Trump. This information was allegedly part of the “Trump-dossier,” which was a project partly funded by the Clinton campaign and DNC and was a collection of unverified claims. 

Comey later implied that this meeting as part of a high-stakes espionage operation.  

“It is important to understand that FBI counterintelligence investigations are different than the more commonly known criminal investigative work,” said Comey.

“What exactly was he getting at? Was he publicly revealing that there were serious concerns at the highest levels of U.S. intelligence that the president-elect may truly have been compromised by the Russians and could be vulnerable to Kremlin blackmail?” writes The Washington Times. “Or was Mr. Comey revealing something else: that he and the other intelligence chiefs were using Mr. Trump as a chess piece in their counterintelligence operation against the Kremlin by feeding him salacious and unverified information from the dossier to see how Moscow might react?”

Then on January 10, the Trump-Russia dossier was published by Buzzfeed, which inspired Trump to refer to the publication as “fake news” since again, the documents mostly consisted of unverified claims.

Author’s note: For over 10 months Intel chiefs have claimed something that just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny of the evidence. This just proves that the Obama administration corrupted and politicized multiple government institutions.

Editor’s note:  Its finally coming around that people are suspecting this to be just the campaign slander that we called it more than a year ago. Comey appears to be the most witless pawn in American scandal history. The crimes being uncovered by Mueller are unrelated and irrelevant to the charges of collusion. Just standard Washington corruption.