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April 30, 2018
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released their heavily redacted 253-page report on their investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election this past Friday, April 27. The most salient finding was that there was no evidence of meetings between President Trump or any of his associates that “reflected collusion, coordination, or conspiracy with the Russian government”.
The report makes an interesting point, which belies the Trump- Russia collusion theory. After the election Russian officials attempted to set up a “back channel” with Trump associates. If there was collusion between the Trump team and the Russian government during the election, efforts to arrange covert communication lines after the election would have been unnecessary. If the Trump campaign was working in concert with Russian operatives to sway the presidential election these “back channels’ would have already been well-established.
In contrast to the report released by the intelligence community in January 2017, the HPSCI report did not conclude that Russia’s meddling was aimed at helping Trump win the presidential election. According to the HPSCI, Russia’s main objective was to “sow discord and chaos” into our electoral process, not to help either candidate.
Further, they found no proof indicating that either Trump or any of his surrogates were involved with the hacking and dissemination of the Hillary Clinton campaign emails. They did however find that some Trump associates had “ill advised contacts” with those connected to Wikileaks. Such as Donald Trump, Jr. who has admitted in congressional testimony that Wikileaks had reached out via email to him on numerous occasions during the 2016 election. Trump Jr. responded only 3 times to the many emails, which he has screenshot and released to the public.
Trump officials were also criticized for taking “ill advised” meetings with Russian operatives. In particular, the now infamous meeting Don Jr., and other significant Trump team members had in June 2016 with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Don Jr. agreed to the meeting because he was promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton. However, shortly after the commencement of the meeting it was apparent that no such information was forthcoming and that Veselnitskaya’s purpose for arranging the meeting was to make a plea for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act- Russian sanctions which Putin very much wants rescinded.
It’s interesting that many in the media and the never Trump crowd believe that this meeting is a smoking gun indicating a “willingness” of the Trump campaign to collude with the Russians. In actuality this meeting shows there was an interest to hear information that a Russian lawyer had on Clinton. Listening to information regarding your opponent is very different than working or colluding with a foreign government such as Russia to win an election. It’s incredulous that this meeting is often touted as proof of Russian collusion when no information on Clinton was even exchanged at this meeting.
Unfortunately Don Jr., being an amateur, wasn’t adept in knowing how to “keep his hands clean”. If he was a “professional” dirt-getter, such as Clinton and company, he would have known that he needed to employ a third party to collect damaging information. Unlike the novice Trump team, which evidence indicates never paid for nor received any information from Russia on Clinton, Clinton and associates used an intermediary to gather their “Russian” dirt. The Democrat National Committee paid the law firm Perkins Coie, who in turn paid the research firm Fusion GPS who then hired British ex-spy, Christopher Steele, to gather Kremlin dirt on Trump, on Team Clinton’s behalf. Kind of sounds like the “Russian collusion” slurs being thrown at Trump and company.
It now appears that her team actually played into the hands of Putin, and paid for Russian misinformation, as almost all of the accusations compiled by Steele are dubious at best, and some have even been proven untrue. Score one for the Kremlin- discord and chaos abounds.
The HPSCI report also points the finger at Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, the virulent anti- Trump, James Clapper, as being the mastermind behind the leaking of the salacious, unverified dossier. According to James Comey, the then Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he was prompted to brief then President-elect Trump on some of the salacious contents in the dossier, by Clapper, which took place January 6th, 2017. The House Committee believes that Clapper not only revealed information from the dossier to CNN, in early January 2017, but also leaked the briefing of the report, to Trump, and then President Obama, who was also briefed at the time, to them.
Disturbingly, in Comey’s notes, from this time, which he claims were prepared contemporaneously, he wrote that CNN had the dossier, but they “were looking for a news hook” before revealing this information to the public. Presto- the briefing provided “the hook”, and instant “validation” of unverified oppositional research funded by Trump’s political opponent, conducted by a foreign national, based on Kremlin sources. The implication is that the briefing was a set-up to lend credence to the dossier to enable the media to publish its contents.
Just days after this meeting took place, on January 10th, Jake Tapper, along with other journalists from CNN, published an article on the briefing of both Trump and Obama of the existence of classified documents containing the allegations that Russian operatives had compromising information on Trump. Hours after the CNN article was released BuzzFeed published the dossier in its entirety.
Not only does it appear that Clapper orchestrated the publication of the contents of the dossier, but according to the House report he was less than truthful when interviewed by the House Committee. Initially, when asked he denied having any contact with the media regarding the infamous dossier. However, when specifically asked about information he may have relayed to CNN he admitted to discussing the content of the dossier with Jake Tapper. So, Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence is a politically motivated leaker, and a liar. Interesting side note, in August 2017 Clapper became a National Security Analyst for CNN.
The House Intelligence committee opened their investigation in January 2017. They interviewed 73 witnesses, and reviewed 308,000 documents. In spite of this lengthy seemingly exhaustive investigation many Democrats were unhappy with the report claiming that it was a partisan investigation. Unfortunately, nothing short of declaring that Trump colluded with Russians to steal the election from Clinton would have satisfied the likes of Adam Schiff (CA-D), a ranking member of the committee.
In addition to the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation, the Senate intelligence Committee is conducting its own investigation, which has yet to be completed. Further there is the special counsel probe headed by Robert Mueller. It’s safe to conclude that after almost two years of investigations that there is no evidence of collusion to be found. However, special counsel investigations need to justify their existence by finding some wrong doing, and have a tendency to stray from their main purpose. Unfortunately the cloud over Trump’s presidency that has existed pre- inauguration persists, and will for some time
