http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/hillary-clinton-trump-russia-investigation/
While America argued last month over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, something momentous was happening all but off the media's radar: The Trump-Russia collusion investigation narrative continued to collapse in spectacular fashion, as Hillary Clinton's leading role in the scandal came into sharper focus.
Last week, while Washington Democrats and their far-left allies shrieked in rage at the prospect of Kavanaugh taking a seat on the high court, former FBI General Counsel James Baker - who reported directly to former FBI Director James Comey - told congressional investigators that an attorney from the Perkin Coies law firm gave him materials about Russian election meddling during the 2016 presidential campaign.
This is a stunning revelation, since it directly contradicts Justice Department and FBI official sworn testimony.
As we've noted before, Perkin Coies, a firm with deep ties to the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton, paid the Fusion GPS opposition research firm to dig into Donald Trump's past. The infamous Trump dossier it produced was compiled by former British spy and paid FBI informant Christopher Steele.
Baker told Congress last week that Perkin Coies lawyer Michael Sussmann directly handed documents to him about Russia's attempts at meddling in the 2016 election. He was a cutout, a go-between, for Hillary Clinton. And the FBI knew it.
Dems Deliver To FBI
And, yet, this information was later used as the basis for the official investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The question is, why did the FBI, knowing this, lie about it? In effect, its application for a FISA tap on the Trump campaign was done at the direction of a political opponent, Hillary Clinton.
And that's entirely illegal, for both the FBI and Clinton.
"Numerous officials at the DOJ and the FBI have told us under oath ... nobody at FBI or DOJ knew anything about the Democratic Party being behind the Clinton dirt," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said Sunday. "Now you have one of the top lawyers for the Democrats and the Clinton campaign who was feeding information directly to the top lawyer at the FBI."
Collusion, anyone? It appears that both the FBI and Justice Department were doing the Clinton campaign's bidding in applying for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court permission to snoop on the Trump campaign's communications. They did so by getting a FISA warrant to spy on former Trump campaign official Carter Page, who had some ties to Russian officials.
And the Clinton campaign contact with the FBI happened "before even the FISA warrant," Nunes said. "Now you have absolute proof that that wasn't told to the FISA court. So you want the evidence of FISA abuse? There it is right there."
A Deep State Campaign?
It's not just FISA abuse, however. What remains to be explored and explained is the Clinton campaign's role in all this. That includes how it apparently got away with running a secret and illegal deep state campaign against Donald Trump.
This is the stuff of penny ante dictatorships, not of proud constitutional republics.
The truth is, Hillary Clinton's campaign has never come clean about its role in pushing the anti-Trump agenda through the FBI and the Justice Department. It really hasn't had to. Despite their reputations for fearless advocacy of U.S. rule of law, both Justice and FBI fear Hillary Clinton. Her brass-knuckle reputation precedes her.
In this case, Clinton's desperation to beat Trump led to these illicit shenanigans. Without her involvement, there would have been no FISA application to spy on Carter Page. No Fusion GPS dossier on Trump. Nor would we be living through the second year of the Mueller Russia collusion investigation. Democrats cynically launched it to ruin Trump's presidency and perhaps even impeach him.
A full year ago, the liberal Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint against the Clinton campaign: "They failed to accurately disclose the purpose and recipient of payments for the dossier of research alleging connections between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia, effectively hiding these payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law."
Hillary Clinton Connections
Clinton's campaign reportedly channeled nearly $6 million from mid-2015 to the end of 2016 to Perkins Coie. The DNC shelled out another $3.6 million in legal services, at least some of which went to Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie, as we now know, paid Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS paid Christopher Steele, who was in close contact with the FBI's No. 4 official, Bruce Ohr, and his wife, Nellie Ohr, who also worked for Fusion GPS.
These connections are not "coincidences." They're a pattern. More and more, it looks like a conspiracy to avoid U.S. election laws to sabotage her political foe. If so, the next Congress should definitely look into it.
The likelihood President Trump did anything illegal during his campaign with regard to Russian election meddling is small or nonexistent.
But the likelihood that Hillary Clinton broke the law by not reporting campaign expenditures and by secretly working with deep state bureaucrats at the CIA, Justice and the FBI to tarnish Trump is growing.
Nunes says that the recent revelations show why President Trump should declassify some of the Russia-related documents. We think that should only be the starting point for a thorough investigation of the Hillary Clinton campaign's apparent crimes.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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