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<\/p>\nBy ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
\nNational Review<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
D<\/span>id<\/span>\u00a0she or didn\u2019t she?<\/p>\n Of course she did. In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton, in an effort to divert attention from the email scandal that was haunting her presidential bid, directed her campaign to peddle a political narrative that Russia\u2019s suspected hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails was in furtherance of a conspiracy between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to swing the election to Trump.<\/p>\n That is, as I argued in\u00a0Ball of Collusion<\/em><\/a>, the Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump\u2013Russia collusion farce. And in promoting it, President Obama\u2019s former secretary of state had a willing and able partner in the Obama administration \u2014 very much including its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus.<\/p>\n Democrats Change Their Tune<\/p>\n It was amazing to watch Democrats play Twister this week, as National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe added\u00a0documentary corroboration<\/a>\u00a0to the\u00a0disclosure<\/a>\u00a0he\u2019d made the week before. In that first revelation, via letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ratcliffe explained that, because our spy agencies have very effective foreign-intelligence-gathering methods, they were able to \u201cobtain insight\u201d into a Russian intelligence analysis that concluded Clinton orchestrated the damaging political narrative. That is,\u00a0Clinton actually did what she accused Trump of doing<\/em>: She colluded with Russians (through yet another foreigner she recruited to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign: the ludicrous former British spy Christopher Steele) in order to damage Trump\u2019s campaign and cinch the election for herself.<\/p>\n As ever with the Clintonistas: When they\u2019re moving their lips, they\u2019re projecting.<\/p>\n Ratcliffe\u2019s initial revelation came with a caveat: While our spy agencies judged Moscow\u2019s analysis about Clinton to be authentic (in the sense of truly being a Russian intel product), they could not vouch for its accuracy (i.e., it might reflect what the Russians really believed, but it might alternatively be exaggeration or fabrication). This was not a wobble. Intelligence agencies sweep up scads of information, and they must always grade its reliability with a skeptical eye to avoid deluding themselves.<\/p>\n But this was all Democrats needed . . . at least at first. At a Judiciary Committee hearing, former FBI director James Comey and Senate Democrats scoffed at Ratcliffe\u2019s frank, professional concession, claiming it discredited his disclosure in its entirety, and called his competence into question. He\u2019d clearly been duped by Russian disinformation . . . said the people who seem to have made a habit of being duped by Russian disinformation.<\/p>\n Did the Russians have a window into the Clinton campaign? It sure looks that way, between Secretary Clinton\u2019s security practices (which even Comey has\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0as irresponsible) and her retention of Steele, with his stable of\u00a0Russian oligarch clients<\/a>\u00a0and his dossier \u201cprimary subsource<\/a>,\u201d whom the FBI suspected (with copious reason) to be a\u00a0Russian asset<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the point here is not whether Russian spies, thanks to Clinton\u2019s own carelessness, had effectively infiltrated her campaign. The point is:\u00a0Clinton was undeniably doing what, it turns out, the Russians were contemporaneously detecting.<\/em><\/p>\n Want to play epistemological acrobatics? Okay, fine. We can spend hours pondering whether Russian spies generated an assessment about what Clinton was up to because they legitimately wanted to inform their Kremlin superiors, or whether they did it because they wanted our spies to see it and to wonder whether the Russians knew that we knew that the Russians knew . . .<\/p>\n I\u2019d prefer to keep my eye on the ball, which has precious little to do with spy games and Russian disinformation. The Russians were able to deduce what Hillary Clinton was up to\u00a0because it was patently obvious<\/em>. It did not take a super sleuth to figure this one out. Just eyes to see and ears to hear.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why you might have noticed a shift in Democratic tone when Ratcliffe released more documents.<\/p>\n The second set of disclosures showed that the CIA had taken the Russian information seriously enough that (a) then-director John Brennan quickly briefed President Obama and his administration\u2019s national-security team about it and (b) the agency included the Russian intel about Clinton in a memo to the FBI, which laid out information gleaned by the \u201cCrossfire Hurricane fusion cell\u201d that Brennan had assembled to promote the Trump\u2013Russia storyline.<\/p>\n After Ratcliffe published these documents, we were no longer hearing much about disinformation. Now the talking point became: Well, there was nothing\u00a0criminal<\/em>\u00a0in what Clinton did; she was simply worried about a potentially corrupt conspiracy between Trump and Putin \u2014 and who wouldn\u2019t be?<\/p>\n Right . . . worried based on absolutely zero evidence. There was not a shred of proof that Donald Trump and his campaign had any foreknowledge of, much less complicity in, the suspected Russian hack of DNC emails. That, you may remember, was the sinkhole on which the collusion farce was constructed.<\/p>\n Clinton Retains Steele to Craft Trump\u2013Russia Narrative<\/p>\n At this point, Democrats have no choice but to concede Clinton\u2019s catalytic role in the collusion narrative because there is no other rational way to look at what happened \u2014 not for any sentient person, never mind Russian intelligence agents.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s look at the timeline.<\/p>\n\nMORE IN HILLARY CLINTON<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
Hillary Clinton Maintains 2016 Election \u2018Was Not On the Level\u2019: \u2018We Still Don\u2019t Know What Really Happened\u2019<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n
Bombshell Allegation: Hillary Orchestrated Collusion Hoax to Distract From Her Emails, According to Russian Intel<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n
New Files Highlight Brennan\u2019s Role Promoting Clinton\u2019s Russia Collusion Narrative<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n
No matter. At the same time that Hillary Clinton had her campaign proclaim that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump-Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump, and Steele dutifully reported that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump-Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump, the FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on \u2014\u00a0you\u2019ll never guess!<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 suspicion that the DNC emails had been hacked by Russia as part of a corrupt Trump\u2013Putin conspiracy to swing the election to Trump.<\/p>\n
What a coincidence.<\/p>\n
___
\nhttps:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/2020\/10\/hillary-clinton-orchestrated-russia-collusion-farce\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes, Hillary Clinton Orchestrated the Russia-Collusion Farce<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}