Imagine, if you will, a cabal of government employees expecting one person to easily win the presidential election, and then the other candidate, the one they couldn’t fathom leading the country, actually wins. Now imagine those government employees aren’t slogging away in the mailrooms of various departments, but they are the upper-echelon of the nation’s intelligence agencies and they resolve to cripple the newly-elected president anyway they can. You don’t have to imagine it, it happened. And we appear to be living in the aftermath of that effort.
This is all “fiction,” of course, because none of what follows can be proven (yet) and the details are still, slowing, coming to light. But indulge this fiction for a moment.
Candidate A’s campaign wants to dig up dirt on candidate B, which is common. But for some reason, candidate A’s campaign decides they don’t want their fingerprints on any of this “research.” Rather than simply cutting a check to the opposition researcher, as happens every election cycle, they shuttle money through a law firm (in an attempt to hide their identity behind attorney-client privilege?), which paid a consulting firm, which then paid the researcher. Why just through all those hoops? If you’re just doing standard, legal opposition research there is zero reason to set up firewalls between the candidate’s campaign and the information they’re seeking.
Moreover, if you want to control the release of any embarrassing information the research turns up, you want as few people outside the campaign to have access to it as possible. Adding layers adds to the risk that anything found can be leaked to candidate B, who can then counter its release to limit the damage. It makes no sense.
The only reason for the secrecy and the layers is you want plausible deniability when it comes to the sources of whatever is discovered. If, say, foreign agents or a foreign government – for the sake of this hypothetical we’ll just say Russia – were the source, it would appear to be unseemly to have your campaign working with these entities to influence the outcome of an election. Those layers mean the likelihood of candidate A’s campaign being connected to that foreign government, at least before the election, is very slim.
Now imagine candidate A’s researcher “discovered” a bunch of salacious stuff, dirt campaigns dream of discovering, only it’s all rumors from a foreign, hostile government. Candidate A can’t give a speech announcing those claims because there is no proof of them. You’d spent millions of dollars for what could amount to worthless information.
Rather than scrap it, you have your researcher and the firm hired secretly by your law firm try to get the information to the media without your fingerprints on it, again. But, much to everyone’s shock, no reporter would report it, the information is that crazy and unproven.
So it sits there, unused.
Well, not completely unused. It turns out those high-ranking government employees had it delivered to them, too. What didn’t reach the level of credibility for liberal journalists in 2016 to even bother to report on it somehow rates high enough to be used by those agencies to obtain a warrant to spy on American citizens. That report even found its way to other politicians, people with no morals or scruples like Harry Reid, and even they won’t directly reference it.
Then the unthinkable happens – candidate B actually wins.
What do you do with these rumors and innuendo? The media has known about them for some time, likely had people desperately trying to prove them, but have come up empty. So what do you do?
In this imaginary scenario, think of some of those government employees running the FBI, and imagine those FBI agents conspiring with the head of the CIA to breathe some life into that information. But how?
Journalists would tell them, theoretically, that since there’s no proof anything in it is true, there has to be some kind of “news hook” to the file for it to reported. So, for the sake of argument, let’s say the head of the FBI decides this unproven file, paid for by candidate A, needs to be brought to the attention of candidate B, finally. Not to make candidate B, now the President-Elect, aware of these rumors his opponent tried to spread about him, but for what amounts to “I just thought you should know.”
But, in the very act of briefing the President-Elect, that report that was unreportable just days earlier, now has that “news hook” because, hey, the head of the FBI thought it was important enough to mention to the President-Elect, after all. Then, as if magically, the contents of a meeting that featured 2 people – the President-Elect and the head of the FBI – somehow becomes known the media and, thanks to that meeting, this file is now “reported.”
From those reports and because of that file, a further investigation starts and a Special Counsel is appointed. The newly elected President assumes office with a cloud over him. Not a real cloud, a manufactured cloud, a seeded cloud created specifically to rain on his parade and cripple his presidency.
You don’t have to imagine it, all of this and more happened. Conspiracy or not, regardless of whether or not all participants were willing or not, they all played their roles inside government and the media perfectly to manufacture an investigation not to discover truth, but to plant President Donald Trump’s feet firmly in concrete and prevent him from getting anything done.
Hillary Clinton and her entire campaign used intermediaries to hire a foreign agent to record rumors from a hostile Russian government but couldn’t use any of it because it lacked any proof. Yet somehow, even with no liberal news organization willing able to verify any of it to the point of reporting, the government uses it to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on American citizens. Then, seemingly out of the blue, FBI Director James Comey decides this document no one can prove and no outlet was reporting on, yet was used in secret government proceedings, needs to be brought to the attention of the President-Elect.
Immediately after that private briefing, the media has what Comey described in his notes written directly after briefing Trump about the file as their “news hook,” and the fiction becomes reality.
Comey never mentioned why the President-Elected needed to know this information, and he never told Trump where it originated – a foreign agent hired by the Clinton campaign to dig up dirt on him. If he had, Trump could have dismissed the whole thing as the political hit-job it was. Yet Comey, who thought Trump needed to know it, curiously chose to withhold the most relevant parts of the facts Comey knew.
This is likely not a grand conspiracy, meticulously planned and hatched years ago over cocktails and cigars in a secret office somewhere, but a hodgepodge of actions scrambled together on the fly with each participant seizing what they saw as an opportunity when it presented itself. Probably unspoken, with most everyone involved working individually toward correcting what they see as an injustice – the failure of the American people to elect Hillary Clinton.
But it is a conspiracy nonetheless. There is no other, more rational explanation. If there were truth to any of the rumors and allegations, either of a salacious or treasonous nature, it surely would have been discovered by now. There’s no lack of resources and people – both in government and the media – looking for some, yet they’ve unearthed none.
At some point, even the truest of believers must come to the realization that that, too, is not a coincidence.
On a lighter, and shameless self-promotion note, this subject of the alliance between political activism and journalism is one of the subjects covered in my forthcoming book, “Outrage, INC: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.” But, and I swear, it’s reported there with a lot of humor (and a ton of footnotes). It’s coming out June 19th from HarperCollins. Pre-order multiple copies (and check out the cool cover art here and beat the “Christmas in July” rush.