Former Bush Aide: It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Colluded With The Russians

Cortney wrote about this last night, but let’s rehash. The infamous Trump dossier that alleges the president had ties to Russia and served as part of the reason why we have a special counsel—Robert Mueller—looking into such allegations turned out to be a DNC-funded operation. Marc Elias, a lawyer with the Hillary campaign and the DNC reached out to Fusion GPS to pay a former British intelligence operative to collect information (via WaPo):

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.

Former Bush White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the new revelations reek of collusion between the Hillary campaign and the Russians in an effort to interfere in the 2016 election. Wait—didn’t Republicans start this operation as an opposition research effort? Yes and no. Yes, it started as an opposition research project by an anti-Trump Republican, but Democrats were the only ones who gave Fusion GPS money and paid Steele (via WaPo) [emphasis mine]:

Some of the pushback on the left has focused on the fact that a still-unidentified Republican client retained Fusion GPS to do research on Trump before the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Thus, they argue, it's wrong to say the dossier was just funded by Democrats.
But the dossier's author, Steele, wasn't brought into the mix until after Democrats retained Fusion GPS. So while both sides paid Fusion GPS, Steele was only funded by Democrats.

So, how did it take this long to know about who funded this unverified dossier? Well, for starters, Marc Elias stopped some reporters, like The New York Times’ Ken Vogel, who was then with Politico, from writing about it, saying his sources were wrong. Well, obviously he was lying. If you want to read how Steele collected this information, please read this lengthy Vanity Fair piece on how Steele and this dossier became known to the public. Fleischer cited key portions, given this new information about the dossier, that could show how the Hillary campaign’s actions could qualify as collusion:

Hard 2read this w/o concluding Clinton campaign colluded w Russia 2interfere in US election. https://t.co/lH5wNiUlzT pic.twitter.com/fy5aycEbzT
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) October 25, 2017

Source A was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.”
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) October 25, 2017

Kremlin gave info to Christopher Steele. His oppo-research was paid for by the Clinton campaign. If that's not collusion, what is?
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) October 25, 2017

How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.

The liberal media won’t admit this, but The Washington Post turns the whole investigation on its head. In the past few days, the focus has shifted from Donald Trump to the Clintons.

The transfer of majority ownership of the Canadian mining company Uranium One to the Russian state-corporation Rosatom in 2010, which included a $500,000 paycheck to Bill Clinton for a speech from a Russian bank selling Uranium One futures and millions of dollars from the chairman of Uranium One being sent to the Clinton Foundation. The chairman, Ian Telfer, used his own charitable foundation to dole out $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation throughout the whole business deal that lasted between 2009-2013. The latter year being when Rosatom took over Uranium One completely, absorbing the American mining sites. That gave Russia control of 1/5 of our uranium supply. Because this sale involved our strategic interests, Hillary Clinton, then-secretary of state, had to approve the sale through the Committee on Foreign Investment. I take it you can guess how she voted. Well, we now know that the FBI and the Obama White House knew the Russians were bribing their way through this deal and did nothing about it for the sake of the Russian reset.

The entire leadership of the DNC is unaware of its activities from only a year ago? https://t.co/UjqSqod5iV
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) October 25, 2017

Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year https://t.co/vXKRV1wRJc
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 24, 2017

And now the Hillary campaign’s lawyer retaining Fusion, using funds to pay a former spy to compile a dossier on Trump based on still yet to be verified information from former Kremlin intelligence agents and foreign ministry officials. It may be unethical and that’s where this whole thing stops, but it seems the Clinton camp is about to be sucked into the nonsensical cyclone that is this whole Russian collusion story. Oh, and just so that no one forgets: there is zero evidence to suggest the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. For Hillary, well, there’s a money trail.

When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying "You (or your sources) are wrong." https://t.co/B5BZwoaNhI
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) October 24, 2017