The liberal media went nuts. The Democrats had what was to be their 10,000thmeltdown over something President Trump did or said. In this case, it would his remarks about accepting dirt on his opponent from foreign sources, which he said during an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton political operative. Trump said it’s called opposition research. This isn’t anything new. It’s amazing, the gaslighting effort the Left is deploying on this front. It’s not shocking because…Hillary Clinton did it. The Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS, who then hired ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele to compile the document known as the Trump dossier; Democrats footed the bill for this operation.
The dossier was trash. The Mueller report debunked it, but at the time, it was a political opposition research document. It also cited sources still active in the Kremlin. And this information, shoddy and unverified, was used to secure a FISA spy warrant against Carter Page, a former foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. So, no, accepting dirt on your opponent from a foreign source did happen. It does happen. And even Obama accepted unsolicited advice from a foreign source during the 2016 election relating to Trump-Russia collusion. John Solomon of The Hill has more:
In July 2016, the Obama administration accepted unsolicited information from Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat who just happened to have helped arrange a $25 million government donation to the Clinton Foundation years before. Downer said that he had witnessed a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, bragging about some dirt that the Russians supposedly had on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Though Downer’s claim was reported two-plus months after the alleged event, and was only hearsay gathered at a London tavern, the Obama administration gave it to the FBI which, in turn, thought it was weighty enough to justify opening a counterintelligence case against the lawfully elected Republican nominee for president.
In other words, the Democratic administration accepted dirt from a foreign friendly and used it to justify investigating its GOP rival.
And then, OMG, they did it again just a few weeks later.
In October 2016, less than three weeks from Election Day, the Obama Justice Department approved a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on the Trump campaign through its former adviser, Carter Page. The primary evidence supporting the warrant? A dossier written by a foreign friendly named Christopher Steele, a retired MI6 intelligence agent from Great Britain. Of course, the Justice Department and the FBI forgot to tell the courts that Steele actually was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, but that’s a small detail for the purpose of this column.
For the second time in three months, the Obama administration took dirt on Trump from a foreign ally — this time, from one in Europe — and weaponized it for a criminal investigation.
Gee—that sounds eerily familiar, right? Will Obama now be dragged through the mud for committing treason, as Solomon notes in the headline of this piece? If there were an example of selective outrage or liberal media bias, well, this is it. History didn’t begin during the 2016 election; some reporters need to learn this. The Clinton Foundation connection also is a tad interesting. That organization was known for being a bank for the depositing of favors by the wealthy, well connected, and powerful. Give a large sum and then something down the road would benefit that donor politically, economically, or both.
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