Although we are most assuredly biased in our coverage of Donald Trump, and although we contend that the GOP, by virtue of becoming the party of the ignorant, is effectively forcing intelligent Americans to make a choice between supporting stupidity and voting for their own values (a decidedly bad choice to be forced into making), we are not here to lie to readers.
That, as opposed to other popular blogs with a readily apparent partisan bent whose sole purpose for writing seems to be to deceive and sow misinformation.
So with that said, we’ve got to tell you that this, out Tuesday evening from the Washington Post, doesn’t look great:
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 firm in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Prior to that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by a still 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.
[…]
The Democrats paid for research, including by Fusion GPS, because of concerns that little was known about Trump and his business interests, according to the people familiar with the matter.
These people said that it is standard practice for political campaigns to use law firms to hire outside researchers in order to ensure their work is protected by attorney-client and work product privileges.
The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting’’ since Nov. 2015 – though it’s impossible to tell from the filings how much of that work was for other legal matters and how much of it related to Fusion GPS.
To be sure, this isn’t surprising and really, you kind of have to ask yourself what you expected when it comes to who was ultimately behind it. Also, to the extent some of the allegations contained in the dossier have been verified, this doesn’t un-verify them or otherwise do anything to exonerate Donald Trump.
But given how controversial this dossier is, the fact that Hillary Clinton and the DNC apparently started picking up the tab after the mystery GOP client stopped funding it, is like red meat for Trump and also for lawmakers like Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy.
Opposition research isn’t really the problem. After all, Donald Trump Jr. himself said “I love it” when offered a chance to obtain potentially damaging information on Hillary Clinton.
Rather, the problem here is that this particular bit of “research” is at the heart of the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative and now it looks like Hillary Clinton literally paid for it. Common sense dictates that if you pay for something, you expect results. This looks like a case where the “results” might have turned out to be a little too good. Because now what you’ve got is a situation where Clinton and the DNC funded research that ended up implicating Trump not only in a conspiracy to undermine America’s democracy, but also in a purportedly sordid episode that no one has any hope of ever verifying.
“Fusion GPS gave Steele’s reports and other research documents to Elias,” WaPo goes on to report, adding that “one person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed of Fusion GPS’s role by the law firm.”
Whatever – the details won’t matter. And neither will the fact that, as noted above, the whole point of opposition research is to undermine the opposition.
The simple fact here is that while some parts of the dossier have been verified, not all of it has, which leaves whoever paid for this open to allegations of … I don’t know … something. But allegations there will undoubtedly be.
So if you thought this was a fucking circus before, you probably haven’t seen anything yet.
Does not scare me away. DNC nor Clinton put that dossier together, nor are they foolish enough to put money into it if there was not a solid reason to do so. Trump did far more to taint Clinton, even to create whole stories around nothing and feed it non-stop to the less than honest media. The fact that things have already been proven from the dossier only leads me to believe there is a lot there to believe.
I have confidence in Mueller and the team he assembled. I am content to sit and wait and I am extremely patient. Trump is not innocent and he is not off the hook. He will burn the internet with his tweets tonight and he will eventually cook his own goose.
yeah i mean it doesn’t change what very obviously happened, it’s just that the optics are terrible.
and now what will happen is lawmakers will try to spin this is a giant conspiracy involving the FBI and conservative media outlets will help them. witness this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-political-meddling-1508883468
who knows, maybe there’s some merit to that.
the problem for Trump – as always – is that what other people did or didn’t do doesn’t change what he did and on top of that, he’s proven with his own words and actions that he’s incapable of being President.
so at the end of the day, they could find out Hillary was a mass murderer in her spare time and it wouldn’t do a damn thing to change the fact that Trump i) had help from Russia and ii) is a moron
It was pretty obvious from the reporting available back in February that the Clinton campaign had retained these folks after the “mysterious republican candidate” (almost certainly Jeb Bush) had dropped out of the race and stopped paying them for opposition research. We also knew that the FBI had been in talks to pay Mr. Steele for his work on the dossier and that the deal had fallen through when Buzzfeed posted the document online.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-once-planned-to-pay-former-british-spy-who-authored-controversial-trump-dossier/2017/02/28/896ab470-facc-11e6-9845-576c69081518_story.html?utm_term=.64d97e9db392
It certainly feels like there has been a concerted effort to change the narrative surrounding the Steele dossier over the last several days and spin this as a conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton, the FBI, and (according to Trump) Russia. It makes you wonder if Trump’s camp isn’t trying to immunize the base from some upcoming revelations from the dossier by poisoning the well.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/920981920787386368
We all seem to lose sight of the fact that the really concerning part of the political intrigue of the 2016 election – is the degree to which the election process was and can be manipulated and the incredible difficulty any thinking voter would have in determining the actual truth about any candidate.
Our democracy and its election process credibility collapsed completely and obviously in 2016. While we all continue to debate who is the worthy of the “greater ass hole” title of the two 2016 candidates – the winner is truly lost to history – because of the lack of verifiable truths about either.
We have no functioning democracy under the election processes used in the 2016 elections, and until we move past the political soap operas of each “news” cycle, we aren’t going to be able to reform our election processes and or restore any functionality or credibility to our democracy.
To demonstrate how off-base I was, in 2015/early ’16 I concluded the Clintons already had something toxic on Trump and used that and a lucrative contract to compel him to run a circus candidacy, exactly as he did, that would be tasked to eviscerate the GOP once and for all and effectively emasculate the eventual GOP candidate so that Hillary could phone it in for an easy win.
I just couldn’t imagine any other explanation for Trump’s outrageous behavior, asinine platform, name calling and ridicule of each and every one of his primary competitors. My assumption was that Bush would get the nomination but he would have been an effective quadriplegic going into the general, having suffered the Trump Treatment. I figured it was so outrageously blatant that even the Post Office deal in DC (his hotel development) was a blatant down payment on the deal, so outrageously and openly corrupt that no one would have believed what the purpose was.
Who knows? Maybe I was right after all and the objective of GOP destruction is still in process. Besides, if this thing (the economy and markets) is going to blow up during this term, I can see Clinton deciding mid-year ahead of the election that she really didn’t want the job anyway – so Plan B went into effect. You have to admit, whether it was a health issue or a tactical shift, at some point last year it was pretty clear Clinton lost her enthusiasm.
I don’t get the fuss. What’s the big deal? They all try to dig up dirt on each other. Because that’s what works in the ten-seconds attention span society. Where you get the government and candidates you deserve.
yeah exactly. just bad optics for her at the exact wrong time.
I give the H man credit for acknowledging this facet of the story, considering his contempt (justifiable imo) for Trump.
Correction H: “But given how controversial this dossier is, the fact that Hillary Clinton and the DNC apparently started picking up the tab after the mystery GOP client stopped funding it…” Steele was hired by Fusion after mystery R stopped using them for (still undefined) oppo research; the “dossier” memos were entirely funded by the DNC & Clinton campaign.