More Evidence for the Real Collusion in the 2016 Election Comes Out

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton makes a concession speech after being defeated by Republican president-elect Donald Trump in New York on Nov. 9, 2016. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

Commentary

Someone really likes reporter John Solomon of The Hill. While many in the media are chasing stories based on false narratives, trying to nail down a smoking gun for the supposed Trump—Russia election collusion they so desperately believe in, Solomon is over there in a corner breaking news that contains actual evidence.

When somebody high up in either the White House or the Department of Justice (DOJ) is ready to bring out more evidence exposing the #SpyGate plot, Solomon is the reporter who is being brought in and shown the evidence so he can break the news.

The only problem is, the evidence Solomon keeps being shown and that he keeps reporting on advances that other narrative, the wrong narrative: The narrative that just won’t go away and die. The one that most of the mainstream media dismissed over a year ago as the vain and egocentric babbling of Carter Page.

It was several weeks ago that Solomon dropped a bombshell report that was almost completely ignored by the rest of the news media: The source for much of the Christopher Steele dossier’s Trump–Russia collusion information didn’t actually come from a high-level government source inside Russia.

Instead, Solomon reported that he got a look at notes written by the former No. 4 official at the DOJ, Bruce Ohr, in which Ohr related he was told by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS that the source for “much of'” the Trump–Russia information in Steele’s dossier actually came from a former Russian intelligence officer who was living in the United States.

That news was so stunning that I wrote an entire column about it. And then I did a follow-up column, which highlighted that Solomon’s revelation meant the FBI should have had no problem contacting and interviewing this former Russian intelligence officer if they made any real attempt to verify the Steele dossier’s Trump–Russia information. That’s the information they used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Carter Page, to legally spy on Trump’s campaign team.

Now, the intrepid Solomon is back with another scoop that hit the wire late on Oct. 7, that expanded on his earlier article a week previously. In this new report, Solomon lays out how DOJ/FBI officials, desperate to keep their involvement in the Steele dossier hoax hidden from scrutiny, made false claims of national security so they could redact meetings between top DOJ officials and lawyers from the law firm of Perkins Coie.

In fact, as Solomon demonstrates in his report, there was no real national-security issue involved, but there definitely were political issues involved.

The FBI knew it was receiving this Steele dossier information from Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee’s top law firm, not from any intelligence agency or source. This means the FBI knew all along where the information they were about to present to the FISA court came from and who paid for it. And they took deliberate steps to hide that.

James Baker, the FBI’s former top counsel who resigned in the wake of the SpyGate scandal, is reported to have testified to exactly this in front of congressional investigators last week.

The Middleman

If you’ve followed the twists and turns of the Steele dossier story from the beginning, then you are aware it’s been known since October of last year that the Clinton campaign tried to hide its funding of the creation of the Steele dossier by political operatives at Fusion GPS, by running the funds through the Perkins Coie firm. So that has long been a matter of public record.

What’s only been suspected until now, however, is that Perkins Coie also was used as a middleman to hand off the information in the Steele dossier so it could be given to the FBI without Clinton or the DNC’s fingerprints all over it. So the law firm wasn’t just used to hide where the money came from to pay for the creation of the Trump–Russia collusion hoax, it was also used to hide who it was that passed the information to the FBI so they could begin “investigating” it.

What Solomon’s latest report reveals is that we can all now stop suspecting that’s what happened, because there is now documentary evidence to what happened.

A diagram of it would look like this:

Hillary Clinton Campaign/DNC $$$ → Perkins Coie → Fusion GPS → Christopher Steele → Steele dossier → Perkins Coie → FBI → FISA court → Carter Page surveillance warrant.

Monitoring

The “insurance policy” idea that then-FBI agent Peter Strzok referred to in his texts with then-FBI lawyer (and his mistress) Lisa Page was actualized in the form of the FISA warrant on minor Trump team foreign-policy adviser Carter Page.

With the “two-hop” rule in place, which allowed the tracing of all communications of the entire Trump campaign staff, Strzok and his cohorts were absolutely sure that during that court-approved surveillance they were going to find something they could use to impeach Trump with, in the unlikely event he won the 2016 election.

Well, the unlikely event happened. Trump won the 2016 presidential election. So the “insurance policy” went into effect: DOJ/FBI counter-intelligence agents carefully monitored all of the Trump transition team’s electronic communications from October 2016 to June 2017.

To their amazement, they didn’t find anything they could use to get Trump with. They uncovered no bribes being paid for top appointments or sweet pay-for-play deals with corporations or foreign leaders under the table.

Instead of finding evidence to impeach Trump with, they ended up with nine months of nothing. (In other words, they failed to find all the kinds of stuff that would’ve been going on if Clinton had won.)

No one was ever supposed to take a deep, serious look at the Steele dossier itself. It was created to feed a media narrative, and then it was decided to take it further by using it as “evidence” to get legal surveillance of Trump’s campaign/transition teams from the FISA court.

Nobody was ever supposed to know where that dossier actually came from and who paid for its creation.

Right now, the DOJ’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, has spent over a year carefully and methodically digging into the Steele dossier, how it was compiled, and how it was presented to the FISA court.

Most of what we know about this entire sordid SpyGate scandal is due to evidence that Horowitz uncovered and handed to Congress, and is now being shown to Solomon. Horowitz’s report is being prepared and could see release sometime soon.

Carter Page has been saying for over a year that the entire Trump–Russia collusion election narrative is a political dirty trick launched by the Clinton campaign.

It’s hard not to see that all the evidence that’s come out in the past year tends to make it look like he’s going to be vindicated on that claim.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.