They made it all up.
If you haven’t been paying attention to all the ins and outs of RussiaGate and the so-called “collusion” scandal, that’s all you need to know about Thursday’s arrest of Russian analyst Igor Danchenko.
The Hillary Clinton campaign hired a bunch of shady operatives to put together a collection of lies and innuendo about Donald Trump and shop it to the FBI. It was the ultimate political dirty trick, one that was aided and abetted by the media long after Trump took office.
Igor Danchenko, the guy who supposedly gathered all the spurious “dirt” in the infamous Steele dossier, is accused of lying at least five times to investigators, special counsel John Durham alleges. Those lies were to cover up the fact that he really had no sources for his claims — or, in some cases, the sources were Clinton associates.
How’s that for a vicious circle? Clinton officials feed their Russian stooge disinformation, it gets laundered through British spy Christopher Steele, and the FBI uses it as the basis for wiretapping the future president’s team.
This, with the active connivance of Obama intelligence officials such as James Clapper and John Brennan, who certainly knew the dossier was utter bull but publicly treated it as credible to feed the flames. And a host of “current and former” intel officials served as anonymous sources for The New York Times, Washington Post and other outlets that breathlessly retailed the supposed progress of the investigation as if it were a mountain of Trump treason.
To be clear: The FBI never found the least confirmation of any of it. Neither did special counsel Bob Mueller’s vast team. The bureau interviewed Danchenko just days after Trump’s inauguration and learned how utterly baseless the gossip truly was — yet it was years before that was made public.
The left — which still treats RussiaGate as real — will blast out “This doesn’t really matter” coverage. (No one wants to give their Pulitzers back!)
In reality, it rips the face off of gross abuses of office by high government officials — and shameless hysteria-mongering by the nation’s most prestigious media outlets. That was the real “collusion,” with the worst culprits escaping justice.