28. INTO THE AGE OF TRUMP

GETTING STARTED

On January 10th (2017), just ten days before Trump was due to be inaugurated, BuzzFeed published a 35-page dossier accusing Trump of all types of collusion with the Russians in order to undermine Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. The story was also picked up by CNN. The next day, The Wall Street Journal also published the story, the first to identify the author of the document, British investigator Christopher Steele (former MI6 agent and now head of his own research company, Orbis).

The information in the Steele Dossier was very damaging to Trump. Now the anti-Trump media and Washington political Left had finally found an issue that could most certainly chase the hated Trump from the White House. Thus even as Trump took office, Democrats were already calling to "impeach Trump" (Democrats Maxine Waters and Elijah Cummings leading the chant in the House and Democratic Party Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate).

What was not known at the time was that the Steele Dossier was specially commissioned back in April of 2016 by Marc Elias, working for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, paying Fusion GPS $1.02 million to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion GPS in turn hired Steele (Orbis) for $168 thousand to come up with the required details. In theory, with Elias as the go-between, supposedly Steele did not know he was working for the Clinton Campaign Committee, and the Clinton Campaign Committee higher-ups knew nothing about this research. Really?!!!

Then in the weeks ahead, Steele presented his findings in sixteen different memos, one by one. In the meantime, Steele also reported his "concerns" to the FBI (July), bringing the FBI (and subsequently the CIA) to begin to look into this matter of a Trump-Russia collusion. Steele even met in September with a friend in the U.S. State Department. But by the end of September the FBI closed down its investigation, finding nothing of importance there.

Yet in October of 2016, just before the national elections, the periodical Mother Jones came across the Steele story, explaining that a British spy working for the Clinton Campaign had come up with information involving Russian support of the Trump Campaign! But actually, by this time rumors of such a document and its contents had become widespread in various Washington circles. Then in November the British Ambassador met with Senator (and, at this point, dedicated political opponent of Trump) John McCain, to let him know of the British concern that the dossier needed to be taken seriously. Eventually McCain got his hands on a copy of the dossier, and in turn passed it on to FBI Director James Comey. The next day a McCain staffer provided the press with copies of the dossier, and thus the official break of the news on January 10th.

Actually, Trump had just previously met with outgoing President Obama, plus Comey and General James Clapper (Director of National Intelligence) in which they covered numerous issues, including the matter of Russia's efforts to affect the election (a regular occurrence, that went both ways between Russia and America!). No mention was made about this dossier at that time.

Concerning the dossier itself, the information was largely conjecture. In another case about a year later, in which a Russian internet service provider was suing Buzzfeed for unfounded claims that it worked for the Russian government in providing email leaks in order to disrupt the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee, Steele confessed in a deposition that he himself had not rigorously checked out the information he put forward in his Trump-Russia dossier. He had used information submitted to a CNN website (iReport.com), not knowing that the information did not come from CNN reporters or CNN investigations directly, but by anyone who wished to post whatever "news" they wanted on that particular website. This website was no longer active, although its archives had remained accessible online. Steele confessed that he did not realize that this information was not fact-checked by CNN itself but merely assumed it was the case, being somehow CNN related. Oops!

The firing of FBI Director James Comey on May 9th (2017) led Congress on the 17th to call for the creation of a special counsel to be appointed, to look into those now widespread rumors of Russian interference in the 2016 national elections, Democrats expecting to see an impeachable connection between Trump and the Russians. Trump's new Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from this matter, leaving Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in charge. Rosenstein in turn appointed former (2001-2013) FBI Director Robert Mueller as that Special Counsel, given wide authority to find out whatever he could on the matter.

For almost two years the investigation went on, out of direct public review of the proceedings. Of course, speculations as to what Mueller might uncover in his investigations made front page news constantly, almost daily. All of this was too scandalous to pass up. But in actuality it was all speculation, an investigation all of its own conducted by the media, with the presumption that it was paralleling the Mueller investigation. But again, this was just newsy speculation, which of course Trump's opponents (his many opponents in fact) enjoyed thoroughly.