Biased FBI, complicit media failed US democracy in pursuit of Donald Trump and Russia election hoax
For years, powerful CNN and MSNBC hosts, together with their print journalist enablers, slammed Trump’s supposed links to Russia. It became almost a religion.
Whatever its truth in science, the release of the much-anticipated Durham report in the US has laid out in shocking detail how a conversation between former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer and Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos, in a London wine bar in 2016, led to the greatest case of election interference in US history.
A highly politicised FBI seized on a vague paragraph, provided by the Australian government, that indicated Papadopoulos had said Russia could help the Trump campaign with the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton.
The FBI didn’t interrogate the information and ignored its own team of expert Russia analysts, but chose to launch Operation Crossfire Hurricane in July 2016, a full-scale investigation into alleged links between Donald Trump and the Russian government, seemingly with the intent to grievously and baselessly harm Trump’s reputation and his chances of winning the 2016 election.
“Neither US law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” special counsel John Durham concluded.
His 300-plus-page report describes in stark detail how the FBI – supposedly an impartial federal law enforcement agency – became a tool of the Democratic Party, and more specifically the Clinton campaign, producing the fraud that eventually became the Russia collusion hoax. Even Downer himself, the report states, later revealed “there was no suggestion that there was collusion between Donald Trump or Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians”.
At the time British intelligence officials “could not believe the Papadopoulos bar conversation was all there was” to the case. “The FBI discounted or wilfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia,” the report said. “At a minimum, confirmation bias played a significant role in the FBI’s acceptance of extraordinarily serious allegations derived from uncorroborated information that had not been subjected to the typical exacting analysis employed by the FBI.”
The FBI investigation led to the Mueller inquiry, which extended the political smear, while coming up with zero evidence of any collusion between Trump and Russia when it was publicly released in 2019. And there still isn’t any seven years later.
Russian meddling in US political discourse in 2016 had nothing to do with the Trump campaign. Yet the twin investigations fuelled a devastating media frenzy for the Trump administration. For years, powerful CNN and MSNBC hosts, together with their print journalist enablers, slammed Trump’s supposed links to Russia. It became almost a religion.
Incredibly, in July 2016, a few days before the FBI launched its probe, director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe shared with president Barack Obama and vice-president Joe Biden intelligence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was planning to smear Trump by linking him to separate Russian efforts to interfere with the election.
“No FBI personnel … interviewed by the special counsel recalled Crossfire Hurricane personnel taking any action to vet the Clinton Plan intelligence,” the report states. “This stands in sharp contrast to its substantial reliance on the uncorroborated Steele Reports, which at least some FBI personnel appeared to know was likely being funded or promoted by the Clinton campaign,” it added, referring to the fabricated report by former British spy Christopher Steele.
If that’s not enough evidence of institutional bias, in 2014 the FBI shut down four potential probes into Hillary and Bill Clinton following evidence the FBI received about a foreign actor seeking to “contribute to Hillary Clinton’s anticipated presidential campaign, as a way to gain influence with Clinton”. Nothing happened, one agent said, because “everyone was super careful … they were ‘tiptoing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next president”.
The two FBI officers critical to launching the Crossfire investigation, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, were texting each other throughout 2016: “(Trump’s) not going to become president, right?!” Page said, to which Strzok replied: “No, he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
For all the gravity of the Russia collusion hoax, the report has been dismissed or ignored by much of the US mainstream media, some of whom won Pulitzer prizes for validating it. The crime was assumed, but the evidence was never forthcoming.
“The people who are criticising it are the people who perpetrated the big lie, and advanced that false narrative, peddled it to the American people, doing immense damage to our country, to our institutions,” former attorney general William Barr (who commissioned the Durham report) observed last week.
Democrat claims that Republicans sought to influence elections by insisting on voter ID or in-person voting pale in comparison to this tacitly co-ordinated hit job on a presidential candidate, which in effect amounted to accusing him of treason without evidence. Indeed, the crime of tapping a phone at the Watergate Hotel seems a trifle by comparison.
And the same institutions, more or less, suppressed and dismissed the true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which could have been devastating to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Those who have been screaming loudest about misinformation and disinformation have ended up being the greatest purveyors of it.
Whatever Trump’s flaws and his later misdeeds, he didn’t deserve this, and his supporters are right to be furious.
The damage done to US society and governance will be profound and enduring. A future Republican administration, with some justification, may well gut the FBI as retribution. If it was a theory before, the weaponisation of federal agencies is now a fact.
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