“It happened. It impacted a presidential election. It is not just Russia now. There’s a tsunami of misinformation out there. Russia, China, various other countries, all aimed at our increasingly fragile democracy.”
That was MSNBC’s Mike Barnacle on May 19, maintaining that in 2016 Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta emails and sent them to Wikileaks, where they were posted.
Let’s assume this was true. On June 11, 2016 Julian Assange told ITV that Wikileaks had emails related to Hillary ClintonAMP: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct.” This was an apparent reference to the John Podesta emails that would publish later that year.
Then, on June 14, 2016, the Washington Post had published its story on the DNC hack by Russia.
On June 15, 2016, seven days prior to when Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges Wikileaks contacted Guccifer 2.0, the WordPress blog by Guccifer 2.0 appeared, taking credit for the DNC hack, and saying everything had already been given to Wikileaks. Guccifer 2.0 claimed, “The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon.”
While in 2016 this was indeed questioned, as it should have been, by July 2018 in his indictment of Russian intelligence officers for the DNC and John Podesta hacks, Special Counsel Robert Mueller laid out the timeline for when the government says the hacks took place. The Podesta emails were hacked by Russia in March 2016, and the DNC emails were hacked in May and June 2016 and then delivered to Wikileaks in July 2016.
Again, let’s just assume all of that is true. After six years, nobody has satisfactorily debunked the Mueller indictments and the case itself never went to trial where a defense might have been presented. All we have to go on are these media sources and then the indictments.
When conservatives, Republicans and others talk about the Russia hoax, this is not what they’re referring to. The hoax was that former President Donald Trump and his campaign were responsible for it!
Specifically, the hoax was the allegations by former British spy Christopher Steele, paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, the so-called Steele dossier that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years.” It alleged there was “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between [the Trump campaign] and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the Trump side by the Republican candidate’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter Page, and others as intermediaries.”
Steele defined the conspiracy: “the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the WikiLeaks platform. The reason for using WikiLeaks was ‘plausible deniability’ and the operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team. In return the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue…”
And Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was said to have traveled Prague, Czech Republic, according the Steele dossier, “in order to clean up the mess left behind by western media revelations of Trump ex-campaign manager [Paul] Manafort’s corrupt relationship with the former pro-Russian [Viktor] Yanukovych regime in Ukraine and Trump foreign policy advisor, Carter Page’s secret meetings in Moscow with senior regime figures in July 2016” where the Trump campaign according to Steele allegedly coordinated with Moscow to put the Democratic National Committee emails on Wikileaks.
And, it was to “cover up and damage limitation operation in the attempt to prevent the full details of Trump’s relationship with Russia being exposed” and the “overall objective had been to ‘to sweep it all under the carpet and make sure no connections could be fully established or proven’”.
Eventually, Special Counsel Robert Mueller debunked the entire conspiracy theory. From the Mueller report: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” and “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”
That included all members of campaign. Per Mueller, “the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government — or at its direction, control or request — during the relevant time period.” As for former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, per Mueller, “Cohen had never traveled to Prague…”
That was the hoax. That Russia hacked the Democrats and Trump helped.
The Oct. 2016 application to the FISA Court stated, “The target of this application is Carter W. Page, a U.S. person, and an agent of a foreign power… The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the U.S. State Department…”
To make the accusation, as the FBI and the Justice Department had to give the FISA Court a “statement of the facts and circumstances relied upon by the applicant to justify his belief that… the target of the electronic surveillance is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power…” under 50 U.S. Code § 1805(a)(2)(A).
Those allegations relied Steele’s “well-developed conspiracy” but that was just the pretext. The hoax itself and the surveillance of the Trump campaign that came later were both justified because of the Trump campaign’s stated foreign policy positions, specifically opposing U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine after former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
The principal allegation was that Russia was attempting to convince the Trump campaign to not send weapons to Ukraine and to instead recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine, telling the FISA Court that the Trump campaign, per the FISA application, “worked behind the scenes to make sure [the Republican] platform would not call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces” stating Trump “might recognize Crimea as Russian territory and lift punitive U.S. sanctions against Russia,” citing news reports.
The Justice Department also included an Aug. 2016 Politico story highlighting Trump’s opposition to U.S. intervention in Ukraine, including his suggestion the people of Crimea preferred to live in Russia, and his doubts that the territories Russia had seized could be reclaimed suggested without risking World War III.
At a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the Politico report relied upon by the Justice Department quoted Trump saying a military conflict to take back Crimea would risk nuclear war: “You wanna go back? …You want to have World War III to get it back?” And it quoted Trump on ABC’s “This Week” suggesting the people of Crimea supported Russian annexation: “The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were.”
Later, in 2019, Trump would be impeached and ultimately acquitted as he considered what to do about foreign aid to Ukraine. As soon as he became inclined to act on his instincts and exercise his Article II powers in that region, House Democrats immediately sought to have him removed.
In short, the President cannot set U.S. foreign policy in that region, even if he runs explicitly on that platform and wins. No, that is just a product of Russian disinformation and must be negated. In the meantime, the war in Ukraine has escalated dramatically after Russia’s full-scale invasion in Feb. 2022, threatening a wider conflict with President Joe Biden warning that could even involve nuclear weapons.
It might all have been avoided, but only with diplomacy, which was absolutely undermined by the U.S. legal and foreign policy establishment not-so-well-developed bullshit allegations against Trump that he was some sort of Manchurian Candidate.
The baseline allegation against Trump and his campaign leading to the targeting via FISA, in 2016, and the frivolous impeachment in 2019, was simply for having different foreign policy views about Ukraine, apparently the most important country in the world ever. And it’s driven the Washington, D.C. political establishment insane. Maybe the DNC hack was real, but the “well-developed conspiracy” wasn’t. That was the real hoax—and it might get us all killed.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.