Anti-Trumpers cheered on the bureau as it fitted up one of the first casualties of Russiagate.
Just over a year ago, the special counsel investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election ended with barely a whimper. The thousands of subpoenas, the myriad search warrants, the countless witness interviews – they all amounted to diddly squat. As the US attorney general William Barr summed it up at the time: ‘The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.’
Admittedly, Mueller had succeeded in exposing some criminal wrongdoing – Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney, was sentenced to three years in prison for campaign-finance and fraud crimes, while Trump’s campaign chief, Paul Manafort, was convicted of financial fraud. But these crimes were all tangential. None related to the object of the investigation — namely, proving that the Russian state colluded with the Trump campaign during and after the 2016 presidential election.
For the anti-Trump Resistance, and its entitled liberal fellow-travellers, it came as a crushing blow. They were so used to being represented in power that they couldn’t accept not being. So they had clung to the bonkers belief that Trump, aided and abetted by Russia, had somehow cheated. But, with Mueller’s verdict in, the belief that Russia had exerted a decisive influence over Trump’s election now stood exposed for what it always was: a conspiracy theory.
It is easy now to mock all those at the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Guardian, who, upset over Brexit and Trump, relentlessly peddled such conspiratorial bilge. Those who sought to ‘connect the dots’ showing the ‘Trump-Russia nexus’. Or those who feasted on the daft Steele dossier, commissioned by the Democratic National Committee, which claimed the Ruskies had a video of Trump engaged in a spot of pissy erotica. Or those who reported, frothing at the mouth, that Manafort had held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2016, presumably to line up the wikileaking of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Utter bollocks, the lot of it.
Now, according to documents released as part of a review of the FBI’s investigation into Michael Flynn’s alleged collusion with Russia, it gets worse. These documents show what many long suspected – that the FBI itself worked against the elected president, while anti-Trump elites cheered it on.
