Russiagate: The Real Scandal, Part 2 | 5-Minute Videos | PragerU

After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the Trump-Russia collusion hoax should have died—just another dirty campaign trick that didn’t work. Instead, it escalated. Lee Smith explains how Russiagate turned from campaign smear to a nearly successful coup to overthrow the President of the United States.

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Transcript:
Russiagate: The Real Scandal, Part 2
Presented by Lee Smith

After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, “Russiagate,” or the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax, should have disappeared into the dustbin of history, just another “dirty” campaign trick that failed.

That’s what should have happened, but it didn’t.

Far from being dead, the baseless conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian agent, was revving up. If it failed to derail Donald Trump’s candidacy, it could still derail his presidency.

So believed outgoing President Barack Obama, CIA director John Brennan, and FBI director James Comey, among others.

There was no time to waste. This was November and Trump would take office at the end of January.

The plotters’ first move was to make a flashy display of expelling Russian diplomats and shutting down Russian “intelligence gathering facilities” in Maryland and New York. This conveyed the impression that the Obama Administration had proof, as The New York Times put it, that the Russians had “enabled the publication of the emails it harvested [from the Clinton campaign] to benefit…Trump’s campaign.”

The Administration had no such proof. It was all for show.

Around the same time, Obama ordered CIA chief John Brennan to produce an intelligence community assessment, or ICA, about Russia’s role in the election. It had to be done before the end of his term— that is, before Trump’s inauguration.

But there was a problem. The intelligence officers assigned to the task couldn’t find any evidence of significant Russian interference. Brennan rejected their report and ordered them to write a new one. The revised version conveniently presented unconfirmed rumor as fact.

This revised ICA was released to the news media. They swallowed it whole — hook, line, and sinker.

The problem wasn’t just biased reporting. And it wasn’t just that the media had missed the real story — how US intelligence agencies and the Obama White House were undermining the new administration.

No, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post were essential players in the anti-Trump plot.

Day after day, they published “leaked” intelligence slanted to advance the Russiagate narrative and destabilize the nascent Trump Administration.

To cite just one example, The Post targeted Trump’s incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn. In a January 2017 article, the paper asserted that Flynn had spoken with the Russian ambassador. The story was sourced to a classified intelligence intercept — which someone had illegally leaked to the media. This should have been the big story, not Flynn’s call. The presidential transition team is supposed to speak with foreign officials.

But because Obama and his aides had created a frenzy around anything related to Russia, the media turned the Flynn story into a national crisis and the retired three-star general was forced from the White House.

The drumbeat of Russia stories continued nonstop, all built around two plotlines — that Russia got Trump elected, and that Trump was beholden to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

Democrats demanded a special counsel investigation into “Russian interference” in the election. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who like Michael Flynn had been accused of “improper” communications with a Russian diplomat, should have shut down any talk of such an investigation. Instead, he yielded to pressure.

On May 17, 2017, Robert Mueller, the former director of the FBI, was appointed special counsel. Mueller hired a staff of nearly sixty people, including FBI agents, forensic accountants and other personnel. This was in addition to fifteen lawyers. The investigation ran for two years and cost over thirty million dollars.

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