Catherine Herridge confirmed recently that the FBI ignored warnings that the primary evidence used in securing a FISA warrant against Carter Page, Christopher’s Steele’s “dossier,” is unreliable “Russian disinformation.” Herridge is as fine an investigative reporter as they come, but my gut reaction was, “Haven’t we known that for years now?”

Then reality smacked me in the face, and I remembered: we’re still pretending as a country that Barack Obama’s FBI and CIA didn’t work with Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton, and the Democrat party to frame Donald Trump as an agent of the Russian government.

I suppose the longer the attempted coup against the president has endured, the easier it is to forget that the U.S. government has done everything in its power to cover up the criminality of its intelligence agencies and preferred political players, while obfuscating the public record with a steady stream of disinformation from the corporate news.

From the points of view of the DC Leviathan and its complicit praetorian press, if there is no signed statement or recorded confession from Obama, Clinton, Brennan, Comey, Lynch, Yates, McCord, McCabe, Nuland, Rice, Strzok, Simpson, Steele, either Ohr, or any of the other countless conspirators involved, then nothing nefarious happened. (Funny how the crimes against Donald Trump require overwhelming intent and evidentiary proof in triplicate form, while every scurrilous allegation against him becomes front page news in the New York Times and is chased down by criminal investigators at every jurisdictional level.)

Away from the Potomac, though, normal Americans have a pretty good idea what transpired during and after the 2016 election, even though the branches of the federal government and all the papers of record pretend not to know a thing.

Sometime before Donald Trump even became the Republican nominee, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and the rest of her campaign brain trust planned to neutralize her biggest vulnerabilities: (1) a lifetime of corruption highlighted by Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, and (2) the risk that some person or entity (like Wikileaks) not under her control would release embarrassing correspondence or incriminating evidence either obtained from her unsecured, compromised email server or from some other long forgotten trove of secrets in her past. They would lay the groundwork to implicate the eventual Republican nominee as a conspirator with a foreign adversary in the theft of her emails, so that she could inoculate herself from the fallout of any damaging revelations contained therein. “Pay no attention to the pay-offs and scandals about which you’re reading; what’s important is that the Republicans have committed Watergate-level political theft in digital form.” That was always the plan.

While the Clinton campaign and the Democrat party (whose finances Hillary contractually controlled) used Perkins Coie as a cut-out to hire Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS to begin seeding disinformation that would evolve into the Steele Dossier and be used against the eventual Republican nominee, Obama’s government was conducting a parallel counterintelligence operation. Their goal was to use confidential sources and spies (like Joseph Mifsud, Stefan Halper, and Alexander Downer) to entice and coax low-level and naive Trump campaign associates (first, George Papadopoulos and then, Carter Page) into painting Donald Trump as a witting or unwitting agent of a hostile foreign power (eventually settling on Russia) and triggering a full-blown counterintelligence operation and broad FISA Section 702 warrantless surveillance of his campaign, so that either (1) the Republican nominee would be caught up in some to-be-determined criminality or so tarnished with the appearance of impropriety that he was permanently damaged and unelectable before voting ever commenced; or that, at the very least, (2) Hillary’s liabilities could be blunted by recasting any unexpected revelations from her past as part of a campaign of foreign espionage against her candidacy. That was always the plan.

The shared goals of Clinton’s campaign and Obama’s intelligence agencies were to (1) create compelling disinformation against Donald Trump, (2) utilize political surveillance to their advantage, and (3) create plausible counterintelligence pretenses as part of the cover up of their illicit operations. In this way, the mainstream press has always told the story backwards, that it was never Russia using disinformation to interfere in America’s 2016 election.

It was Hillary’s campaign and Obama’s CIA and FBI that fabricated a Russian conspiracy theory in order to justify their political spying and eventually cover their tracks. This is why Robert Mueller spent two years and over thirty million dollars investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and never once scrutinized whether the Steele Dossier was explicitly based on Russian disinformation. That was always the plan.

Caricature by Donkey Hotey

Christopher Steele and Nellie Ohr and Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS all worked for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska and likely used his phony “kompromat” in return for working to weaken or overturn the Magnitsky Act’s sanctions against wealthy Russian nationals and the freezing of their substantial assets. This is the same Deripaska that McCabe solicited for incriminating information on Paul Manafort and candidate Trump. And this made-up kompromat is what Brennan fed to his assets in Europe (Mifsud, Halper, and Downer) to dangle repeatedly before Papadopoulos and Page.

In fact, it is entirely likely that we will one day learn that Brennan, Lynch, and Comey used similar operations to ensnare General Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, too. If we still lived in a country with due process and without secret Star Chambers, we would probably discover that far from Carter Page alone being caught up in FISA Court abuses, Flynn, Manafort, Papadopoulos, and others were also illegally targeted. Since the feds couldn’t find anything with which to criminally indict these men except for an odious and bogus Section 1001 “making false statements” charge (in the cases of Flynn and Papadopoulos) and a decade-old tax-dodging complaint (for Manafort), it’s safe to bet that Brennan and Fusion GPS-created propaganda, and not blind, disinterested application of the law, led the Department of Justice to pursue Americans for purely political purposes.

In the end, this American-made “Russian disinformation” has caught almost everyone in its web. Consider just how much of DC ended up taking part in the lie.

Brennan and the CIA constructed fake Russian spy rings throughout Europe;

Nellie Ohr passed this same imaginary Russian intel to her husband, Bruce, and the FBI;

Lynch, Comey, and McCabe used this elaborate but fake Russian conspiracy to file fraudulent FISA applications and pursue Section 702 bulk surveillance on anyone and everyone who ever worked near or for Donald Trump;

Robert Mueller used all this American-made kompromat to bully Trump campaign associates into accepting unethical plea deals, while hiding real Russian collusion by the Clinton campaign;

Senator Feinstein repeatedly covered for Fusion GPS’s perjury by leaking confidential transcripts, while her former intelligence staffer, Daniel Jones, worked to raise funds for Fusion GPS’s defense and continued counterintelligence operations against President Trump;

Richard Burr joined Mark Warner on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to give our intelligence agencies cover by justifying their illegal spying on a domestic political campaign;

Adam Schiff spent the last four years doing the Russians’ bidding by further dividing the country with reckless and wholesale lies that the sitting president is a Russian agent; and

the whole apparatus of the American press spun this fantastic tail of Russian collusion, while giving each other First Amendment prizes for their bravery, acumen, and Jayson Blair-like persistence.

Only in Obama’s America could a hoax as fraudulent and unsubstantial as this one come to fruition.

And after everything, we are left with only one final damning question: were Donald Trump and his associates the only people in Washington not to engage in Russian collusion?

H/t: C. Herridge, L. Smith, S. Davis, M. Cleveland, J. Dunleavy, J. Carlson, C. Ross, P. Schweizer, D. Bongino, G. Jarrett, M. Hemingway, Sundance, and all the other real truth tellers.