Opinion

Anti-Trump ‘dossier’ was all about foreign interference in a US election

When recently asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos what he would do if presented with foreign opposition research, President Trump responded: “I think you might want to listen. I don’t — there’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country — Norway — ‘We have information on your opponent’ — oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

The president, of course, was wrong to be so cavalier about foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of the United States — be it by a docile Scandinavian ally or anyone else. The political firestorm that followed his ­remarks, however, is difficult to take seriously.

After all, it’s hardly a surprise that Trump lacks deftness when navigating the conventions of Washington. Everyone in the Beltway already knows that you don’t listen to foreign opposition research. No, sir. You farm out that job to the party’s ­national committee, high-powered partisan law firms and friendly media outlets.





This is what the Democratic ­National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign did when they paid research firm Fusion GPS and former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw “intelligence” — some of it derived from Kremlin sources — that fueled allegations that their opponent was colluding with a foreign power to steal the presidential election in 2016.

It was the DNC and Clinton campaign that passed information that had been garnered from overseas sources to Obama administration intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which then used the “evidence” to bolster secret warrants and send “cloaked investigators” to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

Maybe all this spying was aboveboard; maybe it wasn’t. One day we will find out. But we do know that Democrats relied on foreign opposition research to cultivate a national freakout over the election. They fed that foreign-sourced information to an unskeptical partisan press, which was happy to regurgitate many of the most salacious and sensational stories related to Trump’s Russian ties.





However tone-deaf Trump’s comments to Stephanopoulos might have been, the awkward fact is that Democrats were far more successful at using Russian disinformation around the 2016 election.

It’s doubtful that any foreign oppo, in fact, has had more of an impact on American politics — ever. There’s no Russian Twitter troll farm or Facebook ad campaign in existence that has done more damage to confidence in national elections than the Kremlin-sourced anti-Trump dossier. The hacked insider-baseball DNC emails were but a distraction compared to the conspiracy theory that held the ­nation captive for over two years.

Now, it’s also almost certain that the president’s answer to Stephanopoulos’ question was influenced by Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had claimed to have dirt on Clinton.





If you truly believed that meeting — which, shady as it might have been, amounted to nothing in the end — is an assault on our democracy, then surely hiring a former British spy to compile opposition research in Russia constitutes a similarly seditious act.

Right now, we don’t have much closure on the question. One of the mysteries of Robert Mueller’s investigation is that the special counsel spent much of his time building an obstruction case against Trump, even after he knew there was no criminal conspiracy between the administration and Russia. But Mueller spent no time investigating the origins of a dossier that had sent him on a fool’s errand.





Seems as if a prosecutor charged with examining Russian interference in the 2016 elections would be more curious about such things.

Yet, rather than attempting to ­explain the distinction between their real-life use of Kremlin oppo research and Trump’s theoretical use of the Norwegian variety, Democrats simply accuse Republicans of practicing “whataboutism” — the perfunctory reaction whenever their hypocrisy is exposed.

Since many of the same people who disseminated the dossier now want to take back power, this is hardly a legitimate response.

Because, as it stands, many voters rightly wonder why one party is free to rely on Russian disinformation and spy on the opposing political campaign, while the other is subjected to endless investigations. ­Either foreign oppo is wrong, or it’s not. The country can’t continue to function under two sets of rules — no matter how enticing the prospect of such a world is to Democrats.

Twitter: @DavidHarsanyi





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