Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, who would became her campaign chairman during the 2016 elections, in Washington D.C. on Oct. 12, 2011. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

For the Real Collusion Story, Look at Hillary Clinton

Commentary

The mainstream media has spent two years relentlessly pushing the narrative that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with shady Russians to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton and then cheated with the Russian government to steal the election from her.

That’s not what happened.

What actually happened was that the Clinton campaign paid a political opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to frame Trump and his campaign by creating fake evidence of Russian collusion. To do this, Fusion GPS hired several people, including former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, to compile a dossier full of questionable second- and third-hand stories told by anonymous Russian sources about Trump and some of his campaign personnel.

Then that fake dossier was laundered to make it look like it came from intelligence agencies, not from political operatives paid by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The dossier was then used by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant on the entire Trump campaign team through a minor team member named Carter Page.

To get their FISA warrant on Page, top Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officials deliberately misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) judge by hiding the fact that Steele was paid by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

Payments to Fusion GPS were hidden by passing them through the law firm Perkins Coie. Not only is that an FEC violation, it’s an attempt to get Clinton’s and the DNC’s fingerprints off the dossier.

An infographic showing the figures involved in the discredited dossier used to frame the Trump-Russia narrative. (The Epoch Times)

That’s important to note because it’s going to be explored thoroughly in DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s upcoming report. Both the money used to pay for the dossier and the truth of who really created it were deliberately laundered to hide its true origins from the FISA Court.

That’s a major crime, and Horowitz will thoroughly lay out how it happened.

It’s been public information since last October that Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid for the production of Steele’s dossier. Everything that’s come out in the intervening 10 months has only confirmed what we already know.

However, many journalists have a vested interest in pretending the Steele dossier is authentic. They engage in fantasies that it hasn’t been debunked.

Mainstream media has been playing favorites between two competing narratives.

The first narrative is that the Steele dossier is real; Trump colluded/cheated with the Russians and that’s why he won the election; and Mueller is going to prove it. This is the only narrative the mainstream media wants to cover. They give the vast majority of their air and print time to discussing it.

The other narrative is one that mainstream media journalists resent every second they have to spend covering it. They want to suppress it and pretend that only right-wing conspiracy theorists discuss it.

This is, of course, the narrative where all the evidence keeps surfacing—that the real collusion during the 2016 presidential election was between the Clinton campaign, top officials in the DOJ, and the FBI, the intelligence community, and key members of the mainstream media. And this collusion involved framing the Trump campaign for stealing the election with the help of the Russian government.

And now even more evidence has surfaced that top DOJ and FBI officials were colluding with Democratic operatives to influence the 2016 election.

John Solomon of The Hill, in a recent report, revealed evidence that demonstrated that the former No. 4 official at the DOJ held a meeting with Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson, during which the Steele dossier and its sources and allegations were discussed. Solomon reports that this official took detailed notes.

Bruce Ohr, who’s been twice demoted at the FBI since his role in this sordid affair was revealed, has been called to testify to Congress on Aug. 28. During that testimony, he’s certain to be asked about his contacts with both Steele and Simpson, as well as his failure to disclose that his wife, Nellie Ohr, was employed by Fusion GPS where she played a role helping to create the Steele dossier.

So evidence continues to mount that the Trump–Russian collusion narrative is actually a hoax—a massive political dirty trick that was hatched by the Clinton campaign, paid for with DNC cash, and laundered through Perkins Coie, all to create a fake dossier that was used to justify an FBI investigation as well as to spawn a strategic leaking campaign to the media.

And all of this led directly to the Mueller investigation.

Bruce Ohr is just the next domino to fall in this chain reaction of evidence that is exposing this entire sordid plot.

Brian Cates is a political pundit & writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter at @drawandstrike

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.