Copies of the "Mueller Report" printed by the U.S. Government Publishing Office are seen at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on April 24, 2019. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

The Fraudulent Paper Trail Through the Anti-Trump Conspiracy

Commentary

Remember the simple rule: Anyone who pronounces on Trump–Russia from the baseline of, “Yes, the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” or its current, fuzzier iteration, “Russia interfered in the 2016 election,” is either directing, party to, or victim of a seditious campaign of deception against the U.S. people based on a series of untrustworthy if not downright fraudulent documents.

As a longtime student of “Russian interference,” I hasten to add I never rule out “Russian interference”; I just expect to find it inside the anti-Trump conspiracy. But that’s another story.

The outrageous fact is, a stack of dodgy documents makes up the shaky foundation of one of the most virulent attacks on our nation in history; to date, though, they have largely passed inspection. Even as they variously come under scrutiny and dispute, they remain in place, undergirding escalating attacks on the legitimacy of the 2016 election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

There is simply no coming to terms with this conspiracy inside the U.S. government until the U.S. people are able to recognize the fraudulence of the paper trail that got it started, and see that those involved in perpetrating these frauds upon us, the People, are, as we often say but never do, brought to justice.

I hate to say it, but I have a hard time believing we ever will see justice. Still, for the record, here is a list of dodgy documents that set us off on this dangerous voyage through U.S. sedition. Reading through, do bear in mind this rule of thumb from West’s Encyclopedia of American Law: “Evidence is not relevant unless its authenticity can be demonstrated.”

Spring 2016

Dodgy Doc No. 1 is the Crowdstrike report that kick-started the engine of public deception, driving the claim that “Russia hacked the DNC,” and then “used” Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks to release the “hacked” DNC emails.

This tells us something shocking but true: The primary evidence amassed to accuse a foreign power of hacking into the computer network of one of our two major political parties was gathered not by the FBI but by a private firm with a checkered reputation, hired by DNC counsel Perkins Coie after a security breach in the DNC system was detected in the spring of 2016.

The salient fact to hang onto here is that the DNC’s computer server—according to Crowdstrike, the scene of the “Russian” crime—was not and has never been examined by the FBI or any other U.S. security agency.

Indeed, the DNC didn’t permit the FBI to investigate, which, of course, doesn’t sound fishy at all. Further, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI blithely accepted the (redacted) findings that “Russia hacked the DNC” from Crowdstrike and then told the U.S. people to do the same.

Certainly, the authenticity of the Crowdstrike report has not been demonstrated. Nonetheless, it continues to paint the aura of Russian espionage around Julian Assange and augment the case of “Trump–Russia collusion.”

Spring to Winter 2016

Dodgy Doc No. 2 is the notorious Steele dossier, that elegantly named pile of opposition research created by a ruthless outfit known as Fusion GPS on behalf of, we finally learned in the fall of 2017, the DNC and the Clinton campaign. The problem with this “evidence” that Trump was simultaneously a pervert and a traitor to Russia is that it is either unverifiable trash, or Kremlin disinformation, or both.

The authenticity of the Steele dossier has not been demonstrated, either.

Both of these products of DNC contractors, Dodgy Docs No. 1 and 2, form the fake “evidentiary” core around which the anti-Trump conspiracy coalesced and expanded throughout 2016 and beyond. Because this core is rotten, every subsequent document based on it is rotten, too.

Fall 2016 to Winter 2017

Dodgy Doc No. 3, perhaps the first of many spinoffs of the Steele dossier, is the FISA application and subsequent renewals presented by the Department of Justice and FBI to gain permission from the FISA court to spy on Carter Page and the wider Trump team.

The Department of Justice and FBI obscured the application and renewals’ roots in the unverified Steele dossier from the FISA court, and, later, tried to hide them altogether from the U.S. people.

With its Steele dossier roots, the authenticity of the FISA application and its renewals certainly cannot be demonstrated, either.

January 2017

Dodgy Doc No. 4 is the Obama administration Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), another compilation of Trump–Russia smears rooted in Dodgy Doc No. 2 (the Steele dossier), and probably Dodgy Doc No. 1 (the Crowdstrike report).

As in the case of the FISA application, the ICA’s Steele dossier connections were initially and vehemently denied. We are at a point now when its main sponsors—James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey—are arguing about who shoveled the Steele dossier material into the ICA in the first place.

There’s more. The ICA claim that Russian military intelligence “exfiltrated large volumes of data from the DNC” almost certainly draws from Dodgy Doc No. 1 (the Crowdstrike report).

One of the more alarming attributes of the 2017 ICA is its staying power. That is, Trump administration Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), CIA, and FBI chiefs have not withdrawn it for being a noncredible political hit piece, even though the ICA contains its own confidence-undermining disclaimer: “Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents. … High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.”

It is thus especially disturbing to report that when Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first appointee to lead the CIA, called Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia,” he also told us he was relying explicitly on this the same dodgy ICA document to make this charge.

Punked by his predecessors, Pompeo put it this way: “In January of this year, our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligence—the GRU—had used WikiLeaks to release data of U.S. victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee.”

Using the Steele dossier and the Crowdstrike report, that is.

Heavy authenticity problems.

August 2017

Dodgy Doc No. 5 is the so-called Scope memo, which sets forth instructions from then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to special counsel Robert Mueller regarding the parameters of the special counsel investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. We now know the Scope memo, too, was based on the Steele dossier.

More authenticity problems, and not for the Scope memo alone, but for the entire Mueller investigation, which was beset by prosecutorial madness and extensive conflicts of interest.

July 2018

Dodgy Doc No. 6 is special counsel Mueller’s indictment of a string of Russian GRU officers for their “hack” of the DNC. The evidence against the GRU officers is derived from findings in Dodgy Doc No. 1, the Crowdstrike report, which might as well have been conjured from the air.

This would be a colossal joke if it weren’t happening to our country.

April 2019

Dodgy Doc No. 7 is the Mueller report itself, the written record of one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history, a time when the peaceful transfer of power, sanctioned by a national election, was shattered and subverted by a hidden cabal whose denizens ran the most powerful institutions of the U.S. government against us, the People.

When—I should say “if”—nothing happens to these perpetrators of fraud and deception, we will know that they or their allies still run those institutions.

Diana West is an award-winning journalist and author whose latest book is “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”

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