Considering all the breathless reporting done this past weekend about collusion it’s important to remember what actually happened. Russia, or their agents, hacked John Podesta and the DNC and then leaked emails showing the corrupt relationships between the Clinton campaign, journalists and party leadership. The recent stories do not show that the Trump campaign was involved in this operation. Instead, it shows a bunch of political neophytes tried to find evidence that Clinton acted corruptly in her dealings with Russia, resulting in a meeting with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. The twenty minute, one off meeting is so far understood to be as unsuccessful as Peter Smith’s attempt to find her hacked emails. The biggest surprise is that the heads of the campaign were involved in the the dirt digging, though political inexperience is an obvious explanation.

Imagine if a New York Times reporter heard through a Kremlin source that Russia had evidence that of a Clinton quid pro quo, say over the Uranium deal conspiracy that was prominent on the right. Would it be wrong for them to seek out this evidence? No, it’d be a major scoop if it turned out true. Attempts to discover whether a crime had been committed is not participating in that crime. Failed attempts to find out if Clinton had acted illegally may have been stupid in its optics, but it shows no wrongdoing and is by no stretch the collusion that has been claimed.

However, there was one very interesting tidbit to the convoluted tale. The lawyer who met with by Trump officials has extensive ties to Fusion GPS, the firm that put out the false dossier on Trump. If she has true ties to the Kremlin, then it’s looking more and more likely that the ‘collusion’ narrative is, at least in part, a Russian intelligence operation. In fact, it would be a rather successful one considering it was the basis to investigate the Trump campaign and has held a large prominence in media accusations of collusion. This forces Trump’s detractors into a difficult bind. They cannot simultaneously claim this one meeting shows the campaign’s ties to Russia while ignoring that she was closely involved in the creation of the founding document to the collusion conspiracy.

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