I would have no problem answering my blog title’s question in my own words. No problem at all.
But Matt Taibbi – who spent years on the left but now, I’m happy to say, presents both sides – has written a terrific commentary about this subject.
That being the case, I have decided to give you this link to Mr. Taibbi’s chapter-and-verse detailing of how phony the charges were.
Here is how it begins (but, by all means, don’t stop here; use the above link and read every word):
In Brutal Document Release, the Russia Hoax is Finally Exposed
Official claim that Putin “aspired” to help Trump was based on four pieces of evidence, all bogus, even “ridiculous,” according to long-suppressed report just released by DNI Tulsi Gabbard
It was worse than we thought.
The January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin “developed a clear preference” for Donald Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory” is revealed in a report released this morning by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to have been based on four pieces of evidence. One was the Steele Dossier. The surprise is that the other three were even less credible, each included over objections of the report’s CIA authors.
The first item was a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment” of one sentence that the report’s five CIA authors read “five ways” and initially left out, only to have Director John Brennan order it back in. The second item was an email with “no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification.” The third was supposedly backed by “liaison,” diplomatic, and press reporting, as well as signals intelligence (SIGINT), except the “SIGINT” didn’t mention Trump, the “liaison reporting” didn’t mention Trump and was from 2014, and the “diplomatic and media” reporting was a post-election review by a U.S. Ambassador citing a Russian pundit who said Putin and Trump should “work together like businessmen.” This was “evidence” that Putin “developed a clear preference” for Trump.
All three reports weren’t just unsourced and unreliable, but discarded fictions pulled out of the CIA’s trash heap. “They manipulated the manipulations,” is how ODNI Deputy Chief of Staff Alexa Henning put it.
The Assessment was written by just five CIA analysts hand-picked by Brennan, but even these most favored lieutenants couldn’t accept the key pieces of evidence. Two of the five went to Brennan to say, “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected,” only to be overruled. The same thing happened when members of the group objected to the Steele material, saying it didn’t meet even “basic tradecraft standards.” When confronted on this point, Brennan reportedly said, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”
Does this blow the Democrat/media “these charges are baseless/false” narrative to smithereens, or what?
But, despite this, the journalistic frauds who make up so much of mainstream “media” (using the term “media” for them seems less and less reasonable every day) keep featuring stories about jeffrey epstein and Donald Trump that provide absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing on Trump’s part.
By contrast, the “Russian collusion” fraud – with massive evidence to show how fraudulent it was? is, more often than not, relegated to “and in other news” status.
Simply stated, what we are seeing is a true case study in why we should ignore these propagandists posing as journalists.
Thank you Mr. Taibbi for providing the details so eloquently.
