Good news, the New York Times discovered some collusion after all.
By January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele’s main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document and three people familiar with the events, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. After questioning him about where he’d gotten his information, they suspected he might have added his own interpretations to reports passed on by his sources, one of the people said. For the F.B.I., that made it harder to decide what to trust.
Agents did not believe that either the source or Mr. Steele was deliberately inventing things, according to the former official. How the dossier ended up loaded with dubious or exaggerated details remains uncertain, but the document may be the result of a high-stakes game of telephone, in which rumors and hearsay were passed from source to source.
It’s a real mystery how this piece of opposition research ended up full of crazy made up lies.
The FBI can investigate how a Hillary Clinton campaign work product that it decided to treat as authentic might have contained dubious information.
Another possibility — one that Mr. Steele has not ruled out — could be Russian disinformation. That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump’s presidency as well.
That’s quite an admission.
It’s like the Times belatedly figured out that there was no Russian plot to elect Trump, and that enemy countries enjoy exploiting our partisan divisions without actually having a dog in the fight. The Russians didn’t want Hillary to lose. They wanted America to lose. As does China, Iran and any number of our other enemies.
But if the Russians planted land mines, it wasn’t under Trump’s presidency. They were feeding damaging material to Hillary’s campaign.
Did that mean they wanted her to win?
That’s the logic we’ve seen deployed with the entire Russian collusion argument. Except the Times doesn’t go that route for obvious reasons. Instead it tries to shift to a suggestion that the Russians wanted to be able to bring down Trump if he didn’t follow their orders.
That’s not what happened.
If the Clinton campaign accepted damaging information on Trump for the Russians, that’s a counterpart to the same collusion argument being aimed at Trump.
Except the Russian documents ended up being used by the FBi and DOJ to try to influence an election.
As usual, lefties accuse others of their own crimes.
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