The Real Collusion Story

The Real Collusion Story

By Michael Doran

"In a textbook example of denial and projection, Trump foes in and out of government wove a sinister yarn meant to take him down."


"...With respect to the framing of Trump, however, the second-sight scam required elaborate orchestration, the work of many hands. The key was the double-tracking of the dossier. Hillary Clinton’s enablers channeled it simultaneously into the press and into the government. They then recruited people inside government to verify to the outsiders that it was a serious document, a guide to the intelligence that reporters were not allowed to see. Without this double-tracking and official or quasi-official authentication, journalists would never have believed that they were catching a glimpse of what Brennan and the FBI saw in their crystal balls — pardon me, their top-secret monitors. And without leaks about investigations, journalists would have had no dossier-related news to report. Official statements that the dossier “was being looked into” transformed it into a legitimate topic for reputable news outlets.

This con failed in its primary goal of preventing the election of Trump, but it was nevertheless a partial success. It instilled in a significant portion of the American public the conviction that Trump indeed conspired with Putin. This conviction is especially prevalent among the lofty-minded — a class of people that includes Republicans as well as Democrats.

The bipartisan character of the delusion was the greatest factor that legitimated the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel leading the investigation into Trump’s alleged relations with Russia. The lofty-minded have greeted every indictment that Mueller has handed down as confirmation of their collusion delusion. In reality, those indictments only prove that a phalanx of crack investigators armed with nearly unlimited resources, a grand jury, and an expansive mandate can draw blood almost at will. If a similar phalanx were to target Hillary Clinton and the shenanigans surrounding the Clinton Foundation, how much blood would flow? In other words, Mueller’s indictments are just the latest form of the non-verification verification.

Regardless of Mueller’s intentions, his probe serves as precisely the kind of “insurance policy” that Strzok seems to have been discussing with his lover, Lisa Page, in August 2016. Trump cannot shut down the Mueller probe and excise the rot in the DOJ and the FBI without appearing to obstruct justice. In practical terms, then, the Mueller probe is the cover-up.

Of course, the lofty-minded refuse to see it this way. The political damage that Mueller’s team is inflicting on Trump helps explain why a surprising number of people mount passionate and sincere defenses of the dossier and the super spy who compiled it. The logic of partisan politics will always lead a significant percentage of people to insist, with varying degrees of true belief, that a sow’s ear really is a silk purse. But partisanship is not by any means the only factor at work here. Even people with well-deserved reputations for intellectual seriousness passionately defend the integrity of Christopher Steele, a man whom the New York Times insists on calling, despite all contrary evidence, “a whistleblower.”

For a complete understanding of the dossier’s tenacious hold on lofty minds, one must supplement conventional political analysis with psychology. What we are witnessing is nothing less than a textbook case of denial and projection — the most perfect case imaginable.

The event that shaped the dossier more than any other was the hack of the DNC. Guccifer 2.0 first began releasing documents on June 15. A week later, Steele produced his first report. The Hillary Clinton that emerged from the DNC emails was preternaturally unsuited to a populist moment. Here she was: the Hillary Clinton who made high-priced speeches to Wall Street on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Here was the co-executive of the international slush funds of the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. Here was the power-hungry political boss who worked with the DNC to fix the Democratic primaries. Clinton’s supporters instinctively understood the size of the wound that the hack opened up, and they worked frantically to cauterize it — which meant deflecting attention from the greed, entitlement, and sleaze that characterized Clinton, Inc.

The dossier quickly became a tool for denying the deficiencies of Bill and Hillary Clinton, projecting them onto Donald Trump. Is Bill Clinton a sexual predator? That’s nothing. Trump pays teams of prostitutes to pee on him! Did Hillary Clinton preside over the failed “reset” with Russia? That’s nothing. Putin is blackmailing Trump, and he fears Hillary! Did Bill Clinton pocket a $500,000 fee for a speech he gave in Moscow, shortly before the sale of American uranium to Russian interests? That’s nothing. Trump’s been dependent on Putin for years! Do the emails from the DNC prove that Hillary Clinton rigged the primaries? That’s nothing. Trump conspired with Putin to rig the entire election!

In the wake of the DNC hack, leading figures in the press and senior officials in the Obama administration faced a choice. They could depict Carter Page as he really was: an unknown man of modest accomplishments who played no role of note in the Trump organization. Or they could conspire with Fusion GPS to promote the fiction that he was a sly operative in a sinister network. In a fateful choice, they opted for dishonesty and deception over truth.

Once the enablers of Hillary Clinton compromised their own integrity, they internalized her program of denial and projection. Their own egos are now invested in perpetuating it. To avoid owning up to their shortcomings, they insist, in ever-shriller tones, on the personal integrity of the super spy and the credibility of his reports. The mere acknowledgement of a simple truth — that the “dossier” is junk — would constitute an admission either of deep professional malfeasance or of gob-smacking gullibility.

Choose your poison, Hillary enablers: You duped people and thereby abetted a gross abuse of power; or you were yourself badly duped.

Choose your poison: You duped people and thereby abetted a gross abuse of power; or you were yourself badly duped. That is the dilemma that the lofty-minded now face. The choice is excruciating. It requires abandoning satisfying self-images and embracing painful self-truths — while also handing a well-deserved victory to a hated political enemy. As a consequence, the Steele dossier has proved to be as consequential as it is asinine.

The Greatest Denier

Of course, no one is in deeper denial than Hillary Clinton herself. After she had conceded to Trump on the night of the election, Obama called her. Taking the phone, she said, “Mr. President, I’m sorry.”

Sorry, no doubt, that the baton had fallen to the ground once again. Sorry that she would not be the first female president. Sorry that she would not hold the reins of power. But was contrition an aspect of any component of her sorrow?
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If there is one thing Hillary Clinton does not do well, it is contrition. In an interview last September, she clung to the fiction that the election was stolen. Her belief that Trump conspired with Putin was absolute. “There certainly was communication, and there certainly was an understanding of some sort,” Clinton said. She had “no doubt” that Putin sought a Trump victory, that there was “a tangle of financial relationships” between Trump and Russia, and that Trump’s associates “worked really hard to hide their connections with Russians.” Were those, in her mind, clear signs of collusion? “I’m convinced of it,” she said.

She will remain convinced until the day she dies. The alternative, a rigorous examination of conscience, is too painful to contemplate. How much longer will Hillary Clinton’s damaged psyche hold America hostage?"

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