Former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attend the Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2016 (Voice of America/Wikimedia Commons)
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Barack Obama has long bragged about his supposedly scandal-free presidency, a claim that conveniently ignores a host of ethical problems, from Hunter Biden profiting off access to Obama’s White House to the IRS harassing conservative activists. But the biggest scandal of Obama’s presidency is still coming into focus: his administration’s spying on a political opponent, Donald Trump, based on nothing more than a dirty trick deployed by Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
The collusion in the 2016 election was not between Trump and Russia but between Hillary and the United States government under Obama.
On the speaking circuit these days, Obama lectures Americans on dangers to democracy. But he presided over the most significant one in recent memory: an utterly bogus investigation that hobbled Trump’s campaign and presidency. Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, had informed him by at least July of 2016 that Hillary was pushing a Trump-Russia collusion claim. Obama could have instructed his agencies to steer clear of this nonsense. But he didn’t.
John Durham, the Justice Department special counsel who is examining this debacle, has shown in his filings the ease with which Hillary got friends in the Obama administration to investigate Trump. Christopher Steele, her chief opposition researcher, was peddling the Trump-Russia hoax across the Obama administration in the months before the election.
The final Durham report will presumably detail the full extent of that collusion. In some cases, it can be plausibly argued that the Hillary campaign simply duped government officials.
Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.
What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources.
On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele, to ask for his professional reaction. He told me it was potentially “collateral” information. I asked him what that meant. He said that it was similar but separate from the information he had gathered from his sources. I agreed to let him keep a copy of the Shearer notes.
The Shearer to whom Winer refers is not a “journalist” but another dirt-digger long associated with Hillary Clinton.