Topic: Lying Liars' Lies About Trump's Russian Collusion Have Collapsed (Read 118 times)

USA Today, really liberal rag.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/29/roger-stone-not-guilty-plea-donald-trump-russian-collusion-bail-column/2710177002/

Stone was hauled in to federal court Friday morning after a theatrical, televised arrest that should be the subject of a Justice Department investigation or congressional inquiry. Why the excessive threat of force? Though CNN denies it, many still wonder whether the network was tipped off. The extreme intimidation tactic might have been intended to send a message, but it only tended to confirm the biases of those who see special counsel Robert Mueller's entire effort as a rogue operation.

The “process crimes” Stone is charged with, such as lying and witness tampering, are potentially serious. But he was not charged with facilitating Trump campaign collusion with Russian hackers, and the indictment itself gives little reason to believe there ever were any.

It was certainly not a crime for the Trump campaign to be interested in what WikiLeaks had on Hillary Clinton or other Democrats. WikiLeaks had established itself as a reliable — though notorious — source for purloined information. Weeks before WikiLeaks published the emails, Democrats had made public that their computer systems had been hacked, allegedly by Russian operatives, though WikiLeaks has denied that Moscow was its source.

Regardless of where the emails came from, once WikiLeaks began to publish them, everyone in America wanted to know what was in them, no doubt especially the Trump team. Roger Stone was simply conducting his version of opposition research, albeit ineptly. And the indictment notes that Stone was “claiming both publicly and privately” to be in contact with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign, so if he were trying to keep his activities a secret he was doing a poor job.

What this story indicates is that the Trump campaign didn't have close ties to WikiLeaks, and no knowledge about what was in the emails, which presumably it would have if there were collusion afoot. And though investigations have found 100 contacts between members of the Trump circle and a variety of Russians during the 2016 campaign, none of the reported communications offers clear evidence of election tampering, quid pro quos, prior knowledge of dirty tricks, or anything else that would confirm the collusion narrative.

The collusion story was a speculative proposition from the start. It apparently originated with former CIA Director John Brennan, who testified to Congress about his concerns that Russian agents might try to suborn members of the Trump team during the 2016 campaign, based on tips from foreign intelligence services. But rather than warning a major-party presidential candidate that he was a target of a foreign influence operation — which you would expect from a supposedly nonpartisan career intelligence official — Brennan established an interagency task force that targeted Trump’s circle. And while Brennan has more recently called President Donald Trump’s denial of collusion “hogwash,” he still cannot produce evidence to support the charge. If the Trump administration would declassify documents related to the activities of Brennan’s group during the campaign, the public might gain more insight into who was colluding against whom.