'Russiagate' Unveils The Depths Of Corruption In American Politics

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For the last seventeen months now, the daily serving of American political news has included a generous helping of Robert Mueller, the Russiagate investigation that has morphed into an “is there any way possible we can get rid of Trump?” investigation, and a never changing but frothy lack of evidence to show that anything dishonest or disingenuous happened in Donald Trump’s campaign to be President of the United States.

Now, according to an opinion piece released by the Hill on Sunday 20 May, one of the issues that has been hiding in plain sight is getting some attention.

That issue is the increasingly evident amount of corruption in the US government agencies, notably the intelligence services and the Justice Department.

Mark Penn, the writer of this piece, puts his thought forward:

At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton “matter,” but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done.

It is hard to see how a year-long investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.

This is a very clear conclusion. The use of intelligence services - which are supposed to help protect the American people from dangers foreign and domestic - as tools of opposition research, (slander in six syllables) has become increasingly transparent, even as the investigation that this “research” helped launch was supposedly intended to find fault with the candidate Donald Trump and so set the wheels of outrage in motion so as to have him removed from office.

But it is not working.

And as time goes on, these selfsame groups appear to be impugning themselves in a manner that is actually amazing to see. The amazement comes from how such a corrupt operation could be put in motion, and how that operation is only succeeding in outing itself, and yet, it continues, on and on.

The fanciful “dossier” assembled by Christopher Steele and its use by the Clinton camp to create a story out of nothing is one aspect of this level of corruption.

Another is the fact that no evidence against Mr. Trump has arisen that connects him in any way to some sort of illicit or illegal interference with the American election.

A third one is the strange circumstance of Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of a special counsel after his personal recommendation calling for the firing of James Comey from the Director’s post of the FBI. After Comey was gone, Rosenstein and Robert Mueller joined forces to go forward on this “investigation.”

Sixteen prosecutors are on this team. The budget is not disclosed and is presumed to be unlimited. The team also has on it a former attorney for the Clinton Foundation, and the team has overturned facts, files and people’s lives in order to intimidate and press the idea that “something had to have gone wrong for this man to be elected President.”

Bob Mueller’s own behavior is also a mystery in this. The fact that he is still going at this process after such a long time of finding nothing seemed a mystery to even former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani.

However, if there is a takeaway from this whole story, politically, according to Mr. Penn, it appears to be this:

…[T]he Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again.

In other words, If you are not going to play by the Deep State playbook, get out. If you don’t get out, we will make your life hell until you do.

There seems to be no question left about the legitimacy of the 2016 US Presidential election. Donald Trump won the contest. It would seem that he won because... he won. Enough people wanted him in the right states that they voted for him, and he won.

An interesting, and perhaps, alarming question still remains.

“Why?”

The Trump victory was unexpected by almost all political polls. It was apparently completely unexpected by President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and many others who include Republicans as well as Democrats. This election seems to have defied the common cynicism that many Americans developed, that being that “the game is rigged.”

In a sense, as we see from Mr. Penn’s piece, this cynicism was actually proven correct. The game has indeed been rigged for a long time. Mr. Trump beat the game because he went totally outside it and got the American people engaged in numbers great enough to break the hold this “deep state” has on the process. This was perhaps an example of what happens when the Republic actually works as it should.

And there is something about that that seems to have these embeds very worried. President Trump has not pleased everyone in his Presidency. Sometimes he even displeases his supporters. But his will to win through to what he wants has proven indomitable, and his ability to outthink and outmaneuver his opposition is surprising. It would be no surprise to presume that the deep state will continue its attacks, only switching narrative gears when it has to. After all, this has already been shown to be the case while the Mueller investigation has been running.

The final question all this raises is this.

“What would have happened had Hillary won?”