RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Steele dossier has already become a thing of John le Carré-like intrigue—British spies, Kremlin agents, legal cutouts, hidden bank accounts. What all this obscures is the more immediate point: The dossier amounts to one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history. It was perpetrated by Team Clinton and yielded a vast payoff for Hillary’s campaign.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS in April 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Fusion in turn hired former U.K. spook Christopher Steele to assemble the (now largely discredited) dossier. That full dossier of allegations wasn’t made public until after the election, in January 2017. And the media and Democrats continue to peddle the line that it played no role during the election itself.

“Details from the dossier were not reported before Election Day,” ran a recent CNN story. Hillary Clinton herself stressed the point in a recent “Daily Show” appearance. The dossier, she said, is “part of what happens in a campaign where you get information that may or may not be useful and you try to make sure anything you put out in the public arena is accurate. So this thing didn’t come out until after the election, and it’s still being evaluated.”

This is utterly untrue. In British court documents Mr. Steele has acknowledged he briefed U.S. reporters about the dossier in September 2016. Those briefed included journalists from the New York Times , the Washington Post, Yahoo News and others. Mr. Steele, by his own admission (in an interview with Mother Jones), also gave his dossier in July 2016 to the FBI.

Among the dossier’s contents were allegations that in early July 2016 Carter Page, sometimes described as a foreign-policy adviser to Candidate Trump, held a “secret” meeting with two high-ranking Russians connected to President Vladimir Putin. It even claimed these Russians offered to give Mr. Page a 19% share in Russia’s state oil company in return for a future President Trump lifting U.S. sanctions. This dossier allegation is ludicrous on its face. Mr. Page was at most a minor figure in the campaign and has testified under oath that he never met the two men in question or had such a conversation.

Yet the press ran with it. On Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff published a bombshell story under the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Mr. Isikoff said “U.S. officials” had “received intelligence” about Mr. Page and Russians, and then went on to recite verbatim all the unfounded dossier allegations. He attributed all this to a “well-placed Western intelligence source,” making it sound as if this info had come from someone in government rather than from an ex-spy-for-hire.

The Clinton campaign jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump. Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, the next day took to television to tout the Isikoff story and cite “U.S. intelligence officials” in the same breath as Mr. Page. Other Clinton surrogates fanned out on TV and Twitter to spread the allegations.

The Isikoff piece publicly launched the Trump-Russia collusion narrative—only 1½ months from the election—and the whole dossier operation counts as one of the greatest political stitch-ups of all time. Most campaigns content themselves with planting oppo research with media sources. The Clinton campaign commissioned a foreign ex-spy to gin up rumors, which made it to U.S. intelligence agencies, and then got reporters to cite it as government-sourced. Mrs. Clinton now dismisses the dossier as routine oppo research, ignoring that her operation specifically engineered the contents to be referred to throughout the campaign as “intelligence” or a “government investigation.”

Making matters worse, there may be a grain of truth to that last claim. If the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, it was in the summer of 2016 that Jim Comey’s FBI obtained a wiretap warrant on Mr. Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If it was the dossier that provoked that warrant, then the wrongs here are grave. Mr. Page is suing Yahoo News over that Isikoff story, but he may have a better case against the Clinton campaign and the federal government if they jointly spun

Former FBI Director James Comey’s explanation for not prosecuting Hillary Clinton was always improbable. Now it seems impossible.

The Espionage Act makes it a crime to mishandle classified documents “through gross negligence” (18 USC 793-f). Punishment upon conviction carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

With 110 emails on Clinton’s private server that were classified at the time they were sent or received, the Democratic nominee for president could have been prosecuted on 110 separate felony counts. Yet Comey scuttled the case.

But a story in The Hill this week by John Solomon says a newly discovered document shows that then-FBI Director Comey authored a draft statement accusing Clinton of mishandling classified documents and being “grossly negligent.”

The document was confirmed by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was written a full two months before Clinton was ever interviewed by the FBI.

However, sometime later the words “gross negligence” were edited out with red lines. The words “extremely careless” were substituted. This would appear to show that Comey knew Clinton violated the law but subsequently resolved to conjure a way to exonerate her by altering the language.

Comey didn’t do a very good job. The two terms are largely synonymous under the law.

Both before and after a shady, Kremlin-tied lawyer met with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign officials in June 2016, she consulted with a top official of Fusion GPS, the firm now known to have been commissioned by the Clinton campaign to produce the infamous Trump dossier.

A report by Fox News suggests there may thus have been coordination regarding the dossier between the Fusion principal, Glenn Simpson, and the Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya. That possibility cannot be discounted. After all, we don’t know what their discussions entailed, even though Simpson has met behind closed doors with congressional investigators.

But there’s a more plausible explanation. Their consultations were almost surely dominated by — if perhaps not exclusively taken up with — the civil forfeiture federal prosecutors were then pursuing against Prevezon Holdings, a Kremlin-crony company for which both Fusion and Veselnitskaya were working. To understand why, recall what was going on in the case at the time.

There has been a great deal of news in recent weeks about Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and that retained Fusion — which, in turn, hired former British spy Christopher Steele to compile the dossier. Less attention has been paid to Baker Hostetler, the law firm that represented Prevezon, and that retained Fusion to do research in connection with the forfeiture case.

Prevezon is controlled by the Katsyv family — specifically Denis Katsyv, the son of Pyotr Katsyv, a high-ranking Russian transportation official and close confederate of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Veselnitskaya is a lawyer for the Katsyvs in Moscow, a big part of what makes her a trusted Kremlin operative.

A couple of thoughts on the passing parade:

~Political memoirs are almost always boring, self-serving, committee-written and unreadable – Hillary’s What Happened being merely an especially bloated example. So Donna Brazile, hitherto one of the Clintons’ loyalest acolytes, might have been expected to turn in a more or less typical insider account of a flop campaign, worth neither your time nor money. Instead, she has confirmed what some of us charged at the time – that the Democrat establishment succeeded in doing to Bernie what the GOP establishment tried but failed to do to Trump: steal the nomination away from the insurgent.

Sanders vs Trump would have made it a much tougher race, and I suspect Bernie could have held a couple of those rust-belt states. But that match-up never happened, because, while the Republicans’ institutional corruption is ineffectual, the Democrats’ is lethal and all too effective. Ms Brazile’s publisher should have made a last-minute title-change and called the book What Really Happened. As is customary with the Clinto Nostra, Donna is now being accused of being a squealer and a turncoat: As the union heavies say in On the Waterfront, you’re supposed to stay D’n’D – deaf and dumb. Ms Brazile, of course, was previously head of the DNC, which is dumb’n’complicit.

I heard, I believe, Jessica Tarlov talking about this the other day, and regretting that the Brazile fracas had reopened the party divisions between the Sanders progressive wing and the Clinton moderate faction. But that’s not really what the divide is, is it? The party split is between Sanders social-justice warriors and the Clintons’ dynastic kleptocracy. And if the latter is what “moderation” and “centrism” look like, why be surprised that Dem foot-soldiers are lurching lefter? Kleptocrat centrism appeals only to wannabes – whether Clinton bagmen like Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who’d like to get a piece of the sleazy deals with Kazakh oligarchs; or media suck-ups who wish they were getting Clinton-sized six-figure sums from Goldman Sachs for speeches nobody wants to listen to.

Beyond that, kleptocrat centrism has no takers: In leftie parties around the world, it requires some effort to wean youthful idealists off their starry-eyed utopianism, and corrupt, entitled, pay-for-play Clintonism isn’t going to cut it. I made this point at the dawn of the 2016 presidential cycle in early 2015:

Leaving the studio, I ran into [Democrat pollster Doug Schoen] emerging from makeup and he upbraided me for my hostility to Hillary – which I felt bad about, because I’ve always gotten on well with him, and we have a shared interest in demography and whatnot. Twenty months later, Doug has caught up to my view.

But few other centrist Dems have. Yet the question underpinning Donna Brazile’s book is pretty basic: What do genuinely moderate Democrats have to show for mortgaging their brand to the Clinton Foundation? Me again:

Hillary got rich, Bill got laid, republican virtue got screwed. Like the sickly leaders of late-Soviet politburos, both appear older and feebler than their years: once the star performer of the double-act, Bill staggers around like the Blowjob of Dorian Gray; the life has all but literally been sucked out of him. His straight-woman, once the reliably stolid, stone-faced Margaret Dumont of his cigar-waggling routine, now has to be propped up on street bollards and fed lines by her medical staff. When she shuts down and she’s out cold, who’s driving the pantsuit? Huma? Cheryl? Podesta? Bill and Hillary have been consumed by their urges. America would be electing the Walking Dead, insatiable and fatal to the touch, but utterly hollow.

As long as “centrism” is cornered by the Clintocracy, the Democrats will continue to drift left and lefter. Clean house, or go full antifa.

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson dismissed a lawsuit by the families of the victims of Benghazi against Hillary Clinton. Judge Jackson decided that the families couldn’t sue Hillary either for wrongful death or for defamation. That isn’t too surprising as Jackson is a former Clinton donor who had been appointed by Obama. And a Clinton donor should never have been ruling on a Clinton case.

But now Judge Jackson will be presiding over the Paul Manafort case.

Presiding over Manafort’s indictment is Judge Deborah A. Robinson. Judge Robinson’s most prominent previous case was the Berger trial. Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s former National Security Adviser, stole classified documents about the terror failures of the Clinton administration, hid documents under a construction trailer, lied about taking them and destroyed some of them.

People have gone to jail for doing a whole lot less with classified documents. But not Clinton associates.

Sandy Berger was sentenced to two years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a fine.

Judge Robinson had presided over the “Scooter” Libby indictment. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in jail. Robinson may have had little to do with that final outcome. And may have had limited control over the eagerness of some in the DOJ to give Sandy Berger a pass. If nothing else, Robinson did end up raising the fine that Berger had to pay. But Berger still got a slap on the wrist and Libby didn’t.

FBI Director Christopher Wray had announced the slap on the wrist for Berger in his former capacity as Assistant Attorney General. And had declined to discuss the investigation while in progress. President Bush had wanted action, but the FBI had cheerfully dismissed the seriousness of the investigation.

And that’s just the way that it seems to go for Democrats and the way that it is for Republicans.

It’s not hard to see why. Take Judge Beryl Howell.

Howell is an Obama appointee and a former Leahy adviser. Beryl and her husband are both Dem donors. She’s also a pal of Obama’s former DOJ boss, Lorretta Lynch. And of Andrew Weissmann.

Weissmann, an Obama donor, is a key member of Mueller’s team.

And Judge Howell gave Mueller his grand jury and decided that Manafort wasn’t entitled to attorney-client privilege. It was an extraordinary and troubling decision. And its legitimacy can’t help but be questioned when it comes from a partisan Dem figure.