Even before his first 100 days in office, the left has tirelessly aimed to dismantle Donald Trump's presidency using the Russia narrative to take down those closest to him, one by one, until — like in the game chess — they reach the king himself.
The allegations that Trump "colluded" with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election are so outrageous that even those who were opposed to his candidacy have indirectly come to his defence.
For one, outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban recently argued over Twitter that there was "no chance this is a DJT-led conspiracy," because Trump "isn't detail oriented, organised or big picture enough" to pull off such a thing. Cuban also suggested that if anyone who had developed ties to Russia became involved in Trump's campaign, they "had no clue that those connections were possibly being influenced by Russia" and that they "had no idea what was happening."
In Russia, the lines are often blurred between business and politics.
However, one cannot examine the left's Russia narrative without considering the strong likelihood that members of the Obama administration surveilled the Trump campaign and their associates, both foreign and domestic, to gather information which they then used to allege collusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op6OL_5Lpvg
President Trump alleged that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump Towers to garner information about his team and how foreign diplomats viewed him soon after the Russia talks surfaced.
Last month, House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced that two White House aides provided him with dozens of intelligence reports that included details — highly inappropriate details — on President Trump's transition team. Despite it all, the Democrats have relentlessly pushed the Russian "collusion" narrative, suggesting that the wiretapping allegations are merely a diversion tactic.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called Trump's wiretapping claims a wrap-up smear employed by authoritarian leaders. "It's called a wrap-up smear," Pelosi said on CNN. "You make up something. Then you have the press write about it. And then you say, everybody is writing about this charge. It's a tool of an authoritarian."
However, the real red herring is the Russia collusion story considering there is zero evidence that Russia actually tampered with the US elections. In fact, Hillary Clinton managed to torpedo her own campaign by skipping over working-class, white male voters in places like Michigan and Wisconsin; states that helped push Trump into the White House.
To understand the true nature of obstruction, one must look no further than 2015, when the Obama administration interfered in Israeli elections by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a group that sought to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Some might argue that any attempt to torpedo a presidency, the way it's being done to Trump, is a far more egregious offence than the Watergate scandal that took Republican President Richard M. Nixon down.
But whose counting.
For one, the CENTCOM scandal of 2014 was a hallmark of the Obama administration's history of manipulating intelligence for political gain. That year, senior members of US Central Command changed intelligence assessments in order to make it seem like, under the leadership of then-President Obama, the United States was winning the war against the Islamic State. The same Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) that Obama infamously referred to the terrorist group as the "JV team."
Further, the allegations that Russia was behind thousands of leaked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails — which helped expose the corruption of the Clinton campaign — were denied by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange who outright said: "That is the circumstantial evidence that some Russian, or someone who wanted to make them look like a Russian, was involved, with these other media organisations. That is not the case for the material that we released."
Last month, Pelosi's Democratic counterpart, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, echoed her sentiment on the news network. "For a president of the United States to make such an incendiary charge — and one that discredits our democracy in the eyes of the world — is as destructive as it was baseless."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oiBs-5j0dM
Yet, on Sunday, CNN's
State of the Union Sunday Schiff
said that he did not "agree with" chairman Nunes's "characterisation" of the documents about the alleged surveillance of Trump's transition. And he certainly did not say Nunes was wrong about what he said.
And while the Obama administration, a former intelligence official, and FBI Director James Comey have denied the charges that wiretapping took place at Trump Tower, last month,
Fox News senior political contributor Brit Hume
pointed out a potential contradiction in Comey's testimony before the House Intelligence Committee about Trump's 2016 election campaign's alleged collusion with Russia that raised eyebrows.
Hume noted that during the testimony, Comey acknowledged that an investigation dating back to last summer took place, but he also denied that there was surveillance, which was likely necessary to have an investigation in the first place.
"The FBI director also said in an answer to the question that he had found no evidence, no information pointing to a wiretap of Donald Trump or of Trump Tower — no evidence of that," Hume told Tucker Carlson. "However, what about this investigation that's been going on since July of the Trump campaign and Trump associates? Are we to believe there is no surveillance associated with that? We do know, as you pointed out, that Mike Flynn was caught up in a wiretap. That may be a routine wiretap of the Russian ambassador to whom he was speaking. But who knows?"
Hume also noted that when Comey made the announcement that there was an ongoing investigation, "e said he received permission from higher up to do this announcement." Hume drew back to a 19 January story in the New York Times that said that the investigation "was based on surveillance that indicated there had been these contacts. That story also said it wasn't clear that the wiretaps turned up anything about the Trump campaign. So, we don't kind of know where we are here. And remember this — this is also supposedly a counterintelligence investigation, which means that it is basically national security matters. So, what's up with that? I mean, what's that tell us about how likely they are to find about Putin or collusion? One wonders."
Carlson added, "f there was an investigation, and there was, there was surveillance."
A reporter for the New York Times recently suggested that the Obama administration "left a trail of bread crumbs" of evidence in an attempt to tie Trump's campaign to the Russians. However, the cake is in the fact that Trump's campaign was being surveilled by the previous administration in order to find out who he was meeting with and what they were saying about him.
But more than anything else, you don't get bread crumbs from cake.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.