Put yourself in Hillary Clinton’s shoes. No, really. I know it’s an abhorrent thought, but imagine being Hillary, having initiated the greatest political dirty trick of all time, watching Russiagate unspool over the past decade. Think of her witnessing the country go down the granddaddy of all rabbit holes in 2017 – a rabbit hole she personally helped dig — looking for proof of Russian collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that she knew didn’t exist.
What was she thinking as the country hired a special prosecutor and spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to pursue leads that she and her campaign team had fabricated out of thin air? Was she ever remorseful? Was there ever a moment when she wanted to reel in the whole sorry deception and tell the country that she was sorry, and that she had lied?
No, there was not. Hillary Clinton even wrote a book called ‘What Happened?’ in which she blamed Putin, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and former CIA Director James Comey for her shocking loss to Donald Trump, a non-politician whom she mocked and derided. To this day, she sticks to her self-serving fable, that Russian President Vladimir Putin was out to get her and, but for his interference, she would surely have become the country’s first female president.
The reality is that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate, disliked and distrusted by most Americans. Polling from CNN that came out about the time of the 2016 Democrat Convention gives a taste of what voters thought of Clinton. The Washington Post reported, ’68 percent say Clinton isn’t honest and trustworthy… her worst number on-record…. The 30 percent who see Clinton as honest and trustworthy is now well shy of the number who say the same of Trump: 43 percent.’
The public was right not to trust Clinton; the more we learn about Russiagate, and her role in it, the more apparent that is.
Any normal person would conclude that Clinton, whose approval rating CNN pegged at a dismal 31% in July 2016, was not a shoo-in come the November election. Barack Obama had been president for eight years and the country had become less Democrat-leaning during his term; only 31% of the nation identified as Democrat in 2016, while 36% had described themselves as true blue in 2008, when he was first elected.
Though expressing confidence that she would win, maybe Hillary knew she had to pull out all stops to beat Donald Trump. Perhaps that’s why she signed off on two dirty tricks that led to the despicable undermining of Donald Trump’s presidency.
First, her former campaign manager Robby Mook testified in court that she personally approved her campaign’s scheme in October 2016 to tell a Slate magazine reporter about an unverified server backchannel between the Trump Organization and Alfa bank in Moscow. This supposed connection formed the first step in trying to convince the public that Donald Trump was a tool of Vladimir Putin. The purported link never existed, but it was widely publicized by Hillary’s supporters and the legacy media (I repeat myself), creating suspicion in the public’s mind.
After the Slate story emerged, weeks before the election, Hillary put out a tweet claiming ‘Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,’ followed up by a news release in which she said, ‘This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.’
The FBI subsequently concluded no ‘hotline,’ indeed no link, ever existed. Interestingly, another apparatchik pushing the Trump-Alfa bank lie was Jake Sullivan, later presumably rewarded by President Joe Biden appointing the unknown politico to be National Security Adviser.
Of course, the bigger and more destructive Russia collusion lie that Hillary helped originate came from the salacious allegations contained in the Steele dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, which led to the longtime investigation into Russian interference and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. This is a fact, verified by the fact that the Federal Election Commission under Biden penalized the campaign and the DNC for lying about having funded that opposition research.
The story, however, goes on. New revelations have revived accusations that Hillary Clinton, as well as Barack Obama, James Comey, John Brennan and others manipulated intelligence and facts to feed the public even more lies about Donald Trump’s supposed ties to Russia.
Amazingly, the New York Times has again leapt into the breach to protect Clinton, perhaps concerned they might lose their 2018 Pulitzer earned for helping promote a fake news story. They reference, ‘An annex to a report by the special counsel John H. Durham’ but claim the disclosures are an effort by ‘the Trump team [seeking] to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files.’ They write that GOP allegations that ‘Mrs. Clinton had approved a campaign proposal to tie Mr. Trump to Russia to distract from the scandal over her use of a private email server’ is not valid because…the damning emails contained in the annex are likely fabrications from Russian spies. Sure.
Will we ever know the complete truth about the plot hatched to discredit the Trump presidency? Probably not, and it is probably also true that key players like Hillary Clinton will never be held accountable.
But, as Hillary watches the ongoing revelations coming from the Trump White House, we can also imagine that she is getting her comeuppance. Her treachery and deceit -– knowing how badly she has abused the public’s trust — has surely shriveled her soul, leaving her bitter and defeated.
People now see her as a corrupt schemer, someone who knew she could not win an election on her merits and so resorted to lies and fabrications that hurt the country.
We also now see her as someone who didn’t just attack President Trump, but also the 61 million Americans who voted for him in 2016.