A Stroll Through Memory Lane: The FBI and the Clinton Campaign

 And the point of all this is to circle back to the whole matter of Trump-Russia.  Conventional wisdom in the "Russia hoax" narrative now posits and iron triangle of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the mainstream media all joining forces to thwart a Trump candidacy and smear Trump with the fake Steele Dossier.

All of this seriously muddles the timeline and calls for a considerable degree of revisionist history and an impressive forgetting of what actually happened in the 2016 campaign.  But narrative has a way of overtaking facts, so in order to refute stories of the Clinton/FBI/MSM alliance, let us take a tour down memory lane about what actually happened.

The Clinton Campaign and the FBI

First consider Clinton and the FBI. It is true, of course, that FBI began investigating the Trump campaign in July, 2016.  However, this fact did not become public until after the election and therefore did nothing to harm the Trump campaign.

Clinton, by contrast, was under open and public FBI investigation for a year before the Trump investigation began, a fact that almost certainly did harm at least some voters' view of Clinton.  The FBI publicly declined to prosecute Clinton several weeks before it opened its investigation into Trump, but a year of FBI scrutiny made Hillary highly suspicious and distrustful of the organization, contrary to allegations that they were working hand-in-glove.

These strained relations proved costly for the Clinton Campaign.  The FBI began warning the Democratic National Campaign (DNC) as early as September, 2015 of Russian hacking attempts. These warnings went unanswered until the DNC became aware that it had been hacked in May, 2016.  The delay proved costly to the the Democrats, and perhaps to Trump as well.  While in September, 2015, the DNC had been hacked by Russia's civilian intelligence agency, a/k/a the SVR, a/ka "Cozy Bear," Cozy Bear limited itself to intelligence gathering and never publicly disclosed DNC materials.  Perhaps a timely response would have prevented hack by Russia's military intelligence, a/k/a the GRU, a/k/a Fancy Bear, which did not hack in until April, 2016, and which did start revealing the materials it found in within a fairly short time.  And, after all, if there had been no successful Russian hack-and-leak, there would have been no question of whether Trump was complicit in it and no Trump/Russia investigation.

It is true that the Clinton Campaign (indirectly) commissioned the Steele Dossier, and that Steele turned over his findings to the FBI, which investigated them. But the Clinton campaign did not know about the FBI's investigation of Trump, which was a closely guarded secret.  And neither the Clinton Campaign nor the FBI ever revealed the existence of the Steele Dossier to the public.  It is true, of course, that both knew about the allegations, and that this knowledge presumably influenced their actions.  But it seems decidedly strange that they would conspire together to frame Trump with a fake dossier and then never release it to the public until after he won the election.

Another point often made by Trump defenders is that the FBI investigators looking into his possible Russia ties were hopelessly biased against him, as shown by the strongly anti-Trump texts exchanged between the lovers, Peter Strozk and Lisa Page.  The accusation is true, but incomplete. The New York field office, which investigated Hillary, was strongly biased against her and greatly resented the decision not to prosecute. Many people on our side of the aisle wonder what an inspector general investigation of the New York field office and their internal texts might reveal.  In defense of members of both investigations, it seems most likely that both succumbed to the all-to-human failings of tunnel vision and confirmation bias.  Focusing so hard on a particular target, both investigations developed a deep-seated hostility to their target and a conviction that there must be something much worse just below the surface if only they could find it. This is a very understandable tendency in human nature, but it must be combatted when people's liberties are at stake.

But what should be the final nail in the coffin of the theory that the FBI improperly colluded with the Clinton campaign was its October 28 announcement, less than two weeks before the election, that it was reopening the Clinton e-mail investigation.  This was in clear violation of FBI policy not to take action in high-profile politically charged investigations so soon before an election. The last-minute investigation proved to be utterly trivial, but it may very well have thrown the election to Trump.  Hardly the actions of an agency secretly in league with Clinton!