What has been heard can’t be unheard.
Via The Federalist:
Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, writes in the Wall Street Journal that evidence abounds of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.
But rather than providing evidence, he proves the opposite: Democrats have absolutely no proof of President Trump colluding with Russia. And Schiff harms himself and the country by making such wild claims. To see why, take Schiff’s points in turn.
Manafort, Papadopoulos, and FlynnFirst, Schiff claims that because the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller has led to charges, this must mean Mueller is on to something. Really? Paul Manafort was charged with crimes unrelated to his time as Trump’s campaign chair, and Manafort’s brief time as the campaign chair was only due to a lack of GOP operatives willing to work with Trump who understood the Byzantine process of a floor-fight at the Republican National Convention. As soon as Trump realized Manafort was problematic, he dropped him like a hot potato.
The charges against Manafort are related to him failing to disclose work for, and payments received by, foreign governments. Yes, this is a problem, but many in DC who violate this statute go unprosecuted. During the time in question—before Manafort was Trump campaign chair—Manafort was working with Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. We are all patiently waiting for Democrat Tony Podesta, and many others who ran afoul of this law, to be charged.
George Papadopoulos, a 29-year-old, was made a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign in March 2016. At this time the Trump operation was desperate to show that Trump didn’t just get his opinions on world events from “the shows.” While in Europe, and after he was added to the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos met with a Russian “professor” on March 14, 2016. The professor introduced him to Vladimir Putin’s “niece,” and on April 26, 2016, the professor told Papadopoulos the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of her emails.
Schiff assumes the professor was talking about the WikiLeaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. As the president would say: Wrong! In April 2016, news of the DNC email theft had not been made public, and everyone living in conservative-ville was focused on finding the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her home-brew server. This was because many believed finding these emails would show Clinton doing favors at the State Department in return for cash from foreign actors.
And while the professor, Papadopoulos, and Putin’s “niece” talked a lot about setting up high-level meetings between Trump and Putin, absolutely nothing came from this. Papadopoulos even proposed a meeting between Trump and Putin to the Trump campaign, and the Trump camp quickly shot this idea down.