nortex97 said:
Russian collusion narrative post-election '16 started with, of course team Clinton and Fusion GPS. From RCP:
Quote:
Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up," Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes report in their book, "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign."
"For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public," wrote Allen, who works for NBC News Digital, and Parnes, who reports for The Hill. "Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."
The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign," and it clearly succeeded. After the election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel. TDIP's dossier reboot put the influence operation into overdrive.
Quote:
A month after TDIP was formed in 2017, former Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri summed up the post-election strategy in a Washington Post column comparing "Russiagate" to Watergate and encouraging the press and other Democrats to "turn the Russia story against Trump."
"If we make plain that what Russia has done is nothing less than an attack on our republic, the public will be with us. And the more we talk about it, the more they'll be with us," she advised. "Polls show that voters are now concerned about the Russia story and overwhelmingly support an independent investigation."
Though the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory was officially debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report in March 2019, it has tied up Trump presidency. A separate report released late last year by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz also debunked many of the theories propagated by the dossier, while uncovering misconduct by the FBI in using the dossier to obtain warrants to electronically eavesdrop on a Trump campaign adviser.
Podesta's and Sullivan's recently released testimony provides evidence that the Clinton team and other Democrats never stopped campaigning against Trump. Hillary Clinton didn't just pay for the Russian-sourced opposition research on candidate Trump before the election; her top aides helped bankroll continuing efforts to cast the now sitting president as a Russian agent.
Quote:
Mimicking the Clinton campaign, TDIP hired Fusion GPS and Steele to conduct the new opposition research, paying them millions of dollars. Podesta steered his repurposed partners to donors at a time when the Clinton campaign had not yet closed its books; the campaign was still open. In 2017 alone, TDIP raised more than $7 million with his help.
The well-funded project's work which dwarfs the original work done for the Clinton campaign, both in budget and scope -- has been largely shrouded in mystery. But a months-long examination by RealClearInvestigations, drawn from documents and more than a dozen interviews, found that the organization is running an elaborate media-influence operation that includes driving and shaping daily coverage of the Russia "collusion" theory, as well as pushing stories about Trump in the national media that attempt to tie the president or his associates to the Kremlin. For instance, TDIP was behind stories keeping alive the dossier's discredited claim that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had met during the 2016 campaign with Kremlin officials in Prague, a rumor that has now been thoroughly debunked by inspector general and special counsel reports.
Long story short: these degenerates craft narratives and lies, feed them to the media, the media publishes them and pushes the stories, millions of Americans are duped into believing the lies whether predisposed to because of TDS or because they think the media wouldn't peddle false info.
Has this ever been done to another American President? I know Bush caught a lot of media heat but this kind of organized disinformation arm of the Dems would make Goebbels beam with pride.