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Sunday, October 29, 2017

Flipping the Script

In 2016, Wikileaks released emails of DNC personnel that showed the DNC under Debbie Wasserman Schultz conspired with the Clinton campaign to rig the Democrat primaries so that Bernie Sanders couldn't win.  No one disputed that these were real emails, but the Democrats and the media focused instead on who gave the emails to Wikileaks.  About the same time, Wikileaks started publishing the emails from the account of John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton's campaign.  These emails showed all sorts of things, none of which were very complimentary to Hillary.  Again, there was no attempt to dispute the accuracy of the emails published.  The focus was on who gave the emails to Wikileaks.  There was no government review of the computers that were hacked at the DNC; the Democrats forbade the FBI access to those computers.  Instead, an outside "security" firm was hired to do the review and that firm pronounced the Russians to be guilty of the hacking.  Thus was born the whole "Russia hacked the election" mantra and then the Trump-Russia investigation.

Keep those facts in mind as we look at the main reaction to the news that the phony Trump dossier that the FBI used to get a FISA warrant in 2016 to surveil people involved with the Trump campaign was, in fact, paid for by the DNC and the Cllinton campaign.  The basic view from Clinton-land has been that the source of the dossier doesn't matter; we need look only to see if the facts in that dossier are accurate.  Here, for example, is what James Clapper told CNN after the news broke:

“With respect to the dossier itself, the key thing is it doesn’t matter who paid for it.  It’s what the dossier said and the extent to which it’s corroborated or not.”

The former Director of National Intelligence suddenly is focused on the truth, or lack of truth of the allegations, not the source.  Of course, we know that the dossier is mostly untrue.  When it was the email of the DNC and John Podesta which were admittedly true, he wanted to ignore the validity of the content and focus only on the source.

This is what is called flipping the script.

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