Reported 2016 Russian Collusion count: 2 for Team Clinton and 2 for Team Trump.
Team Clinton:
The Steele dossier, was Russian collusion, with the Clinton campaign and DNC hiring a retired British spy, Christopher Steele to dig up Russian dirt on Donald Trump. That Russian dirt, unverified and from unknown Russian sources has been used by the Obama Justice Dept. to launch investigations into the Trump campaign and is also the major SPIN cover for the #Resist effort.
The second Clinton Russian collusion effort, is reported to also have been successful at digging up Russian dirt on Donald Trump. The Guardian reports:
The second memo was written by Cody Shearer, a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s.
Unlike Steele, Shearer does not have a background in espionage, and his memo was initially viewed with scepticism, not least because he had shared it with select media organisations before the election.
However, the Guardian has been told the FBI investigation is still assessing details in the “Shearer memo” and is pursuing intriguing leads.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/30/trump-russia-collusion-fbi-cody-shearer-memo
The Shearer memo mirrors much of the Steele dossier. Imagine that… So, the FBI is seriously using dirt from a Clinton sleaze operative, part of the old Clinton-scandals-witness-intimidation-squad, to bolster the Steele dossier…
Next up, the two Team Trump Russian collusion efforts did not bear fruit.
The Don. Jr. meeting with the Russian lawyer, that was spun as a discussion about Russian adoption, fizzled. Andrew McCarthy wrote about that in his article, The Gang That Couldn’t Lie Straight.
The other Trump campaign effort was a Republican operative, Peter Smith, who was reported to have tried to hire a British security firm to locate Russian hackers, with the intention of buying Hillary’s emails. Smith died last year in May, 10 days after talking to a WSJ reporter. Smith is reported to have committed suicide:
“At the time, the newspaper reported Smith’s May 14 death came about 10 days after he granted the interview. Mystery shrouded how and where he had died, but the lead reporter on the stories said on a podcast he had no reason to believe the death was the result of foul play and that Smith likely had died of natural causes.
In the note recovered by police, Smith apologized to authorities and said that “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER” was involved in his death. He wrote that he was taking his own life because of a “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017” and timing related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.””
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-peter-smith-death-met-0713-20170713-story.html
Further on in that same Chicago Tribune story is this fascinating bit of info:
“Smith’s death occurred at the Aspen Suites in Rochester, records show. They list the cause of death as “asphyxiation due to displacement of oxygen in confined space with helium.”
Rochester police Chief Roger Peterson on Wednesday called Smith’s manner of death “unusual,” but a funeral home worker said he’d seen it before.”
Color me just a tad suspicious… 10 days after talking to a WSJ reporter… Who knows, his Russian collusion may have been successful, but unlike the Steele dossier, I am sure Lynch and Comey would not have been using recovered emails from her”extremely careless” homebrew server, as evidence in Hillary’s “no intent”, ummm, “matter”…
Stranger than fiction. Can’t wait to see the next chapter in this 2016 never ending Russian collusion “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” (psst, that’s part of a 1939 Winston Churchill quote about Russia).
Later, I am cooking supper.
libertybelle diaries 
Back on October 10th 2017 John Schindler put up a piece first(?) on his old blog 20committee which I used to comment on.
Fairly immediately Schindler’s post crossed over to the Observer site upon which, prior to the November 2016 election helpfully provided the disclaimer/disclosure that, although we don’t see it anymore used to plainly state:
“This [space] is owned by Jared Kushner.”
Within Mr. Schindler’s 2017 piece,
https://20committee.com/2017/10/10/the-trouble-with-the-steele-dossier/
John inserted a link to a Vanity Fair article authored by one Howard Blum explaining as preface “[T]he essential outline of how it came to be is already clear” with that outline titled on the Vanity Fair site – “HOW EX-SPY CHRISTOPHER STEELE COMPILED HIS EXPLOSIVE TRUMP-RUSSIA DOSSIER”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/how-the-explosive-russian-dossier-was-compiled-christopher-steele
From which I (my words) excerpt:
“On a bright autumn weekend in late November in Nova Scotia, about 300 deep thinkers—a collection of academics, government officials, corporate executives, and journalists from 70 countries—settled in for a couple of ruminative days at the annual Halifax International Security Forum. … It was at some point in this busy weekend that Senator John McCain and David J. Kramer, a former State Department official whose bailiwick was Russia and who now toils at Arizona State University’s Washington-based McCain Institute for International Leadership, found themselves huddling with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia. … Had Sir Andrew arrived in Halifax on his own covert mission? Was it just an accident that his conversation with Senator McCain happened to meander its way to the findings in Steele’s memos?”
“[A]ll that can be firmly established is that McCain and Kramer listened with a growing attentiveness to Sir Andrew’s summary of what was purportedly in these reports—and the two men came to realize they had to see them with their own eyes. Kramer, the good soldier, volunteered to retrieve them. … [A]bout a week later, using a ticket purchased with miles from his own account, Kramer flew out of Washington and landed early the next morning at Heathrow. [After]Kramer engaged in an exchange of word code Steele whisked him off in a Land Rover to the security of his house in Surrey. … Steele passed him his report. Was this the identical 35-page memo making the rounds among reporters? Or, as some intelligence analysts believe, a longer document. … Neither McCain nor Kramer would comment.”
“On December 9, McCain sat in the office of F.B.I. director James Comey and, with no other aides present, handed him the typed pages that could bring about the downfall of a president. Afterward, the senator would issue a statement that amounted to little more than a hapless shrug, and a disingenuous one to boot: he had been “unable to make a judgment about their accuracy” and so he’d simply passed them on.”
***
Color me “a tad suspicious” too.
Something I submit, “Stinks.”
Thanks JK, that has been quite enlightening. I am very tired of the 2016 SPIN info war, but still many miles to go.
P.S. I sure wish I had your intelligence-gathering skills. Quite impressive. I’m baking chocolate chip cookies for my husband right now ( a nice break from memos and spin, lol).
Well … think we ought keep an eye on this?
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/375205-mccain-associate-invokes-fifth-amendment-on-trump-dossier
Something I’d not seen before (possibly referred to in your Guardian excerpt)
“In a memo dated Oct. 19, 2016, Steele wrote that a foreign source who was in touch with “a friend of the Clintons” passed him material through a U.S. State Department connection.”
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/372328-senate-documents-show-fbi-trying-to-suppress-release-of-new-trump-dossier
Okay I’m finished.
Thanks JK, I had read that too… You are as bad as me at never resting until you find the last golden kernels, rofl. Have a nice afternoon:-)
Thanks JK:-). I’ll be glad when #Agitpropcalypse is as moldering as Lenin’s body… I’ll listen – although I remember commenting at NR when they still used DISQUS for their comments – didn’t agree with May’s take on anything in a piece, wrote a long comment… Vaguely, recall it might have been the “Syrian moderate” word game (which was just more SPUN agitprop-original source unknown, in my book). Part of the new strategy by catchphrase and popular punditry circle, and ya’know what I think about all that “military strategy by slogan”… He’s an “expert”, so his opinions matter, not the weight of his arguments or reasoning.
Woke up early, again. I meant to tell you what you’re missing by not joining Twitterville. The “important people, deemed “voices worth listening to”, can apply to become a verified account – that means they get a special “blue checkmark” by their name. Not sure who in Twitter Central Planning decides on bestowing the coveted “blue checkmark”, but if you have one, your account is under your name.
If you don’t have a “blue checkmark” you are nobody worth listening to and even if you use your real name on your account – doesn’t matter… because your account hasn’t been “verified” by the powers that be at Twitter Central Planners…
So the elites, who are “verified as important people” (both left and right) love to point out the idiot anonymous Tweeters… For some of the elite “blue checkmarked, important voices” it seems like their favorite pastime to ridicule the ignorant “not-important-enough-to qualify-for-a-blue-checkmark rabble”… The uneducated masses, I guess…
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