russiagate
Quelle surprise. After more than two years looking for a non-existent needle in an ever-expanding haystack, Chief Hunter of the Needle, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has finally declared that he hasn't been able to find it. This ought to come as no surprise, because as we know non-existent needles don't exist. Except, of course, in the minds of hundreds of foolish Democrat politicians and their dutiful stenographers in the mainstream media, or Global Pravda as it is known on this blog.

The fascinating thing about it all is that it wasn't hard to grasp that the needle didn't exist. It was obvious from the start. Here's what I wrote back in November 2017, almost 18 months before Robert Mueller finally gave up his pointless hunt:
Imagine a Convention of Village Idiots holding a never-ending hunt for a non-existent needle in an ever-expanding haystack. Every once in a while one of them finds a twig, or an old sock, or a marble, and with a look of sheer delight on their face they look up and squawk, 'I've found it'. And all the other VIs gather round to marvel at the needle, and the news is published in the press across the country that they've got it, and there is much rejoicing. Until that is, someone points out that what they've found is not a needle at all, but a twig or an old sock or a marble, and before you know it they've quietly put it to one side, and resumed the hunt.

The Convention, which sometimes goes by the name Russiagate, has been going on for more than a year now, and despite its participants claiming on multiple occasions to have found the needle, sadly for them they've still to locate it. You might think that after still not finding it after this long, they'd be discouraged enough to give up, go home, and tend to their gardens, or some other such useful endeavour. But not a bit of it. The fact that they keep finding things in the haystack that aren't needles only convinces them that there must be a needle in there somewhere. And so with a squawk of excitement and a cry of "On with the hunt", off they go again looking for it with more enthusiasm than ever, ready to unearth yet more non-needles.

What have they actually found? Well, there was the indictment of Paul Manafort. Surely that was a needle, wasn't it? Well, only in the same way that a needle resembles a brick, the charges against him being utterly unrelated to Russia, but instead about dealings he had in Ukraine years before Donald Trump ever announced he was standing for election. How about the indictment of George Papadopolous by the Mueller inquiry? Well, given that the charge against him is again nothing to do with collusion with Russia, but rather about lying to the FBI, that's not very needle-like either, is it?
Somehow though, supposedly serious and powerful people have believed in the non-existent needle with a zeal that might be commendable if it were ever used to do some actual good. As it is, their evidence-free fanaticism has simply shown them to be on the Dark Side of the Moon, many sandwiches short of a picnic, and certainly an indictment short of collusion. The question is why? Chiefly a couple of reasons:

Firstly, although I have zero time for the present incumbent of the White House, who I consider to be a man-child possessing stratospheric levels of folly, egotism and petty vindictiveness, the one commendable thing about him was that in his campaign, he seemed to be fairly keen on not starting a war with Russia. That seems to me be to be a Good Thing! True, his plan was never any more detailed than repeating the phrase,"I think we can get along" over and over, but for anyone who isn't keen on nuclear war, it was still preferable to the sentiments of his opponent, Mrs Warmonger. Although she didn't openly campaign on a promise to start a war with Russia, she might just as well have done so given some of the ideas she was espousing.

But apparently some folks got spooked by what Mr Trump was saying because - well because American exceptionalism and all that. And the only explanation they could come up with for his strange sounding words about dialling down tensions with a nuclear-armed country was that he must be in cahoots with the Kremlin. Obvs! Of course, some of them knew this to be baloney, but said it anyway because they foresaw Mr Trump as a huge threat to their neo-globalist project. Others were just "Useful Idiots", probably truly believing it and being more than happy to peddle it night after night in the TV studios of Global Pravda. I do wonder that it never seems to occur to such people that if tensions with another nuclear-armed power are not dialled down, they stand as much chance of ending up in a cloud of radioactive ash as "the Deplorables" they seem to despise.

Secondly, those who have zealously hunted in the haystack have done so because they could never reconcile themselves to the fact that their beloved candidate did not attain to what she, and they, assumed to be her birthright. Like Gollum, her precious had been stolen from her, but unlike Gollum - a solitary and friendless creature - the Creature Clinton had a multitude of supporters ready to try to move heaven and earth to get back what was apparently rightfully hers. And so rather than facing up to the fact that she lost because she is perhaps the most odious politician in modern America, they instead justified her loss by concocting the most fantastical tale about how the ring was stolen from her by conniving thieves.

However, not only was the tale not true, but its murky origins actually begin with Mrs Clinton's attempts to deprive her opponent of the Presidency. In other words, Russiagate is really Clintongate, as I now hope to explain.

It was abundantly clear very early on that the whole collusion claim started with a dossier put together by the (former?) MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Not only this, but it was also clear that the dossier itself was not impartial intelligence, but had been commissioned by the Clinton campaign, which paid Fusion GPS for dirt on Mr Trump. Fusion GPS then farmed it out to a private British intelligence company - Orbis Business Intelligence - which is owned by Christopher Steele. As an aside, Christopher is friends with Pablo, who was friends with Sergei, both of whom lived in Salisbury - but that's another story for another time!

But it gets even murkier. Not only was the dossier put together at the behest of the Clinton gang, but when it was handed over to US Intelligence, its contents were never even verified by the FBI. Yet that didn't stop its salacious contents being peddled around Washington to various reporters and politicians, prior to the 2016 election. And it was this that formed the beginnings of the whole idea that Mr Trump was in cahoots with Mr Putin.

The dossier itself, which was released into the public domain in January 2017 by Buzzfeed, is full of unverified gossip. And just recently we found out more about why that was. In one of those inconvenient moments when the truth seeps out - although unfortunately the entire Global Pravda press corps seem to have been out at the time - deposition transcripts from a federal court case, in which Mr Steele and Buzzfeed are being sued by Aleksej Gubarev, who is named in the dossier, reveal that Mr Steele took at least some of the information in the dossier straight from CNN iReports. Furthermore, it was also revealed in those transcripts that Mr Steele didn't even know that the site he was taking the info from was not in any way verified, but rather included postings by members of the public. CNN themselves called it:
"a user-generated site. That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked, or screened before they post."
When asked in court if he understood that CNN iReports were nothing more than any random individuals' assertions on the Internet, Steele replied:
"No, I obviously presume that if it is on a CNN site that it has some kind of CNN status. Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site."
The astonishing nature of this needs to be digested slowly, but let me try to summarise it for you.
  1. The Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS for dirt on Donald Trump.
  2. Fusion GPS farmed this out to a private British Intelligence organisation, run by Christopher Steele, who used to lead the Russia desk for MI6.
  3. Mr Steele based at least some of his dossier on "intelligence" taken from a website where anyone can post information.
  4. This dossier then became the basis for the entire two years of absurd accusations against the President of the United States, that he and his campaign actively colluded with a foreign power to steal the presidency.
Seems unbelievable, doesn't it? And yet it's absolutely true.

There is of course another element of all this, which is the claim that the Russian State hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. Whilst these were not claims that Robert Mueller was specifically investigating, they do of course play a part in the general theory of Russian meddling and collusion with the Trump campaign to rob Mrs Clinton of her birthright. Yet there is no more truth in these claims than in the collusion claims. As I noted here:
The claims of Russian state involvement in the hacking of the DNC's and John Podesta's computers originated from the DNC itself, and from the company they themselves paid to investigate, making the alleged victim - the DNC - the counsel for the prosecution for its own claims. There is the fact that the firm the DNC paid to undertake the investigation - Crowdstrike - is owned by one Dmitri Alperovitch, a Senior Fellow at the rabidly anti-Russian think tank, Atlantic Council, which makes them not exactly what you would call "impartial". There is the fact that the FBI have never even examined the DNC's or Mr Podesta's computers to verify the claims they have made, but have instead relied wholly on the findings of Crowdstrike - the company paid for by the DNC. There is the fact that the FBI has never interviewed the two key witnesses in the whole affair, Britain's former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, and Wikileaks' Julian Assange - both of whom have stated that they know the identity of the individual(s) who leaked (not hacked) the emails.
But what about the "fact" that all 17 US intelligence agencies signed off on the January 6th document claiming that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta computers? Problem with this claim is that it's not true (I wrote about this here at the time). Quite apart from the fact that that report contained no evidence to back up the claim of hacking (most if it bizarrely focuses on RT), it was signed off by four, not 17 agencies, with the NSA - the all-seeing eye that can track all incoming or outgoing server activity - only being willing to express "moderate confidence" in the claims being made. The disclaimer to that document in Annex B is unintentionally hilarious, stating without a trace of irony:
"Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact."
In other words, they don't have the proof, which of course the NSA would have if there had actually been a hack and not a leak. Draw your own conclusions.

And so the Mueller Inquiry has now followed the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee in being unable to find evidence of collusion. There's a reason for that. Just as you're never going to find a non-existent needle in a haystack, no matter how hard you look and no matter how many searches you launch, you're not going to find non-existent collusion either.

What has shown up, however, is this: A junk dossier, cobbled together by a British spy at the behest of the Clinton Gang who wanted dirt to discredit her opponent, was circulated to journalists prior to the 2016 election, even though its contents were unverified by the FBI, and it was this that then kickstarted a frenzy of folly and lies that have poisoned the atmosphere in the US for over two years, polluted the airwaves, led to impeachment calls based on falsehoods, and made the international situation far more dangerous than it has been than at anytime since 1962.

Heads ought to roll. Those involved in creating these lies (including in the FBI and Department of Justice) ought to face investigation. Prosecutions should follow. But of course none of these things will happen. Instead, the non-existent needle hunters will do one of two things: They'll either move on, pretend it never happened and continue to be feted as experts on Global Pravda. Or they'll double down on their claims, perhaps saying that Mueller has been compromised (maybe Putin has videos of him as well?). Perhaps they'll even find another haystack in which to hunt their non-existent needle.