Do Political Players Project their own Negative Traits on their Opponents?
Accuse your opponents of what you yourself are doing… Adolf Hitler
Accusation
Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin before the 2016 election.
Since Donald Trump was a 2016 candidate for the office of President of the United States, myriad[1] suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials have been discovered by the FBI, Special counsel, and several United States congressional committees, as part of their investigations into the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Following intelligence reports about the Russian interference, Trump and some of his campaign members, business partners, administration nominees, and family members were subjected to intense scrutiny to determine whether they had improper dealings during their contacts with Russian officials. Several people connected to the Trump campaign made false statements about those links and obstructed investigations. These investigations resulted in many criminal charges and indictments.
Starting in 2015, several allied foreign intelligence agencies began reporting secret contacts between Trump campaigners and known or suspected Russian agents in multiple European cities. In November 2016, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov contradicted Trump’s denials by confirming the Trump campaign had been in contact with Russia, stating in a 2016 Interfax news agency interview: “Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage,” adding “I cannot say that all of them but quite a few have been staying in touch with Russian representatives.”
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Russia report described how “secretive meetings and communications with Russian representatives… signaled that there was little intention by the incoming administration to punish Russia for the assistance it had just provided in its unprecedented attack on American democracy.” Ultimately, Mueller’s investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”.
Above description quoted from Wikipedia, click to get more information.
Rebuttal
Russia claimed to have Hillary Clinton’s emails months before the Trump/Russia collusion accusation.
It took years to unravel, but the entire Trump/Russia collusion story was a hoax. Hilary Clinton had a private email server during her time as the Secretary of State under the Obama Biden administration that most certainly included information about the Clinton Foundation. It’s hard to imagine that it did not include emails identifying donors, some of which were from wealthy Russian business people. There was a conspicuously coincidental donation from Russia to the Clinton foundation adjacent to her negotiated uranium supply agreement, see this article from the NY Times for reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html The exposure of this story might have been very embarrassing in the final days of her political campaign against Trump in 2015. She successfully destroyed the emails without consequence from the Obama justice department, but feared damning information leaking from the Russians, adding fuel to the movement to “lock her up”.
To get in front of the “problem”, the Clinton campaign worked with Christopher Steel to plant a story using the FBI, knowing senior FBI leadership was openly hostile to Donald Trump.* The FBI was able to collaborate none of the tenants of the “Steele Dossier” then, or in the future, even when offering Christopher Steele $1 million to do so. Yet, they launched a full investigation which was leaked to the New York Times. The resulting flurry of news articles included Trump sex allegations at the Ritz, the Alpha Bank communication claims, and the link between Trump and the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce of conspiring and colluding with Russian officials were ultimately proven to be fabricated when investigated under oath.**
This press “feeding frenzy” and Trump political opponent onslaught led to the opening of Robert Mueller’s investigation in 2017 that took two years to complete at a cost of $32 Million and ultimately concluded there was no evidence to prove the Trump/Russia collusion theory. The John Durham investigation concluding in May of 2023 went deeper into the FBI’s involvement, concluding that the collaboration appeared to be between the FBI and the Democratic National Committee vs. Trump and Russia.
Nearly every result from a Google search even today will bring up mainstream media press articles that either through overt statements or bias using slant, omission, or spin try to perpetuate the Trump/Russia collusion narrative. The real question is, why?
*See Page 9 footnotes of the Durham Report.
** See Pages 14-18 of the Durham Report.