A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Wednesday, conservatives called attention to a Washington Post story on the Christopher Steele dossier, which revealed that research for it was funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. National Review’s David French called the dossier story “a perfect storm of classic Clintonism, media irresponsibility, and Democratic moral blindness”:
It’s one thing to review a dossier compiled by a “former intelligence agent” and consider its contents as the product of an objective process. It’s another thing entirely to review that same work as the direct product of an opposing campaign’s opposition research. The goal of an opposition researcher is to collect everything and share everything with the client. A proper intelligence analysis, however, involves separating truth from fiction and provable claims from unverifiable allegations.
Those who pitched the Russian dossier treated it not as opposition research but rather as a form of intelligence report. It had distinctive formatting. It used terms of art. It looked like a government document. How many people did it fool?
Rush Limbaugh said that the dossier story might be “the scandal of scandals”:
They paid a guy to make this stuff up. It is not intelligence. There’s not a shred of it that’s true. It never has been true. [Note: In fact, a lot of it has been corroborated.] But look at how it was used. Look at everybody who went along with this. The CIA director, John Brennan, informed the world that this dossier formed the basis of his investigation into whether or not Trump had colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. The CIA director said that it formed the basis of his investigation. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, working for Obama, ditto, same thing. […]
BuzzFeed, which is a unit of NBCUniversal, decided to go ahead and publish the whole thing in its entirety with caveats. “Sorry. We can’t confirm anything here. There’s not one element of this that’s verifiable, but we think you have a right to know and make up your own mind.” Once they did that and once it was news that Trump had been shown this, the floodgates opened, and this thing became reported on as though it was legitimate intel, folks. This is not an insignificant thing. The director of the CIA during the Obama administration proudly, happily said this dossier formed the basis of his investigation.
There was no dossier! It’s nothing more than made-up drivel bought and paid for as opposition research by Hillary Clinton and her campaign and the Democrat National Committee.
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway was among many who suggested that the Clinton campaign’s funding of the dossier amounted to collusion with the Russians, given that Russian sources were contacted for the dossier’s compilation. “The country has spent the last year with Obama intelligence officials, the media, and Democratic leaders pushing a narrative of Trump collusion with Russia to steal an election that was supposed to be won by Hillary Clinton,” she wrote. “A meeting between Trump officials and a Russian who falsely promised dirt on Hillary Clinton is the best evidence — by far — to support this narrative. Yet here we have the realization that the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the FBI all worked wittingly or unwittingly with Russians to affect the results of the 2016 election. Far from just meeting with a Russian and not getting dirt on a political opponent, these groups wittingly or unwittingly paid Russian operatives for disinformation to harm Trump during the 2016 election and beyond.”
At the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro pushed back against the collusion charge, which was also made by President Trump in a Wednesday press conference:
Trump has no facts to support the notion that the Steele dossier involved collusion with Russia.
In order to substantiate that claim, we’d need to know two things: first, that the Russians were using spy Christopher Steele as a thoroughfare for misinformation about Trump, and second, that the DNC and Hillary campaign knew it and paid for the report specifically for that reason. That’s a heavy lift, and there’s no evidence for either contention at this point.
There should be ample suspicion, however, that the FBI used the DNC-funded Steele dossier as an excuse to open FISA-approved wiretaps on Trump associates. If the FBI knew that the Steele dossier wasn’t credible – or if they suspected that it had been funded as opposition research, and therefore should have been taken with a grain of salt – and then used it anyway, that would be scandalous.
In other news:
Conservatives condemned “Jane Doe,” an undocumented immigrant and a minor previously barred from obtaining an abortion by the Trump administration for going through with the procedure on Wednesday morning:
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh wrote that liberal celebration of the news proved that “leftism is Satanism”:
Satanism is the worship of self above everything. In Satanism, the only thing that matters is the pleasure and comfort of the individual. All else is secondary and irrelevant. Leftism is exactly this, but secularized and given a different name. This is why they celebrate “justice” for the mother without even pausing to consider what was just for the child. The child literally does not count. He interfered with the mother’s lifestyle, so he is worthless. In Leftism, as in Satanism, everything and everyone is subordinate to the desires of the Self. The baby’s self does not need to be taken into consideration.
Many people, even conservatives, have scolded me for accusing all Leftists of being Satanists. I’m sorry if the comparison makes your tummy hurt. I really am. But we happen to live in a country where a certain side of the culture war unabashedly cheers the mass murder of infants. What do you expect me to say about them? That they have a point and maybe we should try harder to understand them? No. They have no point. I’ll let you empathize with the Left if you choose. I will empathize with the 50 million babies it has killed.
