Where Might Hillary Clinton Have Learned the Political Dark Arts?

Special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI details how the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative was developed and fed into the American political ecosystem. The arrest, as it is summarized in a New York Post headline, “illustrates how the Steele dossier was a political dirty trick orchestrated by Hillary Clinton.”So where could the former First Lady have learned these dark arts?It’s starting to look like the roots of Hillary Clinton’s approach to information warfare go back at least to the 1990s. That’s when a lawyer and scandal-monger in the Clinton White House, Chris Lehane, wrote an internal memo entitled “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.” It’s what led, eventually to the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy.”The memo is an eerie, even prophetic read now that Mr. Durham is starting to hand up indictments. It sketches a technique the Clintons felt was being used against them in a stream of “conspiracy commerce” that was way to transmogrify “fringe stories into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media.”Mr. Lehane’s memo isn’t a state secret. It’s accessible at the National Archives’ “Clinton Digital Library.” It warns that stories that originated with lesser players on the Internet would be “bounced all over the world” to either be laundered through British tabloids or picked up by “right-of-center mainstream American media.”Once the story becomes a Story, Congress then launches investigations, bringing into play the rest of the mainstream press. This, the memo suggests, is called the “media food chain.” The memo uses the evolution of the controversy surrounding the 1993 death of White House counsel Vince Foster as a case study to describe the workings of this “well-financed right-wing conspiracy industry operation.”Lehane observed decades later that what he described was not technically a conspiracy. Rather it was a description of how information dissemination was evolving in the early days of the World Wide Web. In any event, it now appears that Hillary Clinton and her acolytes learned the lessons well when conjuring up the supposed “well-coordinated conspiracy of co-operation” between President Trump and Russia.The “Russian collusion” narrative unleashed against President Trump was a much more sophisticated approach to the information warfare detailed in the 1995 memo. The basic strategy, though, was the same. Concoct a scandalous story based on supposedly reputable sources, spread it around to the sympathetic press through intermediaries to keep plausible deniability, and wait for the major media and government investigators to glom onto it.The Clinton team took this to the next level by harnessing Justice Department operatives willing to abuse government investigative powers against a legitimate political candidate. Elements of this strategy abound in the Russian collusion story, though the techniques were better developed, more directed and tightly controlled.A Clinton campaign lawyer Marc E. Elias, whom Johnathan Turley has called a “potential apex target” of the Durham probe, hired Fusion GPS, who employed British former intelligence operative Richard Steele, who then used Danchenko to dig up the dirt. Hillary Clinton aide Charles H. Dolan Jr., identified only as “PR Executive-1,” was dispatched to feed Danchenko what he needed.Mr. Dolan claimed he had obtained the stories when, according to the indictment, he “had a drink with a GOP friend.” Mr. Dolan admitted to the FBI the stories were fabricated. The Dolan-Danchenk relationship was the taproot of the salacious “Steele Dossier.” Meanwhile in the government, supporters of Hillary Clinton made sure that sympathetic operatives in the Justice Department were made aware of the collusion allegations.This led to the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of the Trump campaign. The Steele Dossier became the primary basis for potentially criminal abuse of wiretap authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against Trump advisor Carter Page, and potentially a much wider array of targets. The FISA requests also cited press reports based on the same type of Hillary-linked sources.Major media piled on during the 2016 campaign by spreading rumors based on the dossier, and later undermining the Trump presidency using the Russian collusion “insurance policy.” When the Steele Dossier scandal broke in January 2017, “PR Executive-1” then became an important background source for reporting by the Washington Post and Times of London.Investigations, indictments, hearings and Pulitzers followed. Numerous exposés and official investigations have turned up no evidence of the alleged collusion. Yet this fictitious story remains a staple of liberal critiques of the Trump presidency. In short, the strategy worked, even if it failed to hand Mrs. Clinton the presidency. Nor is there a guarantee it cannot happen again. For critics have a blind spot when it comes to the Russian collusion fantasy. They should read the memo.________Mr. Robbins, author of “This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive,” has taught at the National Defense University and the Marine Corps University.

Where Might Hillary Clinton Have Learned the Political Dark Arts?

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