NeverTrump Started the Steele Dossier Debacle. Democrats Ran with the Ball
By: Vincent Bordini
Tags: Never Trump, Impeachment, Hillary Clinton, DNC, Politics

#NeverTrump.

The message is as simple as the name.

Ask any of your political friends about the Never Trump movement and you will hear derision, sympathy, anger, curiosity and sometimes, you will be greeted with eye-rolls.

What most people don’t know, is the Never Trump movement, and a healthy dose of establishment elitism, created one of the most bogus political investigations in American history.

An excellent piece by Julie Kelly lays the groundwork:

The following month, perhaps ironically on September 11, 2015, Fusion got the go-ahead. “Fusion would be hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative on-line publication backed by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.” Singer was “no fan of Trump,” the Fusion founder wrote. The Free Beacon’s editor-in-chief was Matthew Continetti; his father-in-law is Bill Kristol. Beginning in 2015 and continuing until this day, Kristol has led the NeverTrump movement, a cabal of Trump-hating “conservatives” and Republicans: (Glenn) Simpson referred to his client as “Never Trump.” The Free Beacon, via Paul Singer, kept Fusion on a $50,000 per month retainer until January 2017.

The article is titled “NeverTrump Conservatives Started the Smear Campaign on Carter Page” and it’s interesting, brutal and sad. She covers some serious intrigues in the conservative press as they target an individual, much like their MSM counterparts.

As the Fusion GPS dossier (Steele Dossier or Trump–Russia dossier) was being assembled and picked through to trot out stories for a few NeverTrump websites, Future President Trump managed to win the 2016 Primary in May. Then, the “conservative” funding of the Steel Dossier was halted.

Magically, the DNC picked the tab in June for the Steel Dossier to be completed but they denied knowing they did it.

You read that correctly, the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign denied knowing that they were paying for an opposition research dossier on candidate Donald Trump. They paid $50,000 a month without knowing what they were paying for. We are supposed to believe this.

Glenn Simpson, owner of Fusion GPS, knew Christopher Steele and testified he had worked with him before. Simpson also refused to go into who contacted him in June to give him democrat money.

There was some legal wrangling over NDAs and client privilege and just like that, Clinton and the DNC are supposed to be innocent of the bogus results of this phony dossier.

Jane Mayer reported:

Marc Elias, the attorney at Perkins Coie who was serving as the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, acted as a firewall between the campaign and the private investigators digging up information on Trump. It’s a common practice for law firms to hire investigators on behalf of clients,so that any details can be protected by attorney-client privilege. Fusion briefed only Elias on the reports. Simpson sent Elias nothing on paper — he was briefed orally.

This is political operative 101 for pros. You don’t write anything. You meet or use the phone. Although, if James Comey is spying on you, that can get rough.

Elias simply “orally’ conveyed all the salacious garbage to other democrats and they were off to the races, colluding with Russians. Those Russians were lying to Steele and cracking up while drinking vodka and reading leaked stories of their own creation on the web.

The democrats stopped paying after Donald Trump won the election in November, but Steele kept working the dossier because Glenn Simpson started paying for it himself. Ten days after Simpson was self-funding the Steele Dossier, knowledge of it’s existence found it’s way to Senator John McCain. By December, McCain had the Steele dossier in his hands. David J. Kramer delivered it.

Kramer later testified that Steel told him some of the dossier may not be truthful:

“He explained that what was produced… needed to be corroborated and verified. He himself did not feel that he was in a position to vouch for everything that was produced in this,” he said.

That means Steele had an idea his sources were drinking vodka and laughing at him.

To get US officials laughing at him, Kramer immediately leaked portions of the Steele dossier to everybody in mainstream journalism:

“The Daily Caller reports that Kramer says he never intended for the dossier to be published, despite having given it to reporters from McClatchy, NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed and CNN’s Carl Bernstein, among others which include Obama administration officials.”

David Kramer testified he handed it to Ken Bensinger of Buzzfeed in the offices of the McCain Institute. Perhaps they will give tours of the site of this historical exchange. Senator McCain also had a copy he handed over to James Comey.

Around this time, James A. Wolfe, Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director, photographed and sent the images to Ali Watkins of Buzzfeed for a story that would soon haunt both of them.

Buzzfeed published the dossier, Kramer freaked out as his testimony shows:

David Kramer — “I called Mr. Bensinger, and my first words out of my mouth were you are gonna get people killed.”

By April of 2017, Ali Watkins, then with BuzzFeed, published a piece that smeared Carter Page as a guy who “met with a Russian spy.” The reality was some Russian agents tried to recruit Page in 2013 but Page wasn’t going for it. Page, was working with our CIA.

That means, Carter Page is supposed to meet with spies.

This debacle lead to the unlawful FISA warrant. After that, the Mueller Report, which was a nothing burger for collusion and simply (most unfairly) snared some political prisoners for Beltway insiders to snicker at.

With so many former NeverTrumpers turning around to support the President for 2020, I wonder how many were disappointed in the plays made by the elitist NeverTrumpers who got this Steele dossier ball rolling.

What puts the lie to all of this is the fact that Donald J. Trump was never informed early on that “Russians” were knocking on our door. It was never about defeating Russians. It was always about defeating Donald Trump. That’s why he was never told.

Without the NeverTrump origin and the McCain hand-off to James Comey, these divisive, damaging and untruthful episodes may have never played out.