Yesterday’s installment on the significance of Special Counsel John Durham’s 27-page indictment of Hillary attorney Michael Sussmann included insights from Kash Patel, lead investigator for Rep. Devin Nunes’ investigation into the “Russia Hoax.” As it happens, Thursday’s edition of the NEW YORK POST had a story relating to those very House Intelligence Committee transcripts Patel was assembling. It shows how different the hoaxers’ sworn testimony was from what they were saying publicly.

https://nypost.com/2020/05/11/obamas-top-brass-contradict-statements-about-collusion-under-oath/

For example, let’s take James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence. (The DNI’s job is to coordinate the huge and sticky web of government intel agencies.) We already knew that Clapper’s vow to tell the truth doesn’t mean much, as he has told some enormous whoppers, notably that the National Security Agency didn’t intercept Americans’ phone messages “wittingly.”

But as Emily Jacobs points out in her report for the NYP, Clapper stepped carefully during his testimony in July 2017 before the House Intel Committee, informing the committee that he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”

What the hey?? As DNI, Clapper would have been privy to everything that was being gathered about Trump “colluding” with Russia. And he was saying hadn’t seen any direct evidence at all? Amazingly, yes, though he went on to try to make it sound as if there were SOME reason to suspect it.

“That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing...anecdotal evidence...[redacted],” he said. “But I do not recall any instance when I had direct evidence of the content of these meetings. It’s just the frequency and prevalence of them was of concern.”

Contrast this careful, noncommittal statement with what he had said a couple of months before to Chuck Todd on NBC’s MEET THE PRESS. On NBC, when he wasn’t under oath, he sensationalized quite a bit, using the cloak of “classification” to keep from having to be at all specific about any conversations but saying his “dashboard light was clearly on.”

A month after that, speaking with reporters on a trip to Australia, Clapper said the Russia investigation had far surpassed Watergate. “I think if you compare the two that Watergate pales, really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting now,” he told them.

In light of what is said today in Durham’s indictment, we find Clapper’s comparison of Trump/Russia “collusion” to Watergate quite hilarious. If anything is reminiscent of Watergate, it’s the coordinated antics of these deep-state clowns working overtime to frame then-candidate Trump with fake “Russia” stories in fictional “dossiers” and surveillance warrants.

As Jacobs reports, Clapper was beating this dead horse as recently as February 2019, saying on CNN that “it was a possibility” that President Trump was a “Russian asset,” “whether witting or unwitting.”

Clapper’s not the only one who tread lightly in sworn testimony while stomping like Riverdance for the TV news cameras. Former deputy director of theMcCabe testified, “That’s correct.”

But he spoke differently in his role as CNN contributor (!) and in other TV appearances. In February 2019, in an interview on 60 MINUTES, McCabe dramatically described Trump as “the man who had just run for the presidency, and won the election for the presidency, and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage.” As he had already told the Intel Committee in December 2017 that he had no verification of any claims, he had to know that what he was saying to the TV audience was a huge fragrant pile of bull droppings, yet he told the TV audience it “troubled” him “greatly.”

The same kind of discrepancy is evident in the word-craft of Ben Rhodes, officially Obama’s deputy national security adviser but in practice his personal narrative writer. When asked under oath by the Intel Committee if he had any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, he said no. But in 2019, after then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress (remember that train wreck?), Rhodes tweeted, “Russia attacked our democracy. Trump campaign sought its help, had many contacts with Russians, lied about it and obstructed the investigation into it. Several Trump associates were convicted of crimes. Trump would’ve been indicted if he wasn’t the President. Not complicated.”

If anything isn’t complicated, it’s that Rhodes is good at using what little he has to work with to craft a story that really is based on nothing. No Trump associates were convicted of crimes that had anything to do with Russian collusion. “Contacts with Russians” is meaningless. Rhodes had seen no evidence of any of this, as he himself had testified under oath.

(By the way, if I hear the phrase “our democracy” one more time from some sanctimonious leftist, please forgive me in advance for the way I might respond. Leftists are perfectly willing to upend “our democracy” with strategies designed to fracture the election system, facilitate fraud and shut down transparency. They quite obviously think of it as THEIR democracy –- to be manipulated at will to keep THEM in control –- and they consistently show themselves to be unclear on the concept of a democratic republic. I digress.)

Jacobs also mentions former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power. When Power was asked under oath by the Intel Committee if she’d seen evidence of Russian interference, she said, “I am not in possession of anything –- I am not in possession and didn’t read or absorb information that came from out of the intelligence community.” But that didn’t stop her from tweeting in November of last year: “Every day Donald Trump finds new ways to compensate Vladimir Putin for his election interference. And every day, Putin gains additional incentive to interfere again on Trump’s behalf in 2020.”

She failed to provide examples, but that’s because this was totally made up, and it’s a lot easier and safer to generalize than offer specifics. (One could easily make the case that Trump was HARD on Russia.) Again, Power had testified that she didn’t read or even “absorb” information about this.

Finally, there’s Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice, whom we already knew can lie with ease, as she did repeatedly to cover for the State Department after the Benghazi attack. In 2017, Rice told House investigators that she’d seen no evidence Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016. But in July 2018 on ABC’s THIS WEEK, she said it was “legitimate” to question whether Trump had been compromised by Russia because his decisions were in the service of Vladimir Putin. Good grief.

So you see how Trump’s adversaries could take essentially NOTHING –- no evidence whatsoever, as they testified under oath –- and whip it into a tale as tall as Trump Tower. But it was just full of froth. If only Durham could indict them all for lying on TV.

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