Team Clinton borrows Don Jr.'s Russia defense

Posted on: October 25, 2017 at 15:47:04 CT

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/10/25/team-clinton-borrows-don-jr-s-russia-defense.html

So here we are. The former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign is taking essentially the same position as Donald Trump Jr. about efforts to get help from Kremlin-tied operatives to help win the presidency.

Whoooo boy…

Brian Fallon, who was the top talker for Clinton’s campaign, responded to news that the campaign’s lawyer had lied about paying an American firm with close ties to Vladimir Putin’s regime to dig dirt on now-President Trump much the way Trump’s son did to the revelation that he eagerly agreed to a meeting with Putinists to get dirt on Hillary.

Fallon denied any knowledge of the lie, but then made it clear that he didn’t see anything wrong with dumping Kremlin-canted information into reporters’ inboxes. “…if I had gotten handed it last fall, I would have had no problem passing it along,” Fallon bragged.

When we think back to the revelation of Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russians peddling dirt on Clinton, there was a similar course of events. First, he denied participating in the meeting, then seemed to regret having participated and finally declared himself smart for having done so.

With this latest debacle, Team Clinton has swiftly vindicated the younger Trump and the central argument of their campaign about Russia canoodling which is that they may have done unsavory things, but that everybody else does it too.

To say that this substantially undercuts Clinton and her remaining devotees’ credibility in accusing Trump of Russia collusion just scratches the surface, but let’s back up for a moment and put in perspective what we are dealing with.

We have known for some time about the existence of the Russia-sourced dossier on Trump’s business and personal life that was compiled during his 2016 candidacy. CNN first reported in January that a prominent Republican supporting one of Trump’s primary rivals commissioned the firm Fusion GPS to put together a dirt pile on Trump. After Trump won the nomination, Democratic figures picked up the case expanded the efforts to include the work of a former British spy.

The big news today is not that Democrats were involved in producing this scandal-soaked report on Trump’s vulnerabilities to Russian influence, but that the effort was tied directly to Clinton’s campaign and the national party.

When we look back at how Democrats got to their current pitiful condition the misjudgment and obliviousness of Clinton’s campaign and its proxies at the DNC will deserve special consideration.

We don’t know how much Team Clinton knew about Fusion GPS’s ties to Putin, particularly the efforts to roll back sanctions against Russian oligarchs imposed on friends of Moscow’s murderous regime. But it could have hardly been a secret that the firm had Russia connections. After all, that’s why they hired them.

We don’t know which parts of the dossier are credible and which parts are not. That long ago became the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But we do know that nothing about this revelation should bring more than cold comfort to Republicans worried about what Mueller might have on Trump.

Trump defenders are pushing hard on a narrative that the whole investigation is the fruit of this dossier. That is far from the truth. Both Trump’s former campaign chairman and former national security adviser would have likely been bound for the dock regardless of if the dossier had ever existed.

It didn’t take a former member of MI-6 to sniff out Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.

But what this revelation and Fallon’s response does do is bolster the case of the most cynical of Trump supporters who say that whatever Team Trump did with Russian figures is permissible because Clinton would have done as bad or worse if given the chance.