They say you should never speak ill of the dead. But the duplicitous, dissembling and despicable senator from Arizona, the late John McCain, is proving to be a singular exception to this rule as new revelationscome to light.
Exposing a rat
Steele compiled this fake dossier on behalf of opposition research firm – and smear merchant – Fusion GPS. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, in turn, paid $12.2 million to that organization for the dossier.Last Wednesday, in a newly released sworn deposition in a libel suit by former State Department official and McCain associate David Kramer, the public learned even more of the sordid details behind the manufacture and use of the so-called Russian dossier. In it, Kramer admitted to shopping that thoroughly discredited anti-Trump Steele dossier to news outlets CNN and BuzzFeed, of which the latter was first to publish the 35-page document in its entirety.
Kramer: On a mission for McCain… and Moscow
Kramer first took possession of the document after traveling to London and meeting with dossier author and former British spy, Christopher Steele. Kramer did so at the behest of McCain.
“I think they [Fusion GPS] felt a senior Republican [McCain] was better to be the recipient of this [Steele dossier] rather than a Democrat because if it were a Democrat, I think that the view was that it would have been dismissed as a political attack,” said Kramer in his deposition.
The Steele dossier alleges Trump cavorted with Russian prostitutes while on business trips to Moscow. His alleged sexual antics, the dossier suggests, made the future US president susceptible to Russian blackmail.
So, which sources did Steele turn to for information? “A senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and “former top-level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin,” wrote Howard Blum of Vanity Fair.
The real Russian collusion case
In other words, there clearly was Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But the DNC and Hillary Clinton conducted the meddling by requesting and then paying for Steele’s fake, largely Russian-generated dossier. We also know the fake dossier became an instrumental piece of “evidence.” The Obama administration and FBI then used that fake evidence to launch an essentially FISA court approved domestic espionage operation against the 2016 Republican presidential campaign.
The dossier, therefore, was and still is a political dirty trick that continues to pay Democrats dividends by way of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Mueller, with the aid of his entirely pro-Democrat and largely pro-Clinton staff has handed down indictments for lying to the FBI, tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying to Congress. Yet to date, the Mueller team has failed to produce one single indictment having anything at all to do with alleged Trump/Russia collusion. But in truth, the real Russion collusion occurred between the Russians and the DNC via the Hillary Clinton campaign.
John McCain: A liar exposed
Regarding McCain’s role in this ongoing political travesty, we must also remember that McCain vigorously denied leaking the dossier to BuzzFeed during an interview with The Daily Caller.
“I gave it to no one except for the director of the FBI. I don’t know why you’re digging this up now.”
Clearly, McCain lied.
In response to the release of David Kramer’s deposition, President Donald Trump tweeted:
“Spreading the fake and totally discredited Dossier ‘is unfortunately a very dark stain against John McCain.’ Ken Starr, former Independent Counsel. He had far worse ‘stains’ than this, including thumbs down on [Obamacare’s] repeal and replace after years of campaigning to repeal and replace!”
During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, McCain criticized Trump for his campaign stance on illegal immigration. “It’s very bad… very hurtful to me,” McCain told The New Yorker magazine after Trump wrapped up a successful campaign rally in Phoenix.
“What he did was he fired up the crazies… Now he galvanized them. He’s really got them activated.”
The revenge of the “crazies”
McCain clearly feared his 2016 electoral chance to hold on to his Arizona US Senate seat were threatened if his attempts to achieve bipartisan immigration reform became a weapon in the hands of a GOP primary challenger.
But the “crazies” turned out to be those who re-elected McCain to his disastrous fifth and ultimately final term in the US Senate.
This whole sordid story of GOP backstabbing, including McCain’s dismissive response demeaning Trump’s supporters, is what inspired now-President Trump’s famously derogatory comment on the Senator:
