More than five years ago, Hillary Clinton colluded with the Democratic National Committee, which she had all but officially taken over as a vessel to fund her campaign against Donald Trump on a plot to entrap the GOP nominee in a lie that would go on to dog him until this day.
Specifically, Clinton's campaign and the DNC funded the bogus "Russia dossier" that the FBI would later use as justification to launch a 'counterintelligence investigation' into a major party presidential campaign, something that was unprecedented in the history of the bureau. But both the campaign and the DNC lied about it and said they neither knew anything about the origins of the dossier or how it was initiated.
Finally, more than a half-decade later, both the Clinton campaign and the DNC are paying some sort of price for their chicanery, as reported by the Washington Examiner:
The Federal Election Commission has fined the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for lying about the funding of the infamous, and discredited, Russian “dossier” used in a smear attempt against Donald Trump weeks before he shocked the world with his 2016 presidential victory.
The election agency said that Clinton and the DNC violated strict rules on describing expenditures of payments funneled to the opposition research firm Fusion GPS through their law firm.
Combined, the two entities paid $1,024,407.97 to the law firm Perkins Coie for the information gathered by Fusion GPS, while both hid the reason and claimed that the money was for legal services instead of opposition research.
"Instead, the DNC’s $849,407.97 and the Clinton campaign’s $175,000 covered Fusion GPS’s opposition research on the dossier, a basis for the so-called 'Russia hoax' that dogged Trump’s first term," the Washington Examiner reported.
According to a memo seen by the Examiner, the Clinton campaign and the DNC claimed that they correctly described the expenditures as being for "legal advice and services" because the Perkins Coie firm hired Fusion GPS. But the attempt at establishing plausible deniability did not work; the FEC noted that the law on the matter is clear and it was indeed violated.
The memo also said that neither the party nor Clinton's people conceded to lying to the agency but are not planning to contest the finding (because that would bring the entire sordid episode back into the news cycle at a time when Hillary is said to be considering yet another White House bid because Biden is too old and Kamala Harris is too dumb to be president).
“Solely for the purpose of settling this matter expeditiously and to avoid further legal costs, respondent[s] does not concede, but will not further contest the commission's finding of probable cause to proceed” with the probe, the federal agency noted.
"The FEC, in a memo to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation, which filed its complaint over three years ago, said it fined Clinton’s treasurer $8,000 and the DNC’s treasurer $105,000," the Examiner reported.
The thing is, Clinton and the DNC are not the only guilty ones here; the corporate media, which knew from the outset that the dossier was BS, reported on it as though it was real and that Trump actually was a dupe for Vladimir Putin.
"Axios, one of the leading D.C.-based corporate media outlets, has admitted that reporting surrounding the now infamous Trump-Steele dossier was “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” in an article slamming news-media colleagues for the years of fake news reporting," the National Pulse reported in November.
In addition, Axios noted, outlandish, outsized coverage of the dossier, which was not even vetted at the time, as Trump's presidency began "helped drive the narrative of collusion between" Trump and Russia.
Our institutions -- our politics and our media -- no longer function as our founders established and envisioned.
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