(RightWing.org) – Former President Donald Trump is brash and outspoken and is never afraid to speak his mind, which leads to two related points. First is the idea of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), some of the symptoms described by Joseph Epstein in a tongue-in-cheek commentary for the Wall Street Journal “include an obsession with the president’s hair and comparing him to Mao [Zedong, the first chairman of the Chinese Communist Party].”
The other is the statement “[e]ven a paranoid can have enemies,” which is credited to one-time Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (though some say it was former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir since it came from a conversation between the two). Trump’s latest assertation about being framed may fall into this category.
Clinton and Obama and Biden, Oh My!
In 2020, John Durham was appointed as a special counsel within the United States Department of Justice to perform an independent investigation into the events “arising out of the 2016 presidential campaigns.” On May 12, he submitted his final report to current Attorney General Merrick Garland. The unclassified report is 316 pages long, and no attempt is made here to provide a summary or in-depth overview of such a massive amount of information.
Soon after the report became public, Trump took to his Truth Social page and proclaimed his belief that “The FBI offered Christopher Steele [author of the so-called Steele dossier] One Million Dollars in order to FRAME me.” The FBI operation was codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, and the Durham report does say those “investigators did not and could not corroborate” any of the allegations contained in the dossier, and continued, saying Steele himself could not “produce corroboration even after being offered $1 million or more by the FBI.”
Durham also stated that his team investigated what he terms the Clinton Plan intelligence. The information came into the hands of the US government in the summer of 2016 concerning a purported “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 [sic] of a proposal to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal” tying him together with the Russians. As part of the analysis, Durham includes information provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 that alleges then-CIA Director John Brennan “briefed President [Barack] Obama and other senior national security officials” about this matter.
Another interesting component to all this is a strange email that Obama’s National Security Advisor (NSA), Susan Rice, sent herself literally minutes before Trump took his oath of office on January 20, 2017. In it, she memorialized a January 5, 2017, meeting in the Oval Office where Crossfire Hurricane was discussed — a meeting which allegedly then-VP Joe Biden attended.
Based on other information given to the committee at that time, Clinton’s alleged motive was to deflect attention from her private email server scandal. (Page 92/316). Historian and fellow at the Hoover Institution, Victor Davis Hanson, appeared on the Mark Levin show and expressed the view that the FBI did not act on what they knew about Clinton because they were “terrified” of reprisals should she become president and she was projected to do at that time.
So is Trump right, was he framed? It certainly appears as if they tried.
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