Democrats on the House and Senate committees investigating the Trump/Russia collusion case are accusing their Republican colleagues of spending undue time on the issue of the infamous dossier in an attempt to distract from the meat of the issue. While much of Washington is abuzz with Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s decision to unilaterally release the transcript of Fusion GPS’s testimony from August, Democrats are suddenly wary about the very thing that Fusion brought to the table – an unsourced, unverified collection of rumors that Donald Trump was both working with and compromised by the Russian government.
In an interview with Newsweek, Rep. Mike Quigley said the Republicans were using the dossier aspect of the investigation as a “distraction, a shiny object, with absolutely no bipartisan effort.” Quigley then went on to make a claim that is highly questionable, if not downright false: “The bottom line is if the dossier didn’t exist, the Russia investigation would still be there.”
And that’s actually a major point of contention, not – by any stretch of the imagination – the “bottom line.”
Democrats are partially right when they say that the point of the investigation is not to track down and verify every single rumor in the dossier; that would be a colossal waste of time at this point because anyone with the sense God gave a goat already knows that the dossier is about as reliable as dowsing rod. In that sense, then, they are not wrong when they say the investigation should move beyond questions about its provenance.
The problem is that we have every reason to believe that the FBI used the dossier to secure its initial FISA warrant that allowed the Obama administration to begin spying on the Trump campaign in 2016. THAT’S why the dossier remains so important – not because it may or may not implicate Trump and his associates in Russian collusion, but because it may implicate the Obama FBI in an illegal wiretapping scandal the likes of which Washington has never seen before. Furthermore, if the dossier provided much of the impetus in the early days of the investigation, there is every reason to believe that the ENTIRE Trump/Russia story is built on nothing more substantial than a $10 million piece of Hillary Clinton-purchased opposition research.
You want to talk bottom line, Democrats? Here’s one for you: It’s been more than a year and a half since the FBI opened the investigation into Russian collusion, and the American people have yet to see one SHRED of viable evidence linking Trump with the Kremlin’s 2016 election activities. Not one shred of evidence that would implicate the campaign in anything more serious than a lapse in judgement. If our vast intelligence network can’t close a case in that amount of time, then that is either a sad commentary on our spies or a HUGE indication that this was never anything more than a politically-driven fantasy.
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