An Alternative History

Let's explore alternative history and its fictional aftermath for just a sec. It's 2008, and the Presidential election is in full swing. John McCain, the GOP candidate, along with the RNC pays an oppo research firm $12.5 million dollars to develop a dossier in which Barack Obama is claimed to be in collusion with Muslim countries to undermine our country. There are also a few salacious claims about Obama's character. The dossier is passed to a GOP-friendly DoJ under George W. Bush and a clandestine investigation of Obama and his campaign commences, six months before the election. As part of the investigation, FISA warrants are issued allowing the FBI to covertly surveil Obama campaign aids. The dossier is leaked to the media, snippets of the dossier are leaked to the public (well, we all know that wouldn't happen, because the media was in the tank for Obama, but indulge me). The intent, of course, is to destroy Obama's candidacy.

Obama wins anyway, but a year later the story breaks. RNC bigwigs claim they know nothing about who authorized the payment. McCain claims it was nothing more than politics as usual and that the dossier wasn't used anyway. Everyone in the GOP plays dumb.

A few questions:

• Do you think that the media would ignore the story?
• Do you think that the NYT, WaPo and other supposed investigative "journalists" would find the story generally uninteresting?
• Do you think that the media would quietly accept McCain's claims of innocence?
• Do you think the media would trumpet evidence-free claims that Obama colluded with Muslim countries?
• Do you think that there would be no calls for a special prosecutor?
• Do you think that the Obama DoJ would shrug and refuse to initiate criminal investigation that might lead to indictments?

If you're being honest with yourself ... of course you don't. But this is exactly what's happening with the Fusion GPS story. One of the few journalists who is investigating Fusion GPS, Kim Strassel, comments:

... it is fair to ask if the entire Trump-Russia narrative—which has played a central role in our political discourse for a year, and is now resulting in a special counsel issuing unrelated indictments—is based on nothing more than a political smear document. Is there any reason to believe the FBI was probing a Trump-Russia angle before the dossier? Is there any collusion allegation that doesn’t come in some form from the dossier?

The idea that the federal government and a special counsel were mobilized—that American citizens were monitored and continue to be investigated—based on a campaign-funded hit document is extraordinary. Especially given that to this day no one has publicly produced a single piece of evidence to support any of the dossier’s substantive allegations about Trump team members.

So yes, Mrs. Clinton, the dossier—which you paid for—was used in the election. And we are only beginning to understand in how many ways.

Sadly, we're not in the alternative world I described in the opening paragraphs of this post—a world in which the media is unbiased, where real and thorough investigations actually happen, and where wrong-doing is punished. Instead, we live in a world of Fake News and extreme pro-Democrat media bias. A world in which evidence-free Russian collusion is pushed to the max by the media, and clear, irrefutable evidence of wrong-dong by Democrats is ignored. So much so, in fact, that we may never "understand in how many ways" Clinton corruption was used to undermine the electoral process.