[Townhall] In my earlier analysis of the latest dossier/collusion developments -- which have taken an abrupt turn in the last week, to the dismay of many liberals -- I wrote that newly-revealed and -confirmed details raise serious and uncomfortable questions for both the Democratic Party and the FBI. In a house editorial published today, the Wall Street Journal's editors explicate several of those questions that demand a full accounting. First, on the Democrats:
The Washington Post revealed Tuesday that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee jointly paid for that infamous "dossier" full of Russian disinformation against Donald Trump. They filtered the payments through a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie), which hired the opposition-research hit men at Fusion GPS. Fusion in turn tapped a former British spook, Christopher Steele, to compile the allegations, which are based largely on anonymous, Kremlin-connected sources. Strip out the middlemen, and it appears that Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate. Did someone say "collusion"? This news is all the more explosive because the DNC and Clinton campaign hid their role, even amid the media furor after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier in January. Reporters are now saying that Clinton campaign officials lied to them about their role in the dossier. Current DNC Chair Tom Perez and former Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz deny knowing about the dossier arrangement, but someone must have known. Perhaps this explains why Congressional Democrats have been keen to protect Fusion from answering dossier questions‐disrupting hearings, protesting subpoenas and deriding Republican investigators.
Are Perez and Wasserman Schultz's denials credible? As a New York Times reporter notes, Democratic dollars that flowed to Fusion GPS and Steele were effectively laundered through a law firm -- but they were still coming out of DNC coffers: |