The Democratic National Committee (DNC), still trying to cope with Hillary Clinton’s defeat, just filed a civil suit in the Southern District of New York. Among the named defendants are the Russian government, members of the Trump campaign including the president’s son and son-in-law, and WikiLeaks.
The complaint is 66 pages long, and contains nothing you haven’t heard from the media for the last two years, but the beginning is laugh-out-loud funny: “No one is above the law.” The complaint goes on to say that Russia hacked the DNC, “then used this stolen information to advance its own interests: destabilizing the U.S. political environment, denigrating the Democratic presidential nominee, and supporting the campaign of Donald J. Trump (‘Trump’), whose policies would benefit the Kremlin … In the Trump campaign, Russia found a willing and active partner in this effort.”
The lawsuit moves on to extensively recount Democrats’ conspiracy-theorist and still-unproven version of the 2016 election. Readers will have heard all of this before in the mainstream press: Low-level Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos being contacted by a professor who somehow had ties to the Kremlin, the meeting in Trump Tower between Don Jr. and Russians, and Trump’s praise for WikiLeaks on the campaign-trail, all proves of course Trump and Russia conspired to influence the election.
The problem is that the mainstream press version of events leaves out about 80 percent of the story. In but one example, that Trump Tower meeting was attended by Russians working with Fusion GPS, the firm the DNC and Clinton campaign paid to concoct ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. With the help of shady Russian sources, Fusion GPS came up with a “dossier” the FBI used as a pretext to spy on the Trump campaign. Fusion GPS head honcho Glenn Simpson even met with one of the Russians before and after the Trump Tower meeting.
Worse, some of the complaint is facially untrue, such as the claim that Trump had anti-Russia language taken out of the GOP platform. Byron York has repeatedly debunked this claim with hard evidence, but it still gets repeated. That seems to be a recurring trend in this sad tale of the pathologies of America’s “progressives.”
The rest is pure allegation. The document is thinly sourced, and to media stories of the highly speculative and anonymous nature we have sadly grown accustomed to. And these anonymous sources in the intelligence community may or may not have conveyed even partial truths.
In but one example, Aaron Keller, writing for Law & Crime, notes that a source cited is an article from The New Republic, which sources to a New York Times article that doesn’t say anything close to what the complaint says the New Republic source says. Keller calls this “fourth-hand information.” Stephen Carter, writing for Bloomberg View, called the suit a “publicity stunt” that “reads less like a legal document than like a poorly sourced magazine story.”
Even some Democrats are unhappy with the suit, possibly sensing the potential of major blowback. It would be fitting if the judge tosses the lawsuit out. Then again, there is obviously some forum-shopping at play. Don’t forget that Kimba Wood, a judge for the Southern District of New York who is overseeing Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s case, was almost Bill Clinton’s attorney general but had to withdraw her name due to “nannygate,” and even refereed major leftist donor George Soros’ wedding.
Maybe the DNC is just desperate. They owe their creditors $6 million, while their rivals at the Republican National Committee are sitting on more than $40 million in cash. Either way, here are the top five potential reasons for the DNC lawsuit, with a bit on potential outcomes.
1. Insurance If the Mueller Investigation Ends
In case special counsel Robert Mueller comes out and clears Trump, Democrats could say Russia collusion was still an issue being decided in court. Maybe Democrats fear Mueller will come out and report no collusion before the next election. After all, according to reports, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein did just tell the president he wasn’t a “target” of the Mueller investigation.
Then again, as Andrew McCarthy has repeatedly pointed out, Trump and his campaign are still the “subject” of Mueller’s investigation. There is in fact no investigation without the allegation that Trump’s team colluded with the Russians. As such, saying someone is not a target means almost nothing. Trump could move to being a target in milliseconds.
In other words, the president shouldn’t trust Mueller or Rosenstein, and act accordingly. But if the DNC really believed Mueller would report there was collusion, why wouldn’t it wait until after-the-fact to make their civil suit stronger?
2. A Distraction as Russia-Gate Implodes
Mueller has searched for collusion for more than a year and come up with nothing. Collusion has morphed into Stormy Daniels. But Russia-gate is all the Democrats have.
Meanwhile, former FBI director Jim Comey is imploding on live television, and his deputy Andrew McCabe may soon face criminal charges. Comey and McCabe are contradicting each other, and the inspector general may soon release a report that thwacks much of the Obama-vintage FBI upper echelon.
And the more Americans hear about wrongdoing at the FBI, the worse it is for the Democrats. The Democrats own the FBI, despite Trump being in office. As Mollie Hemingway has reported, it is highly likely that Comey worked with Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to brief Trump on the Democrats’ unverified “dossier,” which allowed the media to report about it with some air of legitimacy. Questions are also surfacing about Mueller’s history of prosecutorial abuse and potential conflicts of interest.
Given that many Americans do question the FBI, and don’t agree with the eggheads on television who say doubting the FBI is unpatriotic, Democrats probably need a distraction.
3. Projecting
If you paid a sketchy opposition research firm to come up with a document using dubious Russian sources, then used compliant intelligence officials to legitimize your document, which you then used to create media reports to try to sway the vote, you’d be terrified of people finding the truth, wouldn’t you?
Maybe you’d assuage your inner guilt (assuming you still have a conscience) by saying your rival is everything that you are, and did everything that you did.
4. An Attempt to Get Trump People in Legal Jeopardy
Maybe, if the suit is allowed to take off, just about the entire Trump family will have to sit down for hours-long depositions. Then the DNC hopes someone contradicts themselves or someone else. But this goes both ways, which brings us to the last, and most likely, explanation for the DNC’s lawsuit.
5. Hubris
If you tell a lie long enough, you start to believe it. Even with the national media squarely in their court, Democrats might be overplaying their hand, simply because they really believe Hillary Clinton is the rightful president (#Resist).
But legal discovery is a two way street, and the rules permit very broad discovery. The Trump team can demand documents and depositions too. They could force John Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Peter Strzok, Loretta Lynch, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Sid Blumenthal, Hillary Clinton, and maybe even Obama to testify under oath.
What could discovery reveal? The president’s defense would be that the conspiracy charge is concocted, and if anything, the other side is really the guilty party. As a bonus, they could attempt to find out about Imran Awan, whom the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak just reported had a USB drive containing classified information harvested from congressional Democrats’ computers handed to the former head of Pakistani intelligence.
This is relevant because the information leaked by the so-called Guccifer 2.0 character, who says he hacked the DNC servers and turned emails over to WikiLeaks, was also at Awan’s fingertips. The fact that the DNC didn’t allow the FBI to examine their servers after they were hacked will certainly come in to play as well. Despite what the media tells you, this has the Trump team licking their chops.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/987470932989050881?s=19
What If Democrats’ House of Cards Is about to Crash?
Conservatives seem to think Democrats are always one step ahead, and play a smarter game. It is true that the Left owns academia, pop culture, and the media, and that we face an uphill battle.
But maybe the modern Democratic Party is less sophisticated than we think. They have no new policy ideas. Their ideas have already been implemented over the last 60 years and have resulted in abject misery. They also preside over the most unequal and segregated parts of the country. No matter who sits in the White House, the Left owns this status quo.
Part of this is admittedly the winners’ curse. Because of their policy victories, the only new ground remaining for the Left is to push stone-age paganism that doesn’t fly with the majority of Americans, racial discord, and socialized medicine. Even here, though, the mainstream Democratic Party is so corporatist that fully socialized medicine causes a huge rift among the Left. Let it also sink in that the “progressive” party is going after WikiLeaks.
Wikileaks may be an arm of Russia, but we don’t know that. How is WikiLeaks any different than The New York Times, CNN, or the Washington Post, which all routinely publish leaked classified information, a felony for the government employee who leaked? WikiLeaks didn’t commit libel, they told the truth that the DNC rigged the system against Bernie Sanders.
So it is more than possible that in all this Russia obsession, we are witnessing the death throes of the monstrosity that is today’s Democratic Party. This same party, for most of its history, has found a way to dehumanize whole classes of people, by age or race. It abandoned principle years ago, and cares only for power. Let me be the first to say good riddance.
