[Hot Air] If you’ve read the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, you know that the whole narrative about Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to win the 2016 presidential election was cooked up by Team Hillary after her stunning defeat. Immediately after Hillary’s concession speech was delivered, her campaign staff set about concocting rumors to present to the media about Russian collusion being the reason for Trump’s unexpected victory. The point was to label Trump an illegitimate president. The Clinton campaign didn’t just pay for the phony Steele dossier, they built upon it and used Hillary’s base ‐ the media ‐ as their partners."Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."The plan, according to the book, was to push journalists to cover how "Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign," and it succeeded to a fare-thee-well. After the election, coverage of the Russian "collusion" story was relentless, and it helped pressure investigations and hearings on Capitol Hill and even the naming of a special counsel, which in turn has triggered virtually nonstop coverage.
Now that we are two years into the Mueller investigation, we know there most likely will be absolutely no collusion between Putin’s Russia and the Trump campaign to be reported. It’s true that some people within Trump’s universe have been indicted and found guilty of bad behavior and are now paying the price, President Trump himself has not been implicated in any wrongdoing. Mueller is going to be wrapping the investigation up soon and his report will probably be made public. Soon everyone will know more clearly what if anything, there is on Trump.