The “Trump/Russia” collusion hoax goes on, with Jim Acosta, still CNN’s chief White House correspondent, asking Trump at a press conference in India, ”Can you pledge to the American people that you will not accept any foreign assistance in the coming election?” When challenged by Trump, Acosta actually insulted him, saying, “Mr. President, I think our record of delivering the truth is a lot better than yours sometimes...” Trump said from the podium that Acosta ought to be ashamed, and he should be, but he won't, because he has no shame.

California Rep. Devin Nunes, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, has announced he’s planning to file a federal lawsuit Monday afternoon against the WASHINGTON POST after years of false “Trump/Russia” reporting. Even after no evidence of collusion has been found, the fake news lives on and evolves.

"The mainstream media continues to go about their normal pace of creating narratives and then going out and selling them to the American people, and they hope that we forget,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News Sunday.

Unlike the suit by Trump’s campaign against The New York Times, which was not brought by an individual and therefore might be determined not to have standing, Nunes' is on his own, as WaPo went after him personally. “What [they] did to me...there’s no explanation for it. I never talked to President Trump about Admiral McGuire; I didn’t go to the White House. None of this was true; it was all invented by someone.”

Nunes also has an ongoing suit against CNN --- that's right, Jim Acosta --- over a fake story they ran about his activities in Vienna; he has proof he was not there when they said he was. Similarly, when Nunes, according to WaPo, was supposedly meeting with Trump about Admiral McGuire, he was actually in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He says that if these news outlets want to know where he is, all they have to do is go to his social media.

He’s created a website associated with the Devin Nunes campaign called DefendUSA.com “that people can go to and join the fight.” He wants to stop the media from being able to poison millions of Americans with fake news.

https://act.devinnunes.com/defend-usa/

Recall that the whole “Russia hoax” claim –- which led to sanctions against Russia, the two-year Mueller investigation and a presidential impeachment –- originated with Hillary Clinton (of course) and the supposed hacking of John Podesta’s emails, which were extremely damaging to her at a critical time in her fight against Bernie Sanders for the 2016 nomination. American Greatness has just posted a revised and expanded version of two articles from July of 2018, under the single title “The Monstrous Lie Behind CrowdStrike” by Michael Thau, in which he looks at the DNC’s unsubstantiated claim that Russia hacked their servers as well as their unrelenting determination to keep those servers in the hands of CrowdStrike instead of turning them over to the FBI.

Thau’s article makes a strong case that the Democratic National Committee refused to let investigators look at their “evidence” of Russian infiltration for a very simple reason: there isn’t any.

Of course, President Trump is well aware of this whole business, and it seems obvious that his mere mention of “CrowdStrike” in the call with Ukrainian President Zelensky struck fear into the Democrats and led them even more frantically down the impeachment path. Think about it: if they'd had the goods on the Russkies with actual forensic evidence, they would have gleefully handed it over to the FBI on a silver platter decorated with roses and daffodils. But instead they've drawn a red line, so to speak, and refused to hand it over to anyone.

Robert Mueller’s team went ahead and blamed the Russians anyway.

So why wouldn’t the DNC instruct CrowdStrike to hand over the servers, and why did the FBI just shrug their shoulders and refuse to get tough about this? Even then-FBI Director James Comey testified before Congress three times that the DNC refused the FBI’s “[m]ultiple requests at different levels” to collect forensic evidence.” Simultaneously, the DNC had been hyping the theft of the emails as akin to “an act of war.” This makes no sense, unless they were pulling a "Jussie Smollett."  It also makes no sense that the FBI didn't, well, make a federal case out of it.

A senior FBI official told The Hill in January 2017 that the Bureau “repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise.” This same source said that “the FBI [had] no choice but to rely upon” CrowdStrike, whose executives refused to discuss the matter under oath.

No choice??

The DNC also rebuffed Department of Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson’s requests and wouldn’t even discuss the matter with him.

I’m no computer expert, but numerous people who are have expressed skepticism about the claim of a Russian hack. One such skeptic who goes by the pseudonym “Adam Carter” has concluded, after working on this story for a few years, that “Guccifer 2.0” was a fake identity created by CrowdStrike as a fake hacker. Though most of Carter’s evidence is technical, Thau says “he’s unquestionably found an inconsistency in the Russian narrative that ought to raise doubts in even the most computer-illiterate congressman’s mind.” This article presents exactly that.

To explain why the DNC might resort to such elaborate fakery, Thau takes us back to March 19, 2016, the day they learned that "hostile actors" had obtained all the emails in the Gmail account of Hillary campaign manager John Podesta. We know this was not an actual hack; he’d fallen for a common “spear-phishing” scam that tricked him into divulging his password (which was --- I kid you not --- “password”). The emails were extremely derogatory towards Hillary and even contradicted the defense they’d publicly made for her use of a private server. When Julian Assange said on June 12 that he’d acquired Hillary’s emails, they must have immediately assumed these were from the same "hack."  Bernie Sanders reacted, too, by meeting with top advisors and resolving a continued fight for the nomination.

The DNC quickly armed itself with the “Russia” narrative and, on June 14 in WaPo, shrieked about Russia stealing Podesta’s emails. (Not surprisingly, all information in the WaPo article had been provided by CrowdStrike and the DNC.) By October 7, when WikiLeaks began releasing the emails, Hillary’s supporters had already been, in Thau’s words, “taught to tune them out by angrily reciting the mantras ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia.’” This became Hillary’s personal defense. “What is really important about WikiLeaks,” she said, “is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans.”

Thau’s article takes a close look at “Guccifer 2.0” and the carelessness of “clues” left in documents sent to the press and asks excellent, common-sense questions that debunk the claim --- maintained in Mueller’s report and continuing through the 2020 election --- that he was a Russian spy trying to aid Donald Trump. By all means, set aside a block of time to read this.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/22/the-monstrous-lie-behind-crowdstrike/