Oh boy, we sure are glad all those Trump supporters on Fox News have been laying the groundwork for “Russian collusion is legal and my favorite!” lately, because the Wall Street Journal is out with a scoop that shows the first actual evidence of what looks like the Trump team trying to collude with Russia. We expect there will be much more. And surprise, disgraced former national security adviser/literal actual foreign agent Michael Flynn is right in the middle of it!
We hope the collusion evidence that comes out after this isn’t quite as dumb as what the WSJ is reporting, though, because honestly, this is kind of sad. Remember in 2008 when there were rumors of Michelle Obama having a “whitey tape,” and all of a sudden garden variety wingnuts were all like Indiana Jones, going on quests so they could be the One and Only True Wingnut to find it? If you’ll remember, they all tragically died on that quest, because the Whitey Tape doesn’t exist. Similarly, Republican operative Peter W. Smith, who bragged about how he was kissin’ cousins with Michael Flynn and Michael Flynn’s son “Pizzagate Junior,” was on the hunt for the mythological “33,000 emails Hillary Clinton deleted from her Benghazi server,” and he was willing to go to the ends of the earth to find them. He even tried to go directly to Russian hackers who had allegedly hacked them! Isn’t that ADORABLE? (Smith is dead now so it’s OK for us to make fun of him.)
Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.
In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. General Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.
“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this — if you find anything, can you let me know?'” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.
Emails written by Mr. Smith and one of his associates show that his small group considered Mr. Flynn and his consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, to be allies in their quest.
Their QUEST. They tried to find Hillary’s deleted emails in a house, they tried to find them with a mouse! They tried to find them in a box! They tried to find them with a fox! Could they find them in the rain? Could they find them on a train? No they couldn’t because they’re fucking losers who believe in internet conspiracies.
The WSJ notes that we can’t be entirely sure whether Michael Flynn himself was part of this, or whether Peter W. Smith was just name-dropping Flynn like he was a common Beyoncé. But he sure implied it! Wonder if Michael Flynn has shared any of this information with his FBI handlers, or if this is small potatoes stuff compared to all the other criminal activity he has to confess to.
A little more context:
The operation Mr. Smith described is consistent with information that has been examined by U.S. investigators probing Russian interference in the elections.
Those investigators have examined reports from intelligence agencies that describe Russian hackers discussing how to obtain emails from Mrs. Clinton’s server and then transmit them to Mr. Flynn via an intermediary, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence.
It isn’t clear who that intermediary might have been or whether Mr. Smith’s operation was the one allegedly under discussion by the Russian hackers.
Smith died just a week and a half after he told his story to the Wall Street Journal, because what good is life if you can’t read Hillary Clinton’s secret sexxx emails about “The Good Wife” and Chelsea’s wedding plans?
If you don’t remember the wingnut myth of Hillary’s 33,000 missing emails, it is a fake story about how when the Benghazi committee subpoenaed her private server, she allegedly handpicked 33,000 emails, all the ones that had her secret plans about how she and Huma could direct the Benghazi attacks from their Obamaphones while lying in their lesbian bed in Georgetown, and deleted them. It is not even remotely true. The request to delete those emails, which were judged to be personal and unrelated to her work at the State Department, came months before the subpoena. But this story is nonetheless one of the things wingnuts believe in, like their silly belief that Barack Obama was born in Muslim-istan, or their hilarious belief that there’s a God out there who loves them.
As the Wall Street Journal explains, there’s never been any evidence that these deleted emails were actually hacked. But Peter W. Smith believed they were, and some Russian hackers done telled him they had them! Here are some enjoyable tweets from Smith, from before he was dead:
Anyway, read the whole story, as it’s very interesting. Smith had apparently been a Clinton-hating wingnut for years and years. As the WSJ recounts, “in the early 1990s, Mr. Smith helped publicize Arkansas state troopers’ claims that then-Gov. Bill Clinton had enlisted them to arrange trysts with women.” And then suddenly there he was in 2016, on a snipe-hunt to find Hillary’s pretend SMOKING GUN emails for the benefit of the Trump campaign. And now he is a dead person. Sad!
Hopefully soon we’ll start learning about how the Trump campaign was actually successful in colluding with Russia, as opposed to sad stories about dumb idiots searching for fake emails they heard about on Fox News.
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