‘Gaslighting’: How Hillary’s Flunkies (And The Media) Got America To Buy That Russian Collusion Narrative
“Instead, Hillary (Clinton) keeps pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. ‘She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,’ this person said. That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. (Robby) Mook and (John) Podesta 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.”
Those words may be found on page 395 of Shattered, Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. The book was written by Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen, neither regarded as right of center. The book was published on April 18, 2017. That date is very important, especially when considered along with several other important dates:
– November 8, 2016: Election Day.
– November 9, 2016: Donald Trump wins the Presidency and Hillary Clinton delivers her concession speech.
– November 10, 2016: Mook and Podesta set post-election communications strategy for the Hillary Clinton campaign featuring Russian involvement in the election as its central theme.
– March 2, 2017: Attorney General Sessions recuses himself from matters pertaining to investigations involving the Trump campaign.
– April 18, 2017: The book Shattered, Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign is published”.
– May 9, 2017: James Comey is fired as FBI Director.
– May 17, 2017: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and begins an investigation into allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 election.
How were Mook and Podesta, barely a day after their candidate lost the 2016 Presidential election, able to create an entire communications strategy based on, of all things, Russian involvement in the election?
After all, the Clinton campaign was not a particularly agile operation capable of delivering a rapid response on demand. For example, during the campaign when Hillary attempted to use Twitter, she required an entire staff that, according to reports, spent nearly a dozen hours crafting the tweet. By the time the tweet went out, the topic it pertained to was stale in voters’ minds and the language crafted by staffers came off sounding equally stale. Yet after the election, in a matter of hours, the campaign constructed a narrative that had to be “spun” a certain way?
Moreover, why would Mook and Podesta two days after the election ended see the need to develop a communications strategy for the Hillary Clinton campaign?
The campaign was over. When most political campaigns end, settling fiscal accounts and closing up shop are the order of the day. When Jimmy Carter lost in 1980 did his campaign staff implement a communications strategy that challenged the outcome of the election? When George H. W. Bush lost in 1992 did his campaign staff provide their candidate with a similar communications strategy?
It almost sounds as if pieces of a plan were already in place on November 10, 2017 when Mook and Podesta determined the communications strategy for a campaign that, by that time, wasn’t even a real campaign anymore. Consider the timeline:
– February 2016: Page texted Strzok worried about the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server. Page was concerned that Hillary Clinton might be “our next President”. (Notably, Comey recently has revealed he was of a similar mindset). Page went on to text Strzok “the last thing you need is going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more DOJ than FBI?”. Strzok and Page also discussed via text preparation of talking points so that Comey could brief then President Obama who wanted “to know everything we’re doing”.
– August 3, 2016: A text from Strzok to Page indicated McCabe was worried about “information control”. This text occurred as then CIA Director John Brennan was scheduled to testify before Congress regarding the possibility of election interference.
– August 15, 2016: Strzok texted Page “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s [likely McCabe] office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
– November 8, 2016: Election Day.
– November 9, 2016: Donald Trump wins the Presidency and Hillary Clinton delivers her concession speech.
– November 10, 2016: Mook and Podesta set post-election communications strategy for the Hillary Clinton campaign featuring Russian involvement in the election as its central theme.
– March 2, 2017: Attorney General Sessions recuses himself from matters pertaining to investigations involving the Trump campaign.
– April 18, 2017: The book Shattered, Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign is published”.
– May 9, 2017: James Comey is fired as FBI Director.
– May 17, 2017: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and begins an investigation into allegations of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign to influence the 2016 election.
– August 9, 2017: Left-leaning media outlet The Nation runs an overlooked article in which cyber-security experts reveal that hacking performed against DNC and Clinton campaign servers couldn’t have occurred from outside the organization. Rather, the hacks weren’t hacks at all. They were leaks from someone inside the organizations with access to the servers.
Also keep in mind things like the behavior of other FBI officials (like Bruce Ohr). Christopher Steele. The Clinton/DNC (according to Donna Brazile, the DNC and Clinton campaign were essentially one and the same) paid for dossier. Use of the dossier to obtain and renew FISA warrants. When Mook and Podesta convened Hillary Clinton campaign staffers on November 10, 2017 in a room littered with Shake Shack containers, they weren’t really establishing a communications strategy.
They were gaslighting. At the November, 10 2017 meeting, much of the groundwork had been laid – some of it more than a year before. To make the rest of the plan work, they needed a communications strategy that would gaslight the media and American public into believing the narrative about Russia-Trump collusion. They needed the media to obsess over it and they needed left-leaning voters to believe in it. That way, there would be sufficient pressure applied to continue investigations against Trump.
No doubt, when Trump fired Comey it was viewed as a windfall – that gave them a way to justify Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. By virtue of the Mueller probe’s own actions, they have proven that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The probe, chartered to investigate Russia-Trump collusion, today is fixated on porn star Stormy Daniels. That’s by design. None of this ever really was about Russia-Trump collusion; anyone that believes otherwise has been gaslighted plain and simple.
All of this for Hillary Clinton? And a campaign that continued after election day 2016? Why?
photo credit: Excerpted from: thekrisharris DSC05062 via photopin (license)