Hillary Clinton went on MSNBC this week and told Rachel Maddow that she thinks Americans who spread “misinformation” and Russia propaganda should be prosecuted.
In a conversation about the recent Justice Department indictment of several alleged Kremlin-run websites and Russian state media employees, Clinton said it’s important to indict Russians who interfere in our elections but there are also Americans “engaged in this kind of propaganda” and that if they were civilly or criminally charged it would be “a better deterrent” because it’s unlikely any Russians will ever stand trial in the United States.
What she’s describing is of course odious and totally incompatible with the First Amendment. Americans are free to spread as much Russian propaganda as they want, whether they believe any of it or not. We can shout all kinds of things from the street corner, hand out conspiracy theory pamphlets in the grocery store parking lot, and post the craziest stuff you’ve ever heard all day along on social media. If Hillary Clinton doesn’t like it, she can go pound sand.
More to the point though, “misinformation” isn’t actually a thing. Neither is disinformation or malinformation. These are Soviet terms that relate to psychological warfare. When Clinton and Maddow and other Democrats use these terms what they really mean is, “facts I don’t like and opinions I disagree with.”
But fine, for the sake of argument if Clinton wants to go down this road, let’s go. Let’s say we’re going to start criminally prosecuting American citizens for spreading Russia propaganda. In that case, Clinton herself is first up. No one has done more to interfere in our elections by spreading Russian propaganda than Hillary Clinton herself. She is arguably the greatest spreader of Russian propaganda and lies in American history, so she can be first to stand trial under these insane new rules she’s proposing.
After all, it was the Clinton campaign that created the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy, which hamstrung the incoming Trump administration and held the nation hostage for more than two years. After 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witness interview, and nearly 300 wiretaps and pen registers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was zero evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates.
There was no evidence Trump ever colluded with Russia, but there’s mountains of evidence that Clinton did. Recall it was her campaign that hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to do opposition research on Trump, then the resumptive GOP nominee. At the time, Fusion GPS was also working on behalf of Prevezon, a company owned by Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch Denis Katsyv, in the company’s battle with U.S. prosecutors over Magnitsky Act sanctions. After the Clinton campaign and the DNC retained Fusion GPS, the firm hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy, to dig up dirt on any possible connections between Trump and Russia. These campaign expenditures to Fusion GPS were never disclosed by the Clinton campaign.
The various reports and memoranda that Steele produced and circulated to the media and the FBI came to be known as the Steel dossier, which was eventually thoroughly debunked and discredited. But at the time they served the useful political purpose of insinuating to the media and the FBI that Moscow had dirt on Trump, who was a secret agent of the Kremlin.
The dossier set off a firestorm after it was briefed to president-elect Trump in January 2017 and then published by Buzzfeed. At the time, it seemed that there were some real connections between Trump and Russia, but in fact that connections were all on Clinton’s side. Steele, for example, had his very own Russian benefactor, Oleg Deripaska, whom Steele referred to as “our favorite business tycoon.” Deripaska was barred by sanctions from traveling to the U.S., yet Steele tried several times to broker a meeting between Deripaska and the Obama administration’s Justice Department.
One of the top DOJ officials whom Steele reached out to on behalf of Deripaska was Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie Ohr earned more than $40,000 working for Fusion GPS on Trump-Russia connections. It was Ohr (Bruce, not Nellie) who became the secret go-between for Steele and the FBI after Steele was fired as a confidential human source after the bureau found out he had lied about his contacts with the media regarding the dossier.
The Clinton campaign collusion with Russia gets even worse. The Russian attorney for Prevezon, the Russian company Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson worked for directly, was a woman named Natasha Veselnitskaya. She’s the one who set up a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, Jr., that was touted as evidence the Trump campaign was colluding with corrupt Russian officials. In that meeting, Veselnitskaya promised to provide “dirt” on Clinton to the Trump campaign, but the information itself was actually produced by Fusion GPS.
All of this is but a brief and incomplete overview. The connections and collusion between the Clinton campaign and Russia are extensive and damning. (For a more thorough accounting of the Clinton campaign’s collusion with Russia, see my colleague Sean Davis’s 2019 piece on the subject here.)
Suffice to say that if we’re going to start prosecuting Americans for spreading Russian propaganda, the very first person we should charge is Hillary Clinton.
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