Hillary Clinton and The Crime of Opposition Research

I don't get worked up easily.

I can read Trump tweets all day long and stay zen.

But the other day, I blew my top off when I read the latest hatchet job on Hillary Clinton.

Let me explain.

The day after the gold star family saga, where Trump insulted the widow of a black soldier and John Kelly lied for him, Washington Post ran a piece accusing Clinton campaign of funding the Christopher Steele opposition research dossier.

The ominous title was "Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier."

This is the dossier that alleged among other verifiable claims that Russian sex workers allegedly urinated on the Orange Man in a bed where Obama once slept (I am not sure if it was just the bed or him in it, my inclination is to point at the bed).

Now, as I wrote here several times, the people who financed the oppo were Republican rivals of Donald Trump.

Interestingly, no media outlet bothered to find out who they were. In fact if you read the Post piece they say so themselves.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.

Whoever they were, they used Fusion GPS, a political research company, to hire the former British spy Christopher Steele to collect dirt on Trump.

He came through and gave them his conclusions. Piss and all.

When it became clear that Trump would be the presumptive nominee, Republicans stopped financing the oppo.

Naturally, Fusion GPS took it to DNC and asked them if they would be interested and they said yes.

As anyone else in any political campaign would. Oppo is a universal practice. Just ask Donnie Jr who took a meeting with a Russian lawyer to get some dirt on Clinton.

As you saw in the Post quote, DNC used Marc Elias' law firm Perkins Coie to fund the Fusion GPS investigation until October. This is their scoop.

But there is more.

Around October, with no one else to give money to this project, Christopher Steele, who was said to be sufficiently alarmed by his own findings, contacted his sources at FBI to let them see the dossier.

Or was it John McCain?

In any case, the FBI were so intrigued that they agreed to pay him to complete his research. But they never did or could when his name was revealed after the election.

Much of this is common knowledge among news junkies.

The only two pieces missing were the original contract holder and the Democratic intermediary for the subsequent funding since neither the DNC nor the Clinton campaign  fessed up to partially funding the Steele dossier.

And we now know that the answer to the second question was Marc Elias.

Though we still have no clue who the original Republican instigator was. And the liberal media have no desire to look into it.

So now that we are all up to speed, let's turn to the piece that affected my blood pressure.

A couple of days ago, I looked at the BBC News site, as I do every morning and I saw this.

Seriously?

First, look at her picture. Look at her eyes, her expression, her hands.

What does the picture say to you? Scary bitch? Grabby, corrupt politician? Shifty, untrustworthy woman?

All of the above?

I can tell you that for every decent picture of Clinton there are probably 500 like this one and it is not a coincidence.

As John LeCarré said in his latest book (The Pigeon Tunnel)

I opened my Times newspaper to be greeted by my own face glowering at me. From my sour expression I could tell et once that the text around it wasn't going to be friendly. Photographic editors know their stuff.

Second, read the text.

It claims that her team bankrolled a sleazy dossier and goes on stating that "Mrs Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) reportedly helped fund the research."

If you read the whole article, curiously, at the end there is a chart that you will see below.

You will notice that the timeline is the same one I provided in my introduction. DNC was not the funding group. They got involved briefly only to see the FBI taking over.

Yet they didn't use this information in their piece.

The trick is that no one would take a look at this chart. They already know from the outset that the scary looking bitch bankrolled a sleazy dossier.

Besides, the chart is meaningful only if you know the progression already.

My question is this: If you know the entries in this chart, which are in the same piece, how do you write a title like "Clinton Team and Democrats "Bankrolled" Trump Dirty Dossier" in good conscience.

And this is a British publication.

Imagine the fun they had in the US.

Next time you hear a male journalist ask the question, why people hate Clinton, slap them silly if you are a woman.

And he is within your reach.

It will be cathartic.

People hate her because the corporate media have been protecting scums like Weinstein, Halperin, O'Reilly or Wieseltier while attacking uppity women like Hillary Clinton.