How can this be? Let me count the ways:

• The FBI and the Mueller investigation both had as their guide star the Steele Dossier hoax, upon which was built a multi-year investigation into a non-existent relationship of “collusion” between Donald Trump and the Russian government to subvert the 2016 election.
• DARPA backed not one, but two Hillary Clinton-created hoaxes that tied Donald Trump and his campaign to Russia and created what now appears to be phantom Russian interference in the 2016 election.
• The New York Times documented a #resistance movement in the Trump Administration, one of whose prominent “leaders” came out of the closet to endorse Joe Biden.

Both law enforcement and the intelligence community were handed fake evidence to undermine President Trump, and he spent his entire term fighting against the false accusations of colluding with Russia that were invented by the Clinton campaign.

Forget Collusion. Was "Interference" Also Fake News?
Open records investigations suggest the same academic researchers responsible for the infamous Alfa Server hoax were likely also the government's initial source that Russia did the "DNC Hack":https://t.co/Wf5fSNreqB pic.twitter.com/LzG5AUObY8

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 26, 2023

Matt Taibbi’s Racket has the latest revelations regarding the fake Russia influence narrative, and it calls into question not just the fake collusion narrative, but the Russian interference narrative as a whole.

The Russian hack of the DNC, which always seemed too convenient by half, was likely not true. We may never know, but what we do know is that the same people who invented the Trump/Alpha Bank hoax were also the only people to have examined the servers involved, and they provided the “evidence” to the intelligence community.

In other words, when the government said the Russians hacked the DNC, they were only repeating what the Clinton campaign was saying.

The same Clinton-campaign-connected researchers who helped generate an infamous fake news story were likely the U.S. government’s source for the initial announcement that Russians hacked the Demcratic National Committee, according to documents produced across years of Open Records requests and congressional letters.

According to a letter recently sent to Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, work on attribution of the hack was done by a “Georgia tech team” who submitted a report on August 7, 2016, titled “Fancy Bear/APT28 Attribution analysis”:

That Georgia Tech team was led by researchers David Dagon and Manos Antonikakis, known to be sources for the infamous “Alfa Server” story claiming the Trump team was engaged in a bizarre scheme to beep backchannel secrets to Russia’s Alfa Bank. The never-believable Alfa story has been dismissed by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, and is destined to take a place alongside the “pee tape” and the “secret talks” of Paul Manafort and Julian Assange as one of the most absurd pieces of much-reported, never-happened news from the Trump-Russia period.

That August 7th, 2016 date is an important last piece of confirmation, as DARPA until recently denied being involved with this work. It was turned up by Grassley, who himself was acting in significant part upon information gathered across years of Freedom of Information Act and state Open Records requests. This story is a textbook example of how citizens like this story’s pseudonymous co-author Undead_FOIA and the “Sleuth’s Corner” can use public access laws to uncover important news, when journalists paid to do the job won’t bother. You can read more of their analysis here.

For years, “Collusion” and “Interference” were the biggest stories in the world. Then the Mueller report fizzled, Covid-19 and January 6th arrived, and new details that emerged in no-longer-front-page stories were ignored. A pause now to take a look back reveals a very different picture from what the public remembers.

You may remember the Georgia Tech team–they are the ones who falsely identified an advertising server sending out automated emails as a secret back channel between the Trump campaign and their supposed handlers in Russia. It was a hoax, but it helped create and substantiate a narrative that Trump was a “Manchurian Candidate” controlled by the Russians.

There were stories in the MSM all over the place, including The Atlantic, where Trump was literally compared to a fictional character who was brainwashed.

The government’s decision to publicly claim Russia was responsible for breaches of Democratic Party emails inspired predictably fulminating outrage. The Atlantic declared Donald Trump a “modern Manchurian candidate” and speculated Russia might be planning “interference with registration rolls.” NBC warned of “a broader ‘active measures’ campaign to influence the upcoming U.S. election.” It became bipartisan axiom overnight that the Russian “hack” was an “act of war,” with everyone from former DNC chair Donna Brazile to an incensed Keith Olbermann (“We were invaded!”) to Dick Cheney to Senator John McCain soon agreeing on the basic premise.

All this propaganda served to cripple Trump’s presidency, with much of the Executive Branch actively working to bring down or stymie the President of the United States.

Hillary’s proxy presidency didn’t allow her to make policy, but it did allow her to counter Donald Trump and undermine his ability to govern. In a sense, she controlled much of the Executive branch during Trump’s presidency.

Hillary, of course, shared the bully pulpit with Trump as well. The MSM promoted her, creating a counter-narrative of Trump’s illegitimacy–one that gave a great deal of leeway to the FBI conspiracy to take down Trump.

Who knows what Trump might have accomplished without having to fight every moment of the day against those who swore to follow him, and not the loser of the 2016 election.