Crosstalk: March 27, 2019

Robert Romano is the vice president of public policy with Americans for Limited Government.

After 22 months of investigation into alleged Trump/Russia collusion, just where do things stand? According to Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress where he quotes Mueller’s report, it says that the investigation failed to establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the government of Russia.

According to Robert, this flies in the face of everything we’ve been told and what the government was told by former British agent Christopher Steele who was hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign in 2016 to investigate this. In other words, apparently the Steele dossier was fabricated. Either his sources lied to him, he lied or both.

Prior to Mueller, the FBI had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Carter Page, a Trump campaign official in October of 2016, and that the investigation was actually taking place prior to that.

The DNC dossier alleged that Trump and his campaign helped the Russians hack the DNC and John Podesta e-mails and put them onto Wikileaks. The thought was that there was a conspiracy that Trump and his campaign had complete knowledge and support of the hack. It was discovered later from Mueller’s own court filings that the hacks took place before there was an attempt to contact, not Russia, but Wikileaks. As Robert noted, if you have a conspiracy with Russia, why do you need to contact Wikileaks about future release of the e-mails; and that occurred after it was already public knowledge that Wikileaks would be publishing e-mails about Hillary Clinton.

Robert also named Roger Stone who was trying to contact Wikileaks after it was reported that they had e-mails on Clinton to find out what those were. So everything put out by Mueller leading to the disclosure of his report had already been confirming that there was no collusion and that everything that happened was in response to public reporting about the hacks and e-mails. So essentially, the conspiracy was made-up.

Looking back, there was a national security investigation begun by the Obama administration looking into the opposition party (the Trump campaign) in an election year. People were spied on, and then when Mueller became involved we began to see prosecutions for unrelated crimes. This involved Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Roger Stone, yet no one was prosecuted for hacking the DNC or for anything that occurred in 2016. It was all for things ‘after the fact’ and in the case of Paul Manafort, his situation was ‘before the fact’, dealing with things even before Trump was running for president.

Robert called this a travesty and he believes we need reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act because you can’t have an administration spying on political opponents based upon made-up charges.

Robert nicely connected the people and activities involved in this complicated story and Crosstalk callers put forth their comments and questions as well.