For months now, the floodgates have been gushing with claims that Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to win the election.
“Collusion,” “collaboration” and “conspiracy” have been key words in headlines.
However, even analysts from the left, including Barack Obama’s green-jobs “czar” Van Jones, have called the allegations “a big nothing-burger.”
Now the headlines are aflame with word that Donald Trump Jr. met with a “Russian lawyer” last year.
The New York Times reported Trump Jr. was told in an email “before the meeting that the information [lawyer Natalia] Veselnitskaya had was part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s candidacy,” NBC reported.
Then, Trump Jr. released emails Tuesday confirming the meeting.
What do YOU think? What are your thoughts on Trump Jr. in 2024? Sound off in today’s WND poll!
“The email exchange shows an acquaintance with ties to Russia, music publicist Rob Goldstone, telling the son of then-candidate Trump last year that the attorney had ‘information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,'” NBC reported.
Trump Jr. said he went to the meeting, listened and nothing came of it: “Obviously I’m the first person on a campaign to ever take a meeting to hear info about an opponent … went nowhere but had to listen,” he said on social media.
So is this “nothing-burger” leftovers?
Well, yes, contends talk-radio superstar Rush Limbaugh.
“I’m sick and fed-up of being forced on defense with this never-ending just line of absolute garbage crap, and yet I feel a compulsion of necessity here,” Limbaugh said on his national broadcast Tuesday. “I just think it’s all bogus. I think it’s all manufactured. I think it’s all concocted, and it isn’t going to stop. It’s not gonna end, no matter what. They’re gonna do this all four years if they have to. Even if the Republicans win in the midterms in 2018, they’re not going to stop this. It is going to continue.
“Think back to all of these stories the past six months. Relive it in your mind, relive it. Every day, we had something else – every day – and none of them went anywhere. Why are we just hearing about this now? This happened over a year ago. Why are we only hearing about this after every other effort to link Trump and Putin and collusion has bombed out? Why are we just hearing about this now?” he asked.
“If it is this incriminating, if it is this deadly, if this is the nail in the coffin, why only now are we hearing about this? It’s got all the ingredients of a story except fact. It has all the ingredients necessary to create illusions and write narratives, but it doesn’t have any substance,” Limbaugh continued.
“By that, I mean there was no high-level information from Russia. There was no information from the Russian government incriminating Hillary Clinton. None of that was available,” he added.
Not that negative information about Hillary Clinton’s links to Russia would have been any secret, even during the campaign. As Obama’s secretary of state, she signed off on giving 20 percent of America’s strategic uranium resources to Russia – all around a time when over $100 million in donations were pouring into the Clinton Foundation coffers.
Then, too, her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was getting paid $500,000 for a speech in Moscow.
But none of that apparently has become part of the independent counsel’s investigation of U.S. politicians’ “collusion” with Russia.
At least not yet.
The Daily Caller reported many Trump critics claimed that the New York Times report supported the theory that Trump campaign operatives were somehow involved in the Russian government’s hacking of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.
But Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort’s “lone meeting with the Russian lawyer pales when compared to the coordination between Clinton allies and Ukrainian government officials who hoped to see Clinton win,” the report said.
The Daily Caller reported:
A veteran DNC operative who previously worked in the Clinton White House, Alexandra Chalupa, worked with Ukrainian government officials and journalists from both Ukraine and America to dig up Russia-related opposition research on Trump and Manafort. She also shared her anti-Trump research with both the DNC and the Clinton campaign, according to the Politico report.
Chalupa met with Ukrainian Ambassador Valeriy Chaly and one of his aides, Oksara Shulyar, at the Ukrainian Embassy in March 2016 to talk about unearthing Paul Manafort’s Russian connections, Chalupa admitted to Politico. Four days later, Trump officially hired Manafort.
“The day after Manafort’s hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC’s communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation,” Politico reported.
The Politico report also notes that the DNC encouraged Chalupa to try to arrange an interview with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to talk about Manafort’s ties to the former pro-Russia president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort previously advised.
Limbaugh rejected the Times’ scenario regarding Trump Jr.
“The woman that showed up claiming to be the Russian lawyer with the information claimed to know nothing about it whatsoever. She was there for a totally different purpose. But you remember the Trump golden-showers dossier. It was rummaging around Washington throughout the summer of 2016. It was rummaging around and every media outlet knew about it. And none would write it, none would publish it, none would reference it because everybody knew that it was totally fraudulent and totally made up.”
He was referring to a long list of unsubstantiated claims about Trump actions in Russia.
“But they desperately wanted it out there; they wanted it. So BuzzFeed came along and published the whole thing with all these caveats saying none of it can be confirmed but this is what’s going around and we think you, the reader, should know, even though it’s all totally lies, every bit of it was bogus. The reason why BuzzFeed did it is because Trump was shown the dossier by intelligence agencies,” Limbaugh said.
“The story was that intel agencies were upset that Trump was not willing to have a meeting with them every day. I guess it’s common for presidents to get an intel briefing every day from the intelligence agencies, you know, one person that takes all the information, puts it in one report and provides it to the president. Trump was out there saying, ‘I’ve got a good memory. I don’t need to meet with these people every day.’
“So this dossier was presented to Trump by intelligence agencies under the guise of, ‘Mr. President, this is why you need to meet with us. This is the kind of stuff that will be out there. It’s not true, but this stuff is the kind of stuff that you need to be aware of.’ Sorry. Right then it becomes news. It was presented to Trump …Â Story is ‘Donald Trump today was presented with intel that says,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ Not that it was fake and phony and totally made up, but rather ‘Trump was presented with intel information today that said blah, blah.’
“And then it’s in the news. Now it’s a story, even though it isn’t true. It’s the same thing here. We have an email from a dubious source who’s now denying that he said this, passing along words from the son of a Trump partner, Miss USA pageant in Russia, claiming there’s high-level information from the Russian government designed to help Trump beat Hillary. Except there isn’t,” he said.
Limbaugh said it’s well-known that the Hillary campaign “was getting oppo-research on Trump from the Ukrainian government, and that led to Paul Manafort being fired as campaign manager. And nobody in the mainstream media or anywhere else batted an eye about Ukraine helping Hillary.”
Limbaugh explained there’s a reason leftists are attacking Donald Trump Jr.
“But you note the energy with which the media is going after Donald Trump Jr. And there’s a reason. They want to dirty him up. They want to destroy the guy before he gets started on his own political career. He has an obvious interest in politics. I don’t know if you’ve heard this guy speak.
“Folks, he is what his dad isn’t in that he is an ideological conservative – and if you’ve heard him speak, he’s got it down. He knows his stuff – and he can sell it and he can be persuasive with it – and he is the exact kind of conservative they want to destroy before he gets started, especially given that they don’t have a bench of their own. That is an added reason for all this energy in destroying Donald Trump Jr. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Van Jones’ description of the claims of a Russia-Trump scandal as a “nothing-burger” was caught on video by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, which is doing a series of undercover videos on American media called “American Pravda.”
O’Keefe previously released a video of a CNN producer admitting the network’s focus on allegations that Trump’s election campaign colluded with Russia is mostly for ratings. The producer said the network’s mostly liberal audience would not have put up with that kind of treatment of Obama.
Then a video clip shows Jones being approached on a street and stating in response to a question, “The Russian thing is just a big nothing-burger.”
He adds, “There’s nothing there you can do.”
The video (Be warned of offensive language):
[jwplayer 3oDwAH6S-pszPfxYQ]
Jones, one of CNN’s highest-profile political commentators, previously attacked Trump over the “Putin relationship,” Project Veritas pointed out.
The Hill said the email chain that Trump Jr. released was “stunning.”
It shows Trump Jr. was told information at the meeting “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
But in the end, the emails reveal, there was nothing.
In an interview Tuesday, Veselnitskaya claimed she never had any damaging information on Clinton.
She accused Trump campaigners of “longing for such an information.”
