Durham report shows it was Clinton, not Trump, who colluded with Russians: Victor Davis Hanson
Hanson criticizes a series of individuals tied to Clinton's campaigns or administration
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The Durham report suggests there are more questions about Hillary Clinton's overtures toward Russian entities than former President Donald Trump's, Victor Davis Hanson claimed.
Hanson, a historian and fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, told "Life, Liberty & Levin" that Durham's findings showed that "far from being a Trump-Russian connection, there was a Hillary-Clinton–Russian connection."
Hanson analyzed the findings, saying they showed Clinton was using a Moscow-based "source," Democrat-linked PR executive Charles Dolan Jr., to collect purported intelligence on Trump.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Dolan, who served twice as former President Bill Clinton's Virginia state campaign chairman, was "feeding" information to Igor Danchenko, a Russian national working at the Brookings Institution at a time the thinktank was being led by Nelson "Strobe" Talbott, Hanson said.
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Trump, Clinton (REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo)
Talbott, who also served as Bill Clinton's deputy secretary of State, had been made privy to "briefings and inquiries on the development of the dossier" by Steele, according to a Fox News analysis by law professor Jonathan Turley.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"Strobe Talbott… was introduced to Christopher Steele through Fiona Hill of impeachment fame, and the basic story mark was that they were fabricating everything in this dossier, and Dolan was trying to pass on rumors to Danchenko, who was corroborating with Steele," Hanson said.
In a 2019 Politico op-ed, Talbott notably claimed in-part, "[W]e already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker."
Hanson said the purported "pee tape" — which supposedly was to have shown prostitutes urinating on a Moscow hotel bed at the behest of Trump to spite the Obamas, who reportedly previously slept there — was "all made up."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"[A]nd worse yet, the FBI knew it was made up, and yet they continued to pay Danchenko in hopes that he might find some credibility because they were using this material to get a FISA warrant to spy on [then-Trump campaign aide] Carter Page, and yet they knew that it was false."
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Ex-MI6 spy Christopher Steele (TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)
"Even in the case of Steele, they offered him $1 million, apparently, if he could just reify or substantiate just one point and he couldn't. So the FBI was knee-deep in it, and Durham suggests that they didn't want to investigate Hillary or monitor her communications," he said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The reason the feds didn't probe Clinton as they had Trump, he surmised, was because they were certain she was soon to be elected president.
"And they were terrified that anybody, I guess, who would concoct such a conspiracy might do the same to them if she was in the White House," he said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"So it's damning to the FBI. It's damning to the Hillary Clinton campaign. It's damning to the media, because it's all out there and then nobody's refuted it… it really shows that Hillary Clinton colluded with the Russian government through intermediaries, and the FBI knew about it and blamed Donald Trump, who was innocent of it."