The real story of Trump and Putin in Helsinki

The news media went hysterical over President Trump’s comments at a press conference in Helsinki after meeting with Russian President Putin. It’s instructive to first examine what it is the president actually said.

What got the media stirred was this answer to a question about Russian meddling in the election. Trump said, “All I can do is ask the question—my people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be but I really want to see the server but, I have confidence in both parties.”

The Trump haters seized on that line of “both parties” and spun it that Trump was trashing our intelligence services. Keep in mind this is while Congress is investigating the possibility that several FBI agents were involved in a plot to first block his election to the presidency and then bring him down once he won. It’s important at this point to break the issue of Russian interference down into two distinct categories.

First, there’s no doubt that the Russians have been buying ads on platforms like Facebook to sow discontent in the country. What is not widely reported is they bought ads both pro-Trump and anti-Trump. They bought ads both pro-Hillary and anti-Hillary. They play both sides of the Black Lives Matters issue as well as Texas and California secession movements. In other words, the Russians take the opportunity to drive the wedge deeper on any issue that divides us. Why? Nobody really has a good answer. There could be a geopolitical strategy to topple us as the world’s superpower. It could be as simple as Putin’s hatred for America. Whatever it is, they’re certainly active on every side of the issues.

In the indictment of the twelve Russians unsealed recently by Robert Mueller’s team they contend that the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency set up shop to interfere with the U.S. presidential election in the spring of 2014. That was over a year before Donald Trump jumped into the race. It is inconceivable that such an operation was devised to get Trump elected president.

But it’s the second part of this equation that Trump is questioning. The part about the Russians hacking the DNC servers, or as the left-wing media like to say it, “hacking the election.” There’s no evidence at all that the Russians or anybody else “hacked the election.” Whatever the Russians did had no bearing on the outcome of the election. That’s one of the reasons why Trump is so defensive. The left is trying to convince the American people that his presidency is illegitimate because the Russians got him elected. That is utter bovine scatology. 

The real issue is the DNC server itself. This is the point Trump was making when he said, “I really want to see the server.” Something most Americans don’t even know is the FBI has never examined the DNC server that was supposedly hacked. How incredible is that? The whole investigation hinges on testimony from a company, CrowdStrike, hired by the DNC to say the server was hacked. Until our intelligence agencies have actually examined the server themselves how on Earth can they definitely say who hacked it, or if it was hacked at all?

That is the point Trump was making in Helsinki, and the left-wing media chose to ignore the real story in favor of flogging the dead mule of Trump-Russia collusion.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Mr. Trump, beware the Mueller trap

The news media are abuzz with speculation as to who leaked the questions Robert Mueller is going to ask President Trump, if he ever gets the chance. At least one CNN legal analyst thinks Trump is the source of the leak. Michael Zeldin points to improper grammar as the smoking gun. He didn’t elaborate.

The general consensus is these questions were compiled by Trump’s lawyers during negotiations with Mueller’s people over a Trump interview. Then who leaked them? It’s difficult to tell. The bigger question is who stands to gain anything by the leak? The media say Trump does. I’m not so sure. He tweeted there were no questions about collusion, but at least one question asks what he knew about Paul Manafort reaching out to Russia. Another question refers to “any meeting with Mr. Putin.” Another asks what Trump may know about Jared Kushner trying to set up a back channel to Russia.

None of this would’ve been illegal nor improper. Trump was already elected president and setting up communications with Putin and/or Russia would be no more extraordinary than setting up communications with any other country. It’s just that Russia has been so vilified since the “witch hunt” began.

Remember when Hillary was hitting that reset button? There was nothing at all sinister about dealing with Russia then. It was only after the DNC claimed they were hacked by the Russians that anything Russian became suspect. By the way, we still have never seen the DNC servers to determine if they were hacked by the Russians or anyone else. The irony is the lawsuit filed by the DNC against Trump, Russia, and others may force the DNC to produce those servers. We may yet learn definitively that no hacking occurred.

But back to the leaked questions. If these really are questions Mueller wants to ask Trump then it’s troubling for the Trump legal team. Mueller isn’t going to ask any question he doesn’t already know the answer to. That means he has proof of the answer, either by wiretaps or other witnesses. If President Trump slips up on one tiny detail he could be facing a perjury charge, which is most definitely an impeachable offense. It’s what Bill Clinton was impeached over. He wasn’t convicted, of course, but this is a far different climate. There are plenty of Republican Never-Trumpers in the Senate who would jump at the chance to take this man down.

Then there are the people who claim Trump will be compelled to talk if he doesn’t agree to meet with Mueller. I would assume the same laws against forced self-incrimination apply to a deposition as they would in a court of law. That’s probably why Mueller and his team keep insisting that Trump isn’t the target of any criminal investigation. If you’re not the target then it’s more difficult to argue the self-incrimination angle. 

Whether they’re openly targeting Trump, make no mistake, he’s the ultimate goal. Manafort, Flynn, Papadopoulos, et al. are small fish. If that’s all Mueller has at the end of the day then this whole investigation was for naught. And knowing that Mueller already knows the answers to all the questions put to Trump only solidifies the fact that he is, in fact, the target. When you’re the target you don’t talk to the people targeting you.

President Trump is so eager to clear his name it’s almost a given that he’ll sit down with Mueller and his people at some point. He’ll be walking into a minefield. He has to be very careful where he steps.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The real story of Fusion GPS is beginning to emerge

I’ve never bought this notion that the Russians hacked the DNC servers. To me, the story carries about as much weight as the Trump dossier. As we dig deeper into this bizarre story, we find the two are indubitably intertwined. 

The now-debunked dossier accuses Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev of hacking into the DNC computers. Gubarev is suing BuzzFeed News for publishing the dossier. In such a lawsuit, the defense is allowed to provide documentation to defend itself. Surely Gubarev wouldn’t be suing if the civil lawsuit risked exposing him to criminal charges.

Fusion GPS, the company Hillary Clinton hired to compile the dossier, is suing to try and stop a subpoena from Gubarev’s lawyers seeking everything they have related to the dossier. Think about this for a moment. If the dossier were really legit there’s no way Fusion would be suing to stop documentation that would confirm its legitimacy. Quite the contrary. They would be providing all the evidence they have to the press to make their case against Trump.

The most powerful argument against the veracity of the Russian hacking story is the fact that no U.S. intelligence agency has ever inspected the DNC servers. Is that not incredible? James Comey said they were taking the word of a company called CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is company that protects clients from data breaches. The mission statement on their website states, “We don’t have a mission statement—we are on a mission to protect our customers from breaches.” Their most high-profile client was the DNC. It’s unlikely they would be bragging that their only mission is to stop data breaches when they couldn’t stop the data breach at the DNC. In fact, it’s unlikely they would still be in business if that were really the case.

I believe the whole Russia hacking story was a cover-up for the real story that this was an inside job from a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter. The fact that the dossier that supposedly uncovered the Russian breach has now been largely discredited adds credence to that theory. In fact, there’s no evidence at all that the Russians hacked the DNC other than what we’re being told by CrowdStrike, a company founded and run by Hillary supporters.

What’s even scarier is the FBI may have used the Trump dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page, a man described as a Trump advisor. If the dossier is what FBI agent Peter Strzok described as an “insurance policy” in case Trump got elected president, we have a disturbing conspiracy that goes way beyond campaign dirty tricks.

And if the Russians didn’t really hack into the DNC servers is there even a Trump/Russian collusion story to investigate? No. The breached servers is the pretense used by the FBI and now the Mueller team to investigate Russian collusion. Otherwise, they have nothing. That means that the entire affair is predicated on information taken from a piece of paid-for campaign propaganda from Hillary Clinton that is demonstrably false.

Strzok was the point man on the Trump dossier at the FBI. He was also the guy who facilitated Hillary being let off the hook for the illegal computer server scandal. And he was the man who entrapped Michael Flynn. He’s also a fierce political partisan who had such animus against Donald Trump that he just might do anything to bring him down. And he conveniently found himself in a position on the Mueller team to do just that. But only if we take the basic premise of hacking as fact. Which we can’t.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.