"A livelier than usual Friday-night news-dump"

You should have seen the one that got away...
Mark Steyn writes in Steyn On America,

Late yesterday afternoon, there was a livelier than usual Friday-night news-dump, when the Attorney-General of the United States announced that Robert Mueller had wrapped up his "Russia investigation" and there would be no further indictments.

For two years, the prefatory "Russia" has been intended to give the word "investigation" more heft, to make it seem as if there was something more than let's-get-Trump-on-anything. But even the unlimited resources of a wretchedly corrupt federal justice system couldn't keep that going without something more than Michael Cohen's taxi medallions (only in America) and a few Russian troll farms, one of whom has amusingly decided to push back in court against Mueller and his showboating cronies.

Other than that, there are, as I said almost two years ago, no Russians in the Russia investigation - and what foreign "interference" with the 2016 election there was from Russia seems to have been amateur and minimal, unless you count MI6 spook Christopher Steele working his Moscow Rolodex on behalf of Hillary Clinton and her Deep State allies. There was, however, extensive domestic interference with the election, in that at the behest of the sitting administration the most powerful figures in the permanent bureaucracy set to work on a sophisticated surveillance operation against its political opposition: "Republics" in the Americas have been invariably prefaced by the qualifier "banana"; it just took Washington a little longer to sign up.

I'm tied up with trial preparation this weekend, but I don't really have much to say that I haven't said in the previous two years. We will see in the next few days whose version of these last three years prevails - mine or, say, John Brennan's. We begin in November 2016, on the morning after the election night before:

Mostly she was mad - mad that she'd lost and that the country would have to endure a Trump presidency... Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. 'She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,' this person said.

No problem, because oddly enough that was what virtually the entire leadership of the DOJ and FBI were planning anyway, and indeed had been working on for months. And one of the most idiotic features of "the peaceful transfer of power" gave them all the cover they needed:

During the stupid and anachronistic two-and-a-half-month electoral "transition", the outgoing Administration worked round the clock to de-legitimize and cripple their successors.

Thus Susan Rice and Samantha Power, neither of whom is Judi Dench in the Bond pics, began frantically "unmasking" hundreds and hundreds of surveilled individuals all the way up to high noon on inauguration day. The object was to turn an improper months-long investigation of the outgoing administration's political opponents into a years-long investigation of the incoming administration's non-existent "collusion" - a brilliantly chosen term because it has no legal meaning. So the same people who'd been running the Trump investigation ordered up a new set of business cards - and hey presto, welcome to the "Russia investigation":

It started in April 2016, when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination. The Hillary campaign and the DNC gave millions of dollars to Marc Elias, a Clinton lawyer, who in turn hired Fusion GPS, who in turn hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. Why use Mr Elias as a cutout? Because Hillary and the DNC could then itemize the expense as "legal services" rather than list payments to Mr Steele, which would be in breach of federal law...

Steele's dossier was passed along to the FBI. It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an "FI" (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump's associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.

But that's all you need. The dossier is a remarkable thing. It self-regenerates and corroborates itself as it ricochets back and forth between corrupt bureaucrats, biddable hacks and rubber-stamp judges:

At the FISA court, the FBI, to bolster their reliance on the Steele dossier, pointed to newspaper stories appearing to corroborate aspects of it - even though, as he subsequently testified under oath at the Old Bailey, those stories were in fact fed to those reporters by Steele himself. Nevertheless, it works like a charm on gullible FISA judges. You take one thing and you make it two things. Or even better, you take nothing and you make it a thing: Here, from yesterday's letter by Senator Ron Johnson, are McCabe, Sally Yates and other FBI/DOJ honchos arranging for Comey to brief Trump on the Steele dossier for the sole purpose of giving CNN a news peg for leaking details about what's in it.

Read more here.