by Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist
Tapper is not allowed to rewrite his horrible history of propagating the Russia collusion hoax.
On Jan. 12, 2017, I appeared on a CNN panel to discuss current events. It was memorable, and not just because we were taping from the roof of a building near the U.S. Capitol as part of the outlet’s special coverage of Trump’s first inauguration. Just as we were about to go on, we were significantly delayed by President Barack Obama surprising Vice President Joe Biden with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
As I recall, there were maybe five or six of us on set, including former Obama political appointee Jim Sciutto and host Jake Tapper, two of the four authors of the most important story of the entire Russia collusion hoax. “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him” had been published just two days prior, followed up by BuzzFeed publishing the actual document claiming widespread collusion between Trump and Russia. That document — which nine months later was revealed to have been secretly bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat National Committee — included salacious lies about Trump supposedly paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed that the Obamas had slept in during a visit to a fancy Moscow hotel. The hysteria was such that many people wondered if Donald Trump would make it to the inauguration.
It may sound crazy now, but Washington, D.C. at that time was full of people who either believed or pretended to believe that Donald Trump really had colluded with Russia to steal the election.
I was one of the exceedingly few who didn’t. I thought Hillary Clinton’s Russia information operation was silly before the election, and when she turned to it as an explanation of her loss, I thought a likelier explanation was that Americans liked Trump’s policies and disliked hers. I said so on television during December, when faulty and weak intelligence assessments from the Obama administration were issued in an effort to legitimize her stance.
Biden’s Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony finally ended and the regular programming began. Evan Perez, a third co-author on the big story (Carl Bernstein being the fourth), did a report from a different location about a rare statement from known liar James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. In his statement, Clapper claimed to have been dismayed by the leaks that led to the CNN story and said he did “not believe the leaks came from within the IC,” meaning intelligence community.