A Cliff Note Guide to Russiagate: The Hillary Coverup | The American Spectator

When I first read that Donald Trump was a Russian asset back in 2016, I had two thoughts: 1. This is the most serious security breach in American history, or 2. This is the biggest hoax in American history.
Given the gravity of the charge, there was no middle ground: either Trump should be shot for treason, or somebody just told the mother of all whoppers.
The country has gyrated between these two poles for the past nine years, with Democrats flogging the first and Republicans scrambling to prove the second.
How could this happen? How did a handful of politicos, spooks, and hacks nearly bring down the American government?
The Democrats used the allegation to launch the Mueller investigation, which crippled the first Trump administration. The investigation, which found no conspiracy between Trump and Russia, nevertheless begot an impeachment of Trump and likely cost the Republicans the House in 2018. All big wins for the Democrats. Republicans struggled against a shadowy intelligence community to prove a negative.
But the stakes here go well beyond partisan politics and are nothing less than epochal. If Trump was working for Russia, the country was compromised by a foreign despot for years. If the Democrats made the whole thing up, the country was fooled by a cabal that nearly overthrew a sitting president — an attempted coup based on a nothing burger. High stakes indeed.
New documents vindicate Trump and confirm the origins of the Russia Hoax, including the role of the intelligence community, the media, and Barack Obama himself.
Here’s what happened.
June 2016. During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton uses an unsecure private e-mail server to conduct official business, a practice that becomes an issue during the 2016 campaign.
July 2016. Clinton and associates create and finances the Steele dossier, a false story about, most salaciously, Trump frolicking with hookers in a Moscow hotel room. Supposedly, the room was bugged by Russian spies, which gave P…