'A Sometime Guide to Jane Mayer's New Yorker Column on Christopher Steele and 'The Dossier''

By Steven Jonas

Let me first say that, unlike many of my friends on the Left, some of them quite good friends, I fully believe that Trump and the Trumpites colluded with the Russians to help them win the election. Indeed I have believed that that could have been possible from the time the first rumors about the possible compact began to appear in the summer of 2016, and certainly when David Corn's first article on the matter, in the context of the "Steele Dossier," was published in October, 2016 .

This does not mean that I think that the Russian maneuvers in support of Trump were the primary reason why he won and Clinton lost. In fact, shortly after the election I published a column on The Greanville Post entitled "Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Leadership Council, and How to Lose an Election." It happens that I also thought that last-minute intervention of Jim Comey on the so-called "tapes issue" (which if anything indicated a tilt, at that time at least, of the "Deep State" towards Trump) was a major blow to her campaign. I said so in a column I published, also on The Greanville Post, in the week before the election. Nevertheless, in the post-election column I said that if she had run a decent campaign, she would have won anyway, despite Comey, and (as subsequently been revealed) despite the Russians, too. 

Thinking about why I was convinced right up front that Trump was involved with some dirty-dealing or other in relation to the 2016 election, I recalled my first awareness of what came to be known as "Watergate." As I said in an earlier column(2015) on the "Role of Chance in History" (which happened to be in part about how the "email issue" might come back to haunt Hillary, should she get the Democratic nomination):

"On June 18, 1972, as I usually do to this day, I scanned the front page of The New York Times. I noticed a secondary lead about a break-in that had occurred at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. I had known of Richard Nixon and his political thuggery since he ran his first red- baiting campaign for Congress against the totally unsuspecting, mild-mannered, five-term Representative Jerry Voorhees in Southern California. 'Nixon's behind this,' I said to myself."

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Source: OpEdNews.com