It appears that Trump's promise to end business-as-usual didn't go over well with business-as-usual types who were expecting that Crooked Hillary Clinton would win the election so that business-as-usual could go on. Obama himself had been elected on the promise of ending business-as-usual but the whole Steele dossier and FISA-abuse scandal (not to mention the IRS targeting scandal) indicates that Obama got in on the business-as-usual act as much as anyone.
The main question is why top-level folks in the Obama administration assigned such a high degree of credence to the infamous Steele dossier - even after the FBI fired Steele as a source (once he started talking to the media about his dossier) - and then intentionally failed to be fully transparent with the FISA court about the dossier's Crooked-Hillary provenance.
But there's a question as to whether the Steele dossier could ever be believed on its face, aside from its contents, i.e., whether the dossier should have been rejected a priori as evidence of anything. The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins, writing back on June 20, 2017:
It had no provenance that anyone was bound to respect or rely upon. Its alleged author, a retired British agent named Christopher Steele, supposedly had Russian intelligence sources, but why would Russian intelligence blow the cover of their blackmail agent Mr. Trump whom they presumably so carefully and expensively cultivated? They wouldn't.Aside from the Steele dossier, what "evidence of Trump/Russia collusion" did the intelligence community or the Mueller team have to proceed on, to warrant an investigation in the first place, or to obtain a FISA warrant?
It sounds like the likes of Rep. Schiff are reduced to citing the aborted June 2016 Trump Tower meeting as the centerpiece of whatever "Trump-Russia collusion" happened. Apparently that meeting didn't appear strongly enough on Mueller's radar to be referenced as damning evidence in his final report.
Given the sleazy way high-level Obama administration officials behaved in order to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and to violate Carter Page's civil rights, they should take his successful election as just deserts.
At that, I'll gladly leave it to Glenn Greenwald, a voice of integrity amid a sea of D.C. corruption and cynicism, to take the left-wing mainstream media outlets to task for wasting so much of people's viewing/reading/thinking time. (And why their cavalier, incurious attitude toward the sleazy behaviors and FISA abuses by top officials under Obama's watch?)
