On Feb. 24, 1972, two weeks before the Democratic presidential primary, the Manchester Union Leader published the now-infamous “Canuck letter.” This letter to the editor accused Democratic Sen. Ed Muskie of laughing at a racist remark by one of his staffers about blacks and Francophone Mainers.
To this day, the Paul Morrison of Deerfield Beach, Florida, who supposedly wrote that letter has never been found. The FBI concluded in October 1972 that the letter was a fake and part of a sabotage operation against Muskie’s presidential bid — one of many dirty tricks by the reelection campaign of President Richard Nixon.
Nixon knew his way around dirty tricks, but the Clintons have recently given him a run for his money.
In 2016, the law firm Perkins Coie, representing Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, hired former MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele to gather opposition research against Donald Trump regarding his supposed clandestine ties to Russia.
Russian national Igor Danchenko, who worked for Steele, fabricated and passed to Steele lurid rumors about Trump, some of which he might have fabricated himself, others of which came from Clinton operatives such as Charles Dolan. These Clinton-originated rumors were intended to make it seem like Trump was closely tied to the Russian government and possibly also being blackmailed by Russian intelligence for genuinely gross behavior with prostitutes.
Steele went on to launder Danchenko’s fabrications back into the United States through the now-infamous Steele dossier, intended to resemble an intelligence document with reputable sourcing. But it was still just the Clinton campaign’s product — not only bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign but also a regurgitation of rumors started by its own operatives.
Within federal law enforcement, these Clinton-originated lies took on a life of their own.
Even though the FBI had been long familiar with Steele and stopped using him as a source of information, agents, some of them partisans with axes to grind, used this information. It became their justification for the unprecedented surveillance of the Trump campaign through a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Agents knowingly lied in order to get judges to keep the investigation alive.
This is the part of the scandal that resembles Watergate more than it does the Canuck letter.
As election trickery goes, that’s about as dirty as it gets. But it actually got worse because the fabrications never died. This dirty trick by the Clintons went on to guide the media’s narrative about the Trump administration for the first 26 months of his presidency.
Indeed, almost every major news outlet treated the supposed story of Trump’s collusion with Russia like the big story of its time. The Washington Post and The New York Times won actual (now very embarrassing) Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of a completely fake story — a Clinton-originated conspiracy theory.
Cable news anchors at MSNBC and CNN spent every night in their breathless assertions that foreign interference had handed the 2016 election to Trump. Rachel Maddow hardly had time on her show for anything else, so eager was she to target this new “fake news bubble for liberals.” Keith Olbermann, the ghost of cable news past, was equally obsessed with the story and needed no help making an ass of himself covering it from his perch at GQ.
It was all a lie.
Clinton, of course, joined in to help to spread her own campaign’s lies after she had lost the election. As evidence of Trump’s Russia collusion, she made public remarks about the investigation that her own people had managed to initiate. She called Trump an “illegitimate president” and later accused one of the Democrats’ 2020 campaigns of Russian collusion as well.
What the public witnessed between 2016 and 2019 was an adept criminal enterprise at work using obeisant, friendly journalists and friends in law enforcement to shape public opinion with ludicrous lies. Nothing this elaborate, corrupt, and far-reaching has ever been seen since at least Nixon’s time.
