Consider what it takes to lie to a free people at scale. A private liar can deceive a neighbor. A campaign can deceive a district. But to deceive an entire nation, and to do it durably, you need something rarer. You need an institution the public has been trained to trust, and you need to borrow its authority. The intelligence community is that institution. When career officers say a thing is so, citizens reasonably assume the judgment rests on secret evidence too sensitive to share. That trust is precisely what makes the apparatus so dangerous when it is turned, because a borrowed badge of credibility can launder a falsehood into a fact. This is the heart of the matter, and it is why the events of 2016 through 2020 deserve a stark description. The coordinated politicization of US intelligence by the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and an interlocking network of operatives was the single greatest disinformation campaign in American history.
I want to be careful with that claim, because careless conservatives have squandered credibility by overreaching, and the fact-checkers are waiting. So let me say plainly what I am not arguing. This was not treason in the strict constitutional sense, which requires levying war against the US or adhering to its enemies, proven by two witnesses to an overt act. That high bar is not met here, and pretending otherwise only hands critics an easy rebuttal. What I am arguing is more precise and, in some ways, more damning. The conduct fits the ordinary legal definition of conspiracy, a secret agreement to achieve unlawful ends through unlawful means, and it carries the unmistakable character of sedition, the deliberate poisoning of public perception against a lawful government. The aim was to subvert an election and, having failed at that, to cripple the presidency the voters chose.
Begin with the money, because money leaves a paper trail, and the trail here is not seriously contested. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee routed roughly $1.02 million to the law firm Perkins Coie for what they would later report to regulators as legal services. Perkins Coie retained the research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, paying his firm roughly $168,000. The product of this arrangement was the now-infamous Steele dossier, a collection of unverified and largely uncorroborated allegations. The political origin of that document is not a matter of conjecture. In 2022 the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for misreporting these payments as legal expenses rather than the opposition research they were. A campaign paid for a smear, mislabeled it, and then the smear migrated into the machinery of federal law enforcement.
Hellbound and Down 