How did this baseless witch hunt ever get started?

Maybe Hillary can tell us

There is a reason Rachel Maddow put Hillary Clinton front and center on her MSNBC program Wednesday night. That reason can be described by the acronym: C.Y.A.

The 2016 GOP convention chants of “Lock Her Up!” may yet come true. Because the real story out of Attorney General William Barr’s appearance Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee is that the legal bloodhounds are on Mrs. Clinton’s trail.

That Barr’s four-page synopsis of a 480-page report did not capture every nuance is the Democrats’ feeble attempt at diversion. Fake news.

‘The definition of “collusion” ‘

From the Washington Times: 

Attorney General William P. Barr revealed Wednesday that the Justice Department is looking into the possibility that Russian operatives fed disinformation to the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election season.

Mr. Barr told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the expanded scope of a review into “the activities over the summer of 2016,” which included vehemently anti-Trump FBI senior officials making key decisions on the investigations of Mrs. Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

One key question is how much the FBI relied on the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, using information gleaned from Russian sources, which helped spur the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. The dossier was funded by payments from the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee that were hidden in campaign finance reports behind payments to a law firm.

“That’s the definition of collusion,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chamber’s senior Republican.

The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable” document “needs to be investigated.” 

A star is born

Missouri’s new senator, Josh Hawley, was focused and downright percussive. (By contrast Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, whom I deeply admire otherwise, stumbled over a question in search of a point.)

Hawley repeated the arrogant, smirking Peter Strzok saying that he stopped at a WalMart in southern Virginia (well outside the capital beltway) and “could smell the Trump support.”

“I cannot believe that a top official of this government, with the kind of power these people have, would try to exercise their own prejudices – and that is what this is: it’s open, blatant prejudices – and would try to use that to overturn a democratic election. That’s the real crisis here.”

We share Barr’s frustration:

“How did we get to the point here where the evidence is now that the president was falsely accused of colluding with the Russians and accused of being treasonous and accused of being a Russian agent and the evidence is now that was without a basis, and two years of his administration have been dominated by the allegations that have now been proven false?”

“To listen to some of the rhetoric, you would think that the Mueller report had found the opposite.”

Here in Wisconsin

RightWisconsin observes:  Justice Abrahamson is a lame duck herself, yet she dissented on issuing the order to reinstate Walker’s appointments approved during the “lame duck” session. NEWS FLASH: a governor’s term ends when his successor is sworn in, not on election night. Same for legislators.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: It is a separate question, yet to be decided, whether restrictions placed on the governor’s powers violated state constitution. But the Walker appointments will stand.