Russiagate Origins Revisited

On August 26, 2019, I wrote a post entitled What Was Russiagate All About?

Why was a special counsel appointed to investigate allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia?  And why were these baseless allegations taken so seriously by the mainstream press and Democratic politicians?  Why did the press, as well as Mueller himself, fail to acknowledge that the whole story was fabricated?

I just reread this post and my best guesses as to what happened seem to have been remarkably accurate (if I do say so myself).  One item to be added is that it now appears that Russian disinformation played a significant role in getting these investigations started.  Also, it appears that the FBI knew or was warned about this, but chose to ignore these facts.

Declassified Horowitz Footnotes Show Obama Officials Knew Steele Dossier Was Russian Disinformation Designed To Target Trump

Newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December FBI report reveals that senior Obama officials, including members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team knew the dossier compiled by a former British spy during the 2016 election was Russian disinformation to target President Donald Trump. 

Further, the partially declassified footnotes reveal that those senior intelligence officials were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment (ICA). 

As important, the footnotes reveal that there had been a request to validate information collected by British spy Christopher Steele as far back as 2015, and that there was concern among members of the FBI and intelligence community about his reliability. 

So the Russiagate investigation pursued by Democrats along with the mainstream media was based upon a combination of incompetence and political interference by the intelligence community.  The mainstream has refused to accept this however and was goaded into an impeachment trial by intelligence operatives working with colleagues in the "interagency".  Thus, the Russiagate investigation has metastasized into a cold civil war.