A year ago, the story dominating headlines was the allegation that President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. The idea of impeaching President Trump due to these allegations was gathering steam, with accusations from elected officials and beyond that the president of the United States was a Russian puppet, a Manchurian candidate installed by Vladimir Putin, and even an agent of a hostile foreign power for the last 30 years.
You don’t need to be a fan of Trump to be outraged about the Russian collusion conspiracy. But it’s a mark against your patriotism, your judgement, or your intellect if you aren’t. Beyond just being perhaps the most defining political scandal of our time, the hoax gets under my skin because I fell for it. And I’m enormously angry for having been duped.
Now that this narrative has been proven false and possibly influenced by actual Russian disinformation, it is time to revisit how it was created and dominated U.S. politics for so long, as well as demand justice for its perpetrators.
The “Russian collusion” narrative first got its start shortly before the 2016 election, when John Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign, told reporters about an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign and suggested Trump was either “willfully ignoring” intelligence officials’ warnings or acting “as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”
This accusation eventually became a central pillar of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She pushed the claim on social media, including never-verified allegations about a server connected to future President Trump that was supposedly tied to Russia, and called on the FBI to release information about any connection between Trump and Russia.
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