God damn it I hate it when I get fooled by someone else’s bullshit. But if you hate lawyers, you gotta love this…

In 2016, Hilary Clinton was feeling the “heat” of her emails… a nothing story that had a lot of smoke and no fire. Not good. But not the end of the fucking world.

So Clinton and her lawyers made up some “good shit”.

Remember the “Trump ties to the Russian Alfa Bank” and the “Steele Dossier” with the peeing hookers? They had just enough truth to “feel true.” I believed it was probably true — until recently.

How do I know? The lawyer for the Clintons just got indicted for lying to the FBI. Michael Sussman didn’t get indicted for the lie about Alfa Bank. Hell, anyone can tell any story to the FBI about a “possible link.” But he told them he was just offering the information as a private citizen — not working for anyone.

But 5 years later, they checked his billables. That’s right, this dumbass Sussman billed the exact hour he was lying to the FBI to the Clinton campaign. And they paid it.

Maybe Nixon’s plumbers weren’t so fucking stupid after all? Or maybe Sussman and his firm, Perkins Coie, are just greedy fucks who can’t let a billable hour go by even if it might mean a few years in jail.

According to Durham, Sussman told the FBI general counsel that he was not delivering the information on behalf of any client. The indictment not only details multiple billings to the Clinton campaign as the data was collected and the documents created; it claims Sussman billed the campaign for the actual meeting with the FBI

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/572861-clinton-lawyers-indictment-reveals-bag-of-tricks

Being a stupid, greedy, liar is no way to go through life son. But apparently, that’s how you make partner at Perkins Coie. The worst part is that Hilary was not a dupe. She was a willing participant and poured gasoline on this bullshit fire more than once — tweeting about it and mentioning the “scandal” to gain another headline in another news cycle.

Yeah, yeah I know. This is just an indictment brought by a Trump appointee and maybe the whole investigation is bullshit too — innocent until proven guilty and all. But at this point no one is disputing he was trying to pull a dirty trick and lied about Trump and Alfa Bank. The only doubt is whether Clinton paid for it. Bills, payments and receipts are pretty damning.

The truth is enough

Sure these kinds of political dirty tricks have been around forever. Jefferson and Hamilton spread lies about each other through the newspapers their parties controlled. Here’s a few dirty tricks I can remember off the top of my head:

• Nixon scuttled peace talks with North Vietnam to help him win in 1968
• Reagan made a secret deal with Iran to hold onto the hostages before the election in 1980
• George W. Bush spread rumors that John McCain had a “black child” in the southern primaries in 2000.
• John Kerry, a legitimate combat veteran, was made to look like a liar and coward in 2004 (W. again).

I’m sure if I spent a little more time on the Google, I could find at least one indictable offense in every presidential election and probably pull more from each side. Although my sense is the Republicans are much better at making dirty tricks and lies stick. (“Stop the Steal” comes to mind.)

But this Russia/Trump shit is especially frustrating because it is unnecessary.

It undermines the actual cases against him for tax evasion, money laundering, influence peddling, steering government and campaign money to his own properties… the fucking list was/is almost endless. Bills, payments and receipts are pretty damning..

Grow up

I’m not just going to blame the politicos for all this shit. Every adult citizen needs to know enough history to know that “stories” during election years are just that — stories. The ones that grab the biggest headlines, are probably built on the biggest pile of bullshit.

Rather than innuendo and “investigations,” we need to stick to what has already been proved, what that candidate has done before and who they let hang around the office door. Vote by association is not the same as guilt by association.

We used to be able to deal with this shit more like adults. To discern fact from fiction, or at least recognize that we can and have been fooled. But now when we learn “our side lied” we double down, we deny the lie, we ignore it, or we shout “what about.”

Fuck that.

We can still support leaders even when they are not perfect. We can forgive them some trespasses, and we can hold them accountable for serious offenses all at the same time.

Lesson learned here — when in doubt, check their lawyers’ billable hours — it will probably be a direct connection to the bullshit hotline.

Update – May 31, 2022 — Not Guilty

Guess what? Sussman’s billables didn’t totally sink him. He was acquitted this week. Turns out it’s hard to prove when a lawyer is lying because they just might be lying (or not) all the time. He billed two clients for the meetings, so hard to know which one he may or may not have been working for when he met with the FBI.

Plus, he was just passing information, the witnesses stories kept switching depending on who they were talking to, and even if he said he was working for Clinton, the FBI probably would have followed up on the Trump/Russia – Trump/Alpha Bank thing.

The acquittal doesn’t mean everything in the Steele dossier is true, but it doesn’t mean it is all bullshit either. Probably grains of both in such a report. Why worry about it now? Because this shit keeps happening, and maybe we will know better and take everything with a grain of salt during an election year.

One small point in the NBC news stories of the acquittal — it said the Mueller Report “found no evidence” of a Trump-Russia connection. That’s not true. Mueller did not find enough evidence of a conspiracy. He found plenty of evidence of unusually high number of connections. He also found evidence of a cover-up and obstruction of justice…