Just about a month shy of seven years ago, over drinks in a London bar, George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, told a top Australian diplomat that the Trump campaign was aware of “a lot of baggage” on Hillary Clinton, and suggested that Russia had offered to help make the information public.
That meeting in May 2016 set off a chain of events that led to Australian officials tipping off their American counterparts and the Federal Bureau of Investigation opening up an investigation into possible collusion between a U.S. presidential candidate and Russia. The 10-month investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, would eventually find no evidence of such collusion.
Certainly, the FBI would have been derelict in its duty not to check the claim out. But there is ample evidence that the FBI barreled headlong into a full-fledged investigation based on evidence that in retrospect can rightly be called flimsy, without considering contrary evidence or seeing if the Trump campaign had a counter-explanation.
All that was well known long before the FBI released special counsel John Durham’s report on the matter on May 12. Indeed, the FBI has already taken steps to address the weaknesses identified in Mr. Durham’s report, making it largely a matter of putting on the public record what the public pretty...
Police have launched an investigation into alleged false accusation by Park Cheol-min, a former member of the Seongnam International Mafia. Park, ahead of the 2022 presidential election, raised al...