It was almost like a Saturday Night Live skit (back when SNL had funny skits). On Monday, during an episode of Hillary Clinton’s podcast (“You and Me Both”), the former secretary of state, U.S. senator, and first lady chatted with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and raised the possibility that not only did President Donald Trump inspire the January 6 invasion of the Capitol with his speech that day, he might have been on the phone that morning with Russian President Vladmir Putin — discussing the upcoming riot.
“I hope historically we will find out who he’s beholden to, who pulls his strings,” Clinton said to Pelosi. “I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol.”
Clinton first began accusing Trump of colluding with Putin, without evidence, prior to the 2016 election in which she lost to Trump. After the election, she insinuated that the election was stolen from her, saying, again without evidence, that “the Russians hacked the election.” Since “hacking” is a term for someone taking an action via computers, the implication was that the Russians had changed votes — massive vote fraud — that swung the election from Clinton to Trump.
“But we know that not just him, but his enablers, his accomplices, his cult members, have the same disregard for democracy,” Clinton added. Previously, Clinton had referred to the millions of Trump supporters as a basket of “deplorables.”
Clinton then asked Pelosi her thoughts: “Do you think we need a 9/11-type commission to investigate and report everything that they can pull together and explain what happened?”
Pelosi enthusiastically agreed. “I do. To your point of who is he beholden to, as I’ve said over and over, as I said to him in that picture with my blue suit as I was leaving, what I was saying to him as I was pointing, rudely, at him: ‘With you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin.”
Pelosi continued, “I don’t know what Putin has on him politically, financially, or personally, but what happened last week was a gift to Putin, because Putin wants to undermine democracy in our country and throughout the world. And these people, unbeknownst to them, maybe, are Putin puppets. They were doing Putin’s business when they did that at the incitement of an insurrection by the president of the United States.”
As to a 9/11-type commission, Pelosi told Clinton that she believed there is “strong support” in Congress for such a commission.
The bizarre conversation between a woman who was actually the presidential nominee of one of America’s two major political parties and another woman who is not only the top member of the U.S. House of Representatives — and only two heartbeats away from being president — is made even more bizarre when one considers that it was the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton that had approved of the effort, without any evidence at all, to tie Trump to Putin and the Russian hacking of the computers at the Democratic National Committee.
The alleged Russia-Trump collusion story dominated over one-half of Trump’s presidency, and did not even end — as this conversation illustrates — with the report of special counsel Robert Mueller that concluded no evidence existed that Trump or any members of his campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.”
Brazenly, however, the allegations by Trump and many of his supporters that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election in several states is dismissed as “just a conspiracy theory.”
Conspiracy means that two or more individuals plan together, usually in secret, to commit or cover up some act. When they are plotting to do something illegal, it is an additional crime. Conspiracies have existed throughout human history, all with solid historical evidence. Some conspiracy theories — such as the unfounded accusations by Clinton and Pelosi — have no basis in fact, and are unsupported by evidence. Yet, millions believe them.
Dismissing something as “just a conspiracy theory” is often a talking point to dismiss the other side’s arguments without having to counter with any arguments of one’s own. It all comes down to whether there is sufficient evidence to raise the “conspiracy theory” to a proven fact.
In the case of Clinton and Pelosi asserting that Trump and Putin plotted together to have an incursion into the U.S. Capitol, it is totally devoid of a shred of evidence, and yet it is predictable that the mainstream media will either ignore the story, or even defend their ridiculous conspiracy theory as having some merit.
