What we know about the Reichstag fire.

This is unofficial knowledge, which I expect to become official in due course, in subsequent official events resembling #releasethememo. This post is copied wholesale from a certain neoreactionary of influence, except that I have spun it slightly towards my interpretation of events, rather than his.

The Democrats applied the full suite of extremely powerful intelligence capabilities of USG to spy on Trump and everyone remotely connected to his campaign, in order to help Hillary and hurt or intimidate Trump’s people and deter potential people from joining up with him, and they wanted as much of that information to be as widely shared as possible so that the dirt they were certain would be there (which, to everyone’s surprise, wasn’t) would be leakable to the propaganda machine press and public in a way that would be impossible to attribute to any particular individual.

Using the fig leaf of an illegal fisa warrant on one member of the Trump campaign, they illegally spied on Trump and the entire Trump campaign, (“unmasking”, June 27, 2016 “Tarmac Meeting”, Samantha Power) expecting something to turn up that would retroactively make the spying arguably legal, legal in the progressive sense of “what does it matter now”.

Except that it did not.

The ultra-expensive, national security-level tools of the permanent government were pointed towards these improper targets, in the ultimate form of “opposition research”, but for free, paid for by taxpayers. They figured that what was true for practically anyone would be true for Trump, that all one needs is a pretext to start surveillance, and one would inevitably turn up evidence of some activity which could fit within the broad interpretation of the modern state’s endless list of offenses, at least enough to support an indictment, or at the very least, legal but scandalous, which is effective when used against Republican candidates when spun by the propaganda machine, or at the very, very least, not against Trump the man himself, but against one of his team or even several degrees of separation removed from them (given chain-investigating, the investigatory equivalent of chain-migration) for anything they may have done over the course of their entire lives that might end up “inadvertently” being hoovered up in the course of an infinitely-expanding network and scope of investigation. And in the last resort, use one of those cases to “flip” that individual into an informant to tell them something dirty about Trump that the surveillance couldn’t pick up.

They believed all they would have to do is just get the surveillance started. They knew the (foreign and domestic) surveillance needed a FISA warrant, which needed a foreign power hook, which had to be Russia. Which didn’t exist, so someone would have to make it up out of whole cloth. Which obviously couldn’t be corroborated, because false and totally made up, and so if supported by oath, somebody could be liable for perjury. Fusion GPS seems to exist in large part for this purpose: to produce opposition material, some of which is from normal “research and investigation”, though spun to the very limits of truthiness, some of which is a conveniently “leak” drop point for insiders, and some of which is fabricated out of whole cloth and laundered through the operator game of repetition through intermediaries, and also as a “jobs for the friends and family of valuable people” shop (cf. “Friends of Angelo VIP program”), and as a conduit to move side-payments / mole bounties / kickbacks / “household loyalty” money around, when necessary.

And so it became indispensable to find a basis for credibility and probable cause not based in actual corroboration or investigation, the only one available being “previously credible, reliable, and valuable informant.” And once the spying started, they expected that something would turn up to make the initial illegality of the spying irrelevant.

Meanwhile the DoJ and FBI were all on board, using the dossier as cover for everything they were doing, and expecting a sure and easy Hillary victory which would prevent any of this from coming to light and blowing up in their faces, and confident that Trump would never learn about it.

Except that he did learn all about it at soon as it started, probably from Admiral Rodgers and the surveillance couldn’t come up with any dirt, despite it being on and greatly expanded for months, and being a sure-fire way to produce lots of dirt nearly 100% of the time on usual targets.

This was what the whole “Mike Rogers did what?!” administration flip-out and threat of disciplinary action (recommended by Clapper and Aston Carter) was all about (as Sailer says, nobody remembers nothing.) This was also the basis of Trump asking Comey “three times” whether he was under investigation, knowing Comey would lie about it.