By Daniel Greenfield:
Lee Smith’s new book exposes the biggest political scandal in American history.
The Five W’s are the essential infrastructure of good journalism. It’s important to be able to tell a good story. But if the story doesn’t contain answers to who, what, where, when, and why, it’s meaningless.
Fortunately, Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President digs into the origin of the coup against President Trump in the old-fashioned Five W’s sense. While the book still leaves plenty of questions buried in reams of classified documents, it’s an excellent resource for organizing and making sense of the mess.
Rarely has a government investigation been clouded in this much secrecy or required so many investigations of the investigation. The points of the spiderweb between private contractors, the media, and government figures still vanish into darkness. But Smith follows the work of Rep. Devin Nunes and his team (the subtitle for the tome is The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History) and that comes with its own infrastructure of the Five W’s.
The ‘why’ isn’t hard to grasp, but the ‘when’ remains elusive. Smith makes a good case for the smear campaign associated with the Steele Dossier predating the former British operative whose continental credentials and FBI connections were used to sell a political assault ordered by the Clinton campaign.
Instead, Smith describes a series of ‘protodossiers’ which were used to eventually shape the Steele Dossier. These protodossiers were works in progress, bits of opposition research focusing on Trump’s international business connections, put together and fed to the media in a conventional fashion. There’s nothing especially controversial (or palatable) about this type of opposition research. But, even from the very beginning, these work products were not merely opposition research intended for the public.
Read more: Frontpage Mag
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