The great advantage of Beto, Elizabeth, Kamala and Pete is they are essentially firewalled from any Obama Era scandals. They are a promissory note, not a bounced political check or worse, a potential co-conspirator.
The DNC’s dilemma is polls show they can’t win from the extreme left. Their chance is in the center but Joe Biden is the last of the Mohicans and scandal may taint him. Meanwhile the unbridled woke are driving issues even further left making Joe even more vital. Hence the worry over Joe’s link to the Dossier.
Perhaps the most sensitive question is how high up this goes. Text messages between two key figures in the Comey FBI, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, say it goes very high, indeed. An Aug. 5, 2016 message from Strzok tells Page that “the White House is running this.” We don’t know yet if that’s true, or who might be involved, but the message suggests how significant the political stakes were then — and are now.
Real Clear Politics
How do the Barr and Horowitz investigations affect Biden? In at least three ways. First, they could strengthen President Trump’s claim that he was the victim of dirty tricks by Obama appointees in law enforcement, intelligence, and national security. Second, they are likely to tarnish the reputation of the Obama administration, which is one of Biden’s strongest assets. Finally, if the Obama White House was directly involved (and we simply don’t know at this point), then Biden will have to distance himself from everyone involved. That’s obviously his best move. But it comes at a price. It makes him look like a marginal or clueless figure on a crucial foreign-policy issue, which Biden has always claimed as his area of expertise. (He headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.)
The Dossier is rapidly becoming poison. In a way you can’t blame the Dems from going hard left. They’ve been let down so badly by the old guard that even Marx looks good by comparison.
Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was being paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to find dirt on Trump.
Victor Davis Hanson
The Russians rightly assumed that Steele would lap up their fantasies, seed them among Trump-hating officials in the Barack Obama administration and thereby cause hysteria during the election, the transition and, eventually, the Trump presidency.
Russia succeeded in sowing such chaos, thanks ultimately to Clinton, who likely had broken federal laws by using a British national and, by extension, Russian sources to warp an election. Without the fallacious Steele dossier, the entire Russian collusion hoax never would have taken off.