Failed 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign funded and launched the false and farcical “Russian collusion” narrative against her opponent, former President Donald Trump, and some in Clinton’s circle apparently actually believed the lies that they helped to create and spread.
A new anti-Trump book claims that some of Clinton’s campaign staffers feared that Trump, with assistance from the Russians, would attempt to poison her with a handshake during the third presidential debate in 2016, Breitbart reported.
While the book further asserted that Clinton herself didn’t actually believe Trump would try to assassinate or attack her with a poisoned handshake, Breitbart nonetheless noted that Clinton and Trump did not shake hands at the third and final presidential debate prior to the election.
A poisonous handshake
The claim of a supposed poisoned handshake is just one of many unbelievable or absurd notions put forward in the soon-to-be-released new anti-Trump book from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, which is titled “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.”
At one point in the book, Haberman wrote, “During preparations for the third debate, Clinton’s team was disrupted by a warning from the husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who said he had been told that Russians might try to poison Clinton through a handshake with Trump, to inflict a dramatic health episode during the debate.”
The reporter insisted that Clinton herself “did not take it seriously,” and also suggested that then-campaign aide Ron Klain — now President Joe Biden’s chief of staff — expressed skepticism about “how Trump would poison Clinton but not himself” with a poisoned handshake.
However, Haberman wrote that Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s then-communications director, “took the prospect seriously enough to check it out; the warning turned out to be mere speculation from a historian with no knowledge of Russian plans.”
Clinton’s team helped create and spread false Trump allegations
This is, of course, an absolutely ridiculous allegation seemingly ripped out of a bad spy movie — hint: it matches a scene in 2014’s “The Interview” about an attempted assassination of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un — that is rendered even more absurd when one considers that it was Clinton’s team that helped create and perpetuate the nonsensical Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
Indeed, after years of denial and obfuscation, the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee essentially acknowledged their role in that charade in March of this year when they agreed to pay fines to the Federal Election Commission for trying to hide the payments made to fund the so-called “Steele Dossier,” according to The Center Square.
To be sure, the FEC fines were a slap on the wrist — the Clinton campaign paid $8,000 while the DNC paid $105,000 — for the violation of improperly labeling the payments on required expense reports.
The settlement reached was confirmation nonetheless that the Clinton campaign and DNC, by way of their allied law firm Perkins Coie, funneled more than $1 million to opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the various baseless and unconfirmed allegations about Trump and Russia into the now infamous dossier, which then fueled the patently false anti-Trump “Russian collusion” narrative for years thereafter.
Ironically, if Haberman’s claims are to be believed — and there are ample reasons to be skeptical of her assertions — then it would seem that Clinton’s own aides and allies fell for and believed the nonsense they helped cook up in the first place.