Thread by @SethAbramson

BREAKING NEWS: In late 2016, I wrote at length about the True Pundit Hoax—an effort by Rudy Giuliani, Erik Prince and Michael Flynn to coerce the FBI into reopening Clinton's email case via lies about FBI leaks. Over 4.5 years later, DOJ confirms the hoax. thedailybeast.com/rudy-giuliani-…

(PS) The columns I wrote on this were at HuffPost, where I was a columnist in 2016. I was—of course—called a conspiracy theorist for saying Trump's inner circle had concocted and spread a lie nationally days before an election to try to exert pressure on the FBI. But I was right.

(PS2) The question now is why it took nearly five years for the DOJ IG to confirm that Giuliani and others in a presidential candidate's inner circle conspired to commit election fraud days before an election. An even bigger question is why no one's being held accountable for it.

(PS3) Remember that Michael Flynn spread the lie on Twitter, where it was shared by his son and Don Jr. And Erik Prince was invited to share the lie on Breitbart by Steve Bannon. And Giuliani shared the lie via Trump's allies at Fox News. This was a coordinated campaign strategy.

(PS4) This was not Giuliani freelancing. This was a highly coordinated Trump campaign strategy that involved numerous media outlets, top Trump campaign allies, and a design to coerce the FBI that—according to a past DOJ IG report—led Comey to have a *manufactured* fear of leaks.

(PS5) In short, in 2016 the top echelon of Trump's campaign deliberately and systematically spread disinformation across the United States days before a presidential election in order to fraudulently create the impression that the FBI was conspiring to aid Clinton. And it worked.

(PS6) The hoax went beyond the already stunning fact of Giuliani lying about what would've been criminal leaks by the FBI. Prince expanded on Giuliani's story to lie about federal evidence he claimed existed. It was all a deliberate election fraud conspiracy that's now confirmed.

(PS7) But no one will be held accountable, because somehow the DOJ IG decided that Rudy Giuliani simply confessing to election fraud was sufficient. No real investigation into the careful coordination behind the lie—and its carefully conceived ambitions—will ever be conducted.

(PS8) Ignored, of course, is that Giuliani was Trump's agent at the time, and his election hoax was spread not just by Trump associates but members of Trump's family. And the hoax just happened to do with the subject Trump himself had obsessed over within the campaign for months.

(PS9) As detailed in my 2018 book Proof of Collusion, Trump was raging privately in July, August and September about the need to find Clinton's emails—even if it meant getting them from foreign spies. And what do you know? In October his team ran a hoax on the emails being found.

(PS10) A 7-year-old temporarily designated as a line attorney at Main Justice would see that this was a conspiracy to commit election fraud—and moreover that this criminal conspiracy was successful inasmuch as it led to Comey believing he needed to reopen Clinton's case publicly.

(PS11) Instead, this'll be a one-day story—at most—about Giuliani being a naughty boy and lying about something inconsequential as a sort of acceptable degree of campaign bluster. And one reason nothing will happen is because DOJ waited *nearly half a decade* to reveal all this.

(PS12) In that half a decade, journalists who had the story *correct* were raked across the coals as "conspiracy theorists," and the individuals involved in the True Pundit Hoax were permitted to *continue committing election fraud*, including during and after the 2020 election.

(PS13) Instead of the FBI being *more* aggressive about policing as election fraud coordinated disinformation campaigns in the days before an election, the new normal is that "anything goes" in federal elections—including conspiracies to coerce the FBI into election interference.

(PS14) If Rudy Giuliani tells the truth in October 2016—that retired FBI agents who planned to vote for Trump were simply griping emptily about Clinton not being charged—McCabe and Comey don't have the email conversation about leaks that leads to the reopening of Clinton's case.

(PS15) Instead, not only does Rudy Giuliani very carefully lie in as many public venues as possible about having heard about Clinton's case from "active" agents, but the most powerful men on Team Trump fan out across the media to amplify and even augment the hoax, pleasing Trump.

(PS16) Now the feckless DOJ has effectively said, "This is fine. Feel free to do this again. Feel free to engage in a coordinated criminal conspiracy to tamper with a federal criminal investigation and lie about nonexistent federal criminal evidence to try to steal an election."

(PS17) According to national polling published at the time, Trump won in 2016 because of the reopening of Clinton's case—and all the evidence suggests that that reopening occurred because of the True Pundit Hoax. Imagine if those responsible had been held accountable before 2020.

(PS18) How different would the 2020 election have looked if the men responsible for so much of the malfeasance during and after the election—Giuliani, Prince, Flynn, Flynn Jr., Trump Jr., Bannon, and others—had faced the election fraud investigation I called for in December 2016.

(PS19) And don't forget Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing—future Trump lawyers who were involved in the True Pundit Hoax as well as the Trump-Ukraine scandal and Big Lie. All these people could've been stopped in advance by federal law enforcement. Instead, they were emboldened.

(PS20) America will continue to see conspiracies to commit election fraud in the form of mass disinformation campaigns targeting federal agencies and American voters until such schemes are treated as the federal crimes they are. And the same people will keep committing them. /end