DAVID MARCUS: The Russia hoax is simple. Democrats lied and half the country believed them

The United States of America has now spent almost a decade embroiled in “Russiagate,” and its citizens have been bombarded from both sides with theories, names, and anonymous quotes. But it all really comes down to one thing: Democrats lied, and half the country believed them.

In the 24 pages of never-before-seen declassified files released Thursday, we saw in cold, calculated black and white exactly how the Clinton campaign crafted the lie that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

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One email allegedly shows Leonard Benardo, vice president of the George Soros backed Open Society Foundation, writing in July 2016 that, “Julie [sic] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump,” adding “Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire.”

Julie is Julianne Smith, then a foreign policy adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign. You know who the FBI is.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard talks to reporters in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on July 23, 2025, in Washington, DC., after releasing newly-declassified documents about the Trump-Russia collusion ‘hoax.’ ((Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | Fox News Digital))

Just two days later, Bernado would allegedly send another email. “HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections,” it read. “That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.”

Benardo would also allegedly write, and this is key, “The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue,” adding, “In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media…”

This all leads to a gem in the annex to John Durham’s Russia hoax probe, released Thursday, which concluded, “During the first stage of the campaign, due to lack of direct evidence, it was decided to disseminate the necessary information through the FBI-affiliated ‘attic-based’ technical structures that are involved in cybersecurity…from where the information would then be disseminated through leading US publications.”

The Clinton campaign knew all too well that their lackeys in the media would eat up this half-baked nonsense with a spoon, and probably win awards for it, which is exactly what happened.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, left. Former FBI Director James Comey, right.  (Getty/Reuters)

What the media wasn’t told at the time was that field officers in the CIA objected to the lies and were run over because, according to their then-Director John Brennan “it rings true.”

This ludicrous legal standard of “rings true,” was used to convince the FISA court to renew warrants on Trump officials, which was not only a free federal law enforcement fishing expedition, but created smoke and the appearance of fire.

In December of 2016, in the dying days of the Barack Obama administration, intel reports were massaged to once again create the illusion that Trump was a traitor who became president only through Russian assistance.

Thus was launched Robert Mueller’s investigation, which would last for years at a cost of more than $30 million, but ultimately exonerate Trump.

Perhaps worst of all, in the midst of this Kafkaesque trial by media and secret courts, people’s lives were destroyed, crushed by false allegations, legal bills and a process that was the punishment.

One of them is Michael Caputo, a long-time member of Trump’s orbit who I talked to on Friday.

“It is precious little comfort knowing we were right, we need accountability, but even accountability doesn’t feed the bulldog,” he told me, which was to say the damage to him and his family cannot be undone.

Accountability comes in many forms. Caputo may never get the perp walks by former Democrat officials that he understandably desires, but this dastardly lie concocted by Democrats to smear Trump and maintain power has at least been been exposed.

According to a Suffolk poll in December of 2018, “Forty-six percent are convinced that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, while 29 percent said there was no such coordination, and 19 percent weren’t sure.”

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Every serious person, whether Democrat or Republican, now admits that this simply was not true. What they must also then admit is that half of Americans believed the lie only because Democrats told it so deceitfully.

It was Walter Scott who wrote in his 1808 poem ‘Marmion’, “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” But in this case, Democrats wanted the web, a web so dense with so many loose ends and round corners that the truth would be forever hidden.

It was Shakespeare who wrote “the truth will out,” and so it has come out, albeit not before shaking a country to its core and crushing innocent lives.

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Whatever else comes from the current investigation of Russiagate, one thing is now clear, ready to be etched in the stone of history: The Democrats invented the Russian collusion lie, they did it intentionally, and they suckered their voters into buying it.

To everyone involved in this hoax, the message must be clear: This is your legacy, your attempt to deceive the American people and destroy the man they elected to lead them. That is who you are.

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