The Weekly Standard's Ties to Fusion GPS

By Julie Kelly
American Greatness
Aug. 16, 2018

In his online appeal for money after being fired this week, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok credited an unlikely source to vouch for his victim status: The Weekly Standard.

At one time a leading conservative magazine, the Standard declared last month that Strzok's plight was merely an "overwrought tale of bias" and the case against him is "just sound and fury." The article brushed off Strzok's actions as "several bad judgment calls" and blasted Congressional Republicans for continuing a criminal investigation into the now-unemployed G-man.

Strzok is following only 32 people on his newly-verified Twitter account. Bill Kristol, the editor-at-large of the Standard, is one of them.

So, what's with the fanboying between the Standard--an allegedly serious publication dedicated to advancing conservative principles--and a corrupt government bureaucrat who embodies everything the conservative movement fought against for decades?

I found an article in the Standard archives this week that might explain why. On July 24, 2016, just days before Strzok helped launch a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, Kristol gave Strzok and the Obama Justice Department a big assist from the anti-Trump Right by posting a flawed and questionably-sourced article. "Putin's Party" is compelling evidence that Kristol and the Standard were far from mere sideline observers as the Trump-Russia collusion scam took shape in the summer of 2016.

At the very least, the timing of the article suggests there was careful coordination between the central players--including the Hillary Clinton campaign--and Bill Kristol to derail Trump's candidacy just weeks before the election. But the article's content also serves to raise alarming questions about the claims by many Republicans that "conservatives" had no knowledge of or involvement with the Christopher Steele dossier.

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