Remember when President Trump had his first conversation with Australia's prime minister and, inexplicably, the conversation turned into a slam-down-the-receiver fight?

Maybe Trump knew something.  The ostensible issue at the time was refugees and a stanky little deal President Obama made for America to take in Australia's high-risk illegal refugees from Islamic hellholes who had paid smugglers to bring them to Australia's shores illegally.  The illegal entrants were being awarded for their illegality with American residence and citizenship, something they will eventually come to abhor before one of them lashes out at us through a terror attack or some other antisocial act, and it takes only one.

No wonder President Trump was angry.  The rest of us were angry, too.

But it's baffling that the problem came from Australia, a longtime ally of the U.S.  Now a new investigative report suggests a reason why: turns out Australia had been meddling in our election, in a failed bid to ensure Hillary Clinton's victory.  The Hill reports that Downer had earlier dispensed some $25 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation back in 2006, leaving Australia in a position to ask for some fancy favors from the Democrats.  It's far from the only instance.  Clarice Feldman notes in an email: "The only documented meddling in the election was by Australians."  She sent links to stories showing that illegal campaign donations went to Bernie Sanders from Australian sources, which resulted in a fine for Sanders, and the Australian Labor Party sent operatives to work against President Trump.  Meddling, indeed.

It's the Australian ruling party, the Liberal Party, that meddled most.  Turns out Alexander Downer, the supposedly untainted, dispassionate outside source that fingered one of President Trump's young advisers in London who had had contacts with Russian sources as a likely national security concern, was anything but dispassionate.  He was in bed with the Clintons all along, shoveling the $25 million in Australian government cash into the Clinton Foundation coffers back in 2006.  Not surprisingly, he's a member of the same Liberal Party as Turnbull, and with the London embassy post an important one for Australia, you can bet they were tight.

According to John Solomon of The Hill, Downer was behind paying Australian cash into the Clintons' slush fund and then by coincidence was the same Australian who sent his message to the State Department, which got it to the FBI, where it was then used as the basis for a Deep State-led FISA warrant to spy on Trump.  Solomon reports:

Former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer's role in securing $25 million in aid from his country to help the Clinton Foundation fight AIDS is chronicled in decade-old government memos archived on the Australian foreign ministry's website.  

Downer and former President Clinton jointly signed a Memorandum of Understanding in February 2006 that spread out the grant money over four years for a project to provide screening and drug treatment to AIDS patients in Asia.

The Deep State and its press allies had had a lot of fun claiming earlier that it wasn't the Steele dossier of sleazy tainted phony stories about President Trump that triggered the FBI into seeking a FISA warrant to spy on President Trump, but Downer's report, fingering the hapless George Papadopoulos, who has since been on the short end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian collusion in the election of Donald Trump.  Here's what the New York Times claimed last Dec. 30:

The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign.  Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America's closest intelligence allies.

And gee, both the Steele dossier and the Downer tip were assembled in London.  Anybody want to find out if there was a link between Downer and Christopher Steele?  Wouldn't be surprised if there was.

What it shows is that the real meddling wasn't the work of the Terrible Russkis; it was the doing of some of our closest allies, determined to get Hillary Clinton elected.  The Australians were owed favors.  Christopher Steele got money from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.  So they all worked together to do their bit to get Hillary elected.  It shows that the extent of Deep State isn't something confined to the U.S.  It stinks.