POWERLINE
How we got here
Despite the best efforts of the
shiftless Adam Schiff to keep the lid on the source of the dodgy Steele
dossier, we know now that the Clinton presidential campaign paid for the
Kremlin-aided smear job on Donald Trump before the election.
Thanks to the reporting of Jonathan
Allen and Amie Parnes we also know that the Clinton campaign continued to
extract value from the dossier after the election. Clinton and her cronies used
it to frame her humiliating loss as a Russian conspiracy to steal the election.
Allen and Parnes revealed:
Within 24 hours of her concession speech, [campaign chair
John Podesta and manager Robby Mook] assembled her communications team at the
Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely
on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers
littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press
and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.
The plan was to push journalists to
cover how “Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign,” and
it succeeded — as Paul Sperry put it in his
excellent New York Post column on the subject — to a
fare-thee-well.
After the election, coverage of the
fabricated scandal of Russian “collusion” was relentless and made a critical
contribution to the congressional investigations that followed.
When President Trump fired then FBI
Director James Comey, Comey had an inspired idea.
He would strategically leak memos of
his conversations with President Trump to his friend Daniel Richman at Columbia
Law School. Richman in turn was to read the memos to New York Times reporter
Michael Schmidt. If all went according to plan, the resulting story was to lead
to the appointment of Special Counsel to investigate all things Trump (video
below).
See the video on this page:
All went according to plan.
Comey is a sophisticated Washington
operator who has moved for a long time in rarefied law enforcement circles. He
knew roughly everyone in the small world from which the Special Counsel would
be drawn.
When Rod Rosenstein appointed
Comey’s friend and “brother in arms” Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, Comey
was home free to ascend Mount Olympus and pronounce his deep thoughts via
Twitter.
_________________
SEE
RELATED STORY
GOP
Reps Seek Criminal Prosecution Of FBI, DOJ Officials For "Full
Throated" Illegal Misconduct And "Treason"
By Tyler Durden
Following the release of a four-page memo detailing
rampant FISA warrant abuse by the FBI and DOJ, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) announced
that he will seek the criminal prosecution of FBI and DOJ officials for the
"full throated adoption of this illegal misconduct and abuse of FISA by
James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein" who Gosar
called "traitors to our nation."
______________________
New York Post
Now that we know what the declassified House memo says about government
misconduct, we also know what it means: The Washington swamp — the deep state —
is bigger, more vicious and more dangerous to American liberty than even a
cynic could have imagined.
Because of the memo and previous
revelations, we know that swamp creatures are embedded in the top of the FBI
and the Department of Justice. Some used their power to try to tip a
presidential campaign based on their personal politics.
They conducted a sham investigation
of the Democratic candidate and misled federal judges to spy on at least one
associate of her Republican challenger.
To block exposure of their misdeeds,
these officials falsely claimed that national security would be damaged. Add
that despicable lie — issued in the name of the FBI itself — to their shameful
records.
Thanks to the battle over the memo,
we also know with 100 percent certainty that the mainstream media is part of
the swamp. The efforts by The New York Times and The Washington Post, among
others, to keep the memo from ever seeing sunshine were appalling.
Before it saw the memo, the Times’
editorial page called it proof of “The Republican Plot Against the FBI.” A
Washington Post columnist warned President Trump he would be making a historic
mistake in releasing it.
“Presidents don’t win fights with
the FBI,” Eugene Robinson wrote, seemingly endorsing the
blackmailing habits of the disgraced J. Edgar Hoover.
Oddly, the campaign by those papers
coincided with the celebration of their roles in releasing the Pentagon Papers
nearly 50 years ago, as heroically depicted in the movie “The Post.”
Then, those papers took great risks
in standing up for the First Amendment in the face of government threats and
financial pressures. Now, those same papers take the side of butt-covering
secrecy and demonize those who demand transparency.
Those organizations are betraying
their legacies and their duties as journalists. They share with corrupt
officials a hatred of Donald Trump and believe that ending his presidency
justifies any and all means.
Their motives are as partisan as
that of the Democrats who fought tooth and nail to scuttle the memo.
Talk about being on the wrong side
of history.
The details of the memo make a
strong case that current and former officials committed crimes by misleading
FISA court judges in seeking four surveillance warrants against Carter Page, a
bit player in the Trump campaign orbit.
Those details seal the sordid legacy
of former FBI Director James Comey. He signed off on three warrant
requests, reportedly without informing the judges that the essential piece of
evidence against Page was the infamous Russian dossier paid for by Hillary
Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Months later, Comey himself told
Congress the dossier was “salacious and unverified,” yet was secretly willing
to use it in court against Page.
Its author, Christopher Steele, a
former British spy, never went to Russia to interview his paid sources, some of
whom were Kremlin officials. Did the judges know any of that before letting the
FBI read Page’s e-mails and listen to his phone calls?
Steele was hired by the FBI, then
fired when he shared his dossier with the press and lied about it. He also
confided to an agent that he loathed Trump and “was passionate about him not being president.”
Did the agent, Bruce Ohr, whose wife
worked for the same firm as Steele, Fusion GPS, tell the judges that? Did
Comey? The memo says no.
Without knowing that partisan link,
the court was deprived of evidence that would have called into question the
surveillance request. Indeed, the memo claims that Andrew McCabe, the former
deputy FBI director removed for his conduct during the separate Clinton
investigation, testified that no warrant would have been sought “without the
Steele dossier information.”
Not incidentally, current FBI
Director Christopher Wray and his team read the memo before it was released,
and did not dispute McCabe’s claim.
To the Trump haters, these facts
don’t matter. He is, in their minds, unfit to be president, so nothing short of
assassination is out of bounds.
Yet it is a mistake to view the
memo’s revelations through the lens of whether you like Trump, or what you
think of Carter Page. The ultimate issues are no more limited to them than were
other landmark moments in American history limited by the personal interests
of the parties involved.
The case in which Nazis were
permitted to march in the Jewish neighborhood of Skokie, Ill., was not an
approval of Nazis. The issue was whether repugnant speech has the same rights
as popular speech.
The Supreme Court effectively said
it did in a 1977 ruling that strengthened First Amendment rights for all
Americans.
Similarly, the “Miranda warning”
that allows a suspect in police custody to remain silent to avoid
self-incrimination stems from a case involving a hideously violent criminal.
Ernesto Miranda ultimately was convicted of kidnapping and rape, yet all
suspects, innocent and guilty, benefit from the 1966 Supreme Court ruling in
his favor.
Rulings like those weave the
Founders’ ideals of equality into the fabric of contemporary life and make
America the beacon of hope to the world.
Something even larger is now at
stake. Trump is the great disrupter who has overthrown the established
political order like no one in modern history, and many opponents have lost
their bearings in resisting his presidency.
In their rage and bigotry, they are
willing to abandon fundamental principles. We only know this because he won the
election; none of this shocking misconduct would have been revealed under a
Hillary Clinton presidency.
The claims in the memo that FBI and
Justice officials acted corruptly should concern all fair-minded Americans,
regardless of political preference. Those claims force us to ask whether we are
a nation of laws that apply equally to all.
If not, we are no longer America. We
are a banana republic where it’s acceptable for the government to use its
police powers against political opponents.
The choice we face is especially
stark given that the case at hand potentially implicates other top aides to
former President Barack Obama.
Recall that Page and others linked to Trump were
accused of having ties to Russia, then their names were leaked to the media in
a bid to sway the election and then to topple the president. There may be other
flimsy FISA applications covering other Trump associates we don’t yet know
about.
The memo is a giant step in uncovering
what appears to be an unprecedented conspiracy, but it is not the endgame. More
documents, congressional hearings, investigations and criminal prosecutions are
unavoidable.
Hysterical Trump haters greeted the
memo’s release by declaring that we face a constitutional crisis. They are
right — and they are creating it.
____________________
The Ticking Memo
By Victor Davis Hanson
The House Intelligence Committee memo is pretty simple. It should
not have been classified and thus far withheld from the public. In fact, far
more information now needs to be released.
Despite the outcry, as Chairman
Devin Nunes clarified, the memo can easily be in the near future supported or
refuted by adducing official documents. In other words, the memo makes a series
of transparent statements and leaves it up to the criminal-justice system and
the public to ascertain subsequent criminal liability.
It is likely that the basic accuracy
of the document will not be questioned, but rather opponents, some of them
mentioned in the memo, will either ask why the resulting embarrassing
information needed to be aired or insist that there are only minor possible
crimes in the events it narrates, or both. Remember, officials from the FBI
supposedly read the memo before its release to ensure that there were not
factual errors or misrepresentations.
In sum, on four occasions during and
after the 2016 campaign, the FBI and DOJ approached a federal FISA court —
established to allow monitoring of foreign nationals engaged in efforts to harm
the U.S. or American citizens deliberately or inadvertently in their service —
to surveil Carter Page, a sometime Trump adviser.
These requests also
mentioned George Papadopoulos, apparently as a preexisting target of an earlier
investigation by FBI official Peter Strzok, but according to the memo
mysteriously there was not adduced any direct connection between the two
individuals’ activities.
The basis of the requests was an
anti-Trump dossier that the FBI and DOJ had purchased from a private concern.
At the time of their various requests, FBI director James Comey and his deputy,
Andrew McCabe, apparently knew that the document was the work of an
opposition-research team, hired and paid, through a series of intermediaries,
by the Clinton campaign.
The same knowledge supposedly was known to DOJ
officials Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rod Rosenstein, who variously joined
the FISA requests.
The FBI and DOJ requests to the
court were also apparently bolstered by citing news accounts in the popular
media about possible Russian collusion, which in circular fashion had been the
result of efforts by the authors and purveyors of the dossier to leak its
contents to the media.
On various later occasions, high FBI
officials purportedly admitted to the congressional inquirers both that the
FISA requests would not have been made without use of the dossier, and yet its
contents could not be verified or in fact were scarcely yet scrutinized.
Apparently, no FBI or DOJ officials
informed the court over the duration of these various requests that:
a) the
dossier was paid for by the Clinton campaign,
b) the FBI in
turn apparently paid to obtain it,
c) supporting news stories used to
substantiate the dossier were the result of deliberately leaking the same
document to seed stories in media organizations, or
d) a DOJ official both met
the author of the dossier and informed the FBI that he was a biased source —
but either did not inform other DOJ and FBI officials that his own spouse was a
collaborator who worked on the dossier, or such knowledge was known to DOJ and
FBI officials but not passed on at some point to the FISA judge, apparently
because the court might not have otherwise approved of the request or might
have acted to revoke prior requests.
What Is the Larger Context?
What does it all mean — both the
memo itself and subsidiary public revelations about the Strzok-Page texts, and
the circumstances around the firing or reassignments of several DOJ and FBI top
officials?
I don’t think there is any more
doubt that the candidacy of Donald Trump terrified top officials of the Obama
DOJ and the FBI, James Comey especially.
A few may have genuinely believed
Trump was a beneficiary of Russian efforts at collusion; more likely, Comey,
McCabe, and Strzok may have believed that such a charge was unlikely but still
useful as a means to thwart the idea of a Trump presidency.
Either way, the DOJ
and the FBI deliberately distorted the nature of the FISA court process by
either withholding information that they knew would likely negate their
requests or misrepresenting the nature of the evidence they produced.
It is also clear from the contacts
between Mr. Simpson, Mr. Steele, and representatives of the DOJ and FBI, and
the employment of Ms. Ohr on the dossier team, that there were conflicts of
interest at best, and, at worst, collusion between Obama DOJ and FBI officials
and the de facto contractors hired by the Clinton team to find ways of
disseminating supposedly embarrassing information before the November 2016
election.
The larger landscape around the
memo’s revelations was not just that DOJ and FBI officials were disturbed by
the Trump candidacy. They were also likely assuming that he would not be
elected, and thus any questionable efforts to ensure that Trump was
not elected might not be investigated in an incoming Clinton administration,
but perhaps in some way even rewarded.
The Scope of the Memo
So far, none of the congressional
committees have released information about the actual scope and effects of
these and possible other FISA court orders — and to what degree, if any, other
American citizens were surveilled and whether such resulting surveillance
was used by the Mueller investigation to indict individuals, or whether the
names of U.S. citizens in such reports were illegally unmasked by Obama
officials and then leaked to the media. We are told such information is coming.
Would there ever have been a Mueller
investigation without the DOJ and FBI efforts to persuade the FISA court?
Would
the prior investigations by Peter Strzok (who later expressed strong dislike of
Donald Trump and worried over his candidacy to the point of meeting and
commiserating with Andrew McCabe) into George Papadopoulos on their own have
sustained a subsequent Mueller investigation, or was such a weak agenda to be
resuscitated by the FISA surveillance? (I.e., was some impetus for the FISA
warrant request an effort to find something that might energize the Strzok
efforts?)
And who was the FISA judge or
judges, and are we to believe that he or they could not have asked a simple
question concerning the nature and origins of the dossier? Was he incompetent,
biased, or representative of the dangerous tendency of judges to rubber-stamp
such FISA requests?
Is This a Scandal?
If all this is not a scandal — then
the following protocols are now considered permissible in American electoral
practice and constitutional jurisprudence:
An incumbent administration can
freely use the FBI and the DOJ to favor one side in a presidential election, by
buying its opposition research against the other candidate, using its own
prestige to authenticate such a third-party oppositional dossier, and then
using it to obtain court-ordered wiretaps on American citizens employed by a
candidate’s campaign — and do so by deliberately misleading the court
about the origins and authors of the dossier that was used to obtain the
warrants.
Some Historical Context
Watergate was about largely failed
presidential cover-up attempts to enlist the CIA and FBI to squash an
investigation into a politicized burglary.
Iran-Contra was supposedly about
rogue administration officials trying to circumvent the law by providing arms
to a foreign government to release hostages and thereby obtain cash to help
perceived friendly foreign agents without knowledge of and in contravention of
Congress.
The current internal efforts in the
middle of a campaign to weaponize the FBI and DOJ are something new.
And
it illustrates a larger effort of the prior administration to warp FBI
investigations of Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized and illegal email server and
other purported improper behavior, as well as efforts of Obama-administration
officials to improperly request unmasking of improperly surveilled Americans
for improperly political purposes.
These efforts come on top of previous
attempts to politicize the IRS in order to oppose perceived political opponents
and to monitor journalists reporting stories deemed unfavorable to the
administration.
Finally, unlike past administration scandals, when the press
posed as custodians of the public interest and demanded transparency from
government agencies, this time around the media are arguing for secrecy and
suppression of documents, and are unconcerned with likely violations of the
civil liberties of American citizens by overzealous federal officials likely
breaking the law.
What about the FBI?
There is much worry that the memo’s
release will hurt the FBI. But such concern is predicated on the definition of
the FBI.
If the agency is defined as its top
echelon, then, yes, the FBI’s highest officials are discredited, the
now-compulsive tweeter James Comey especially.
But if the FBI is defined by
thousands of rank-and-file professional agents, then the agency is not only not
discredited, but empowered by a timely reminder that true patriots at the FBI
never break federal law on the dubious rationale that their purportedly noble
ends justify any means necessary to obtain them.
No one forced FBI director James
Comey to withhold critical information from a FISA judge in order to
surveil American citizens, or to purchase an opposition-research dossier
from a political campaign in the middle of an election cycle.
Nor did anyone force Comey to leak
confidential notes of a meeting with the president of the United States to the
media in a deliberate effort to force appointment of a special counsel.
Comey
swore that he did not write his letter of legal exoneration until after
interviewing Hillary Clinton; we now know that was likely also a false
statement. Comey also changed the wording of his original draft to ensure
Hillary Clinton’s immunity from possible criminal liability.
No one forced the FBI’s top lawyer
and recently reassigned general counsel, James Baker, to leak elements of the
so-called Steele dossier to the media during the 2016 campaign.
No one forced Peter Strzok and Lisa
Page to conduct a romantic affair via FBI secure phones, a texting
correspondence that revealed that they both were prejudicial to the object of
their own then-current investigation, Donald Trump, or to meet with Andrew
McCabe to commiserate about their mutual dislike of Donald Trump.
Note that
their departures from the Mueller collusion investigation were not immediately
announced, but rather such news was released months later to suggest that the
reassignments were neither connected nor out of the ordinary.
No one forced a compromised Andrew
McCabe to continue with the Hillary Clinton email investigation, despite the
fact that his wife had recently received several hundred thousands of dollars
in campaign contributions from a Clinton-affiliated political-action committee.
No one forced him to concede that without the use of the dossier, FISA warrants
would have been unlikely.
Who Will Be Held Accountable?
Many of the those with possible
criminal exposure have already either been fired (Comey, McCabe), reassigned
(Page, Strzok, Ohr), or are considered sacrosanct (Obama, Loretta Lynch, etc.).
Rod Rosenstein’s fate is, for now, largely a political matter, and only later a
legal one.
Still, a special counsel might
indict a number of officials for deliberately misleading a federal judge,
or violating statutes prohibiting the surveillance of American citizens, or
lying while under oath, or he might retract indictments and confessions based
on deliberate misrepresentations to a federal judge.
A bipartisan 9/11–like
commission could at least issue a report and recommendations to ensure that the
DOJ and FBI never again intervene in a U.S. election.
By all means, let us see the
transcript of the McCabe interview, the Democratic minority memo, the actual
FISA court requests, the complete text trove of Page and Strzok, the prior
administration’s requests to unmask surveilled American citizens,
Clinton-campaign communications about the procurement of the dossier, and the
transcripts of those surveilled.
We need to find out whether Russian
collusion and interference into the 2016 election was far more devious and
complex than believed and whether it involved seeding the research behind the
Clinton campaign’s purchased oppositional dossier in order to undermine a U.S.
election, leading to the greatest irony of all: a special counsel
investigating what likely did not happen while ignoring what likely did —
perhaps the greatest political scandal of the modern age.
At this point, the only cure for the
wound is far more light.
