Photo:
Top row from left are former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former FBI Director
James Comey, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and former national
security adviser Susan Rice. Bottom row from left are former FBI Deputy
Assistant Director Peter Strzok, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and
former National Intelligence Director James Clapper. (AP Photo)
Familiarity, it is said, breeds contempt. It also breeds indifference. For almost three years now, the intelligence services and police apparatus of the deep state have worked tirelessly to undermine Donald Trump.
Beginning sometime in the late winter of 2016, when
Trump’s presidential campaign was showing unexpected signs of strength, John
Brennan—the Communist-voting apparatchik turned media mouthpiece whom it
pleased Barack Obama to appoint as director of the CIA—began ringing alarm
bells about Trump’s possible relations with the Kremlin.
His concern was based on two things. One was a report,
spurious as it turned out, about “contacts between Russian officials and U.S.
persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals
were cooperating with the Russians.” The other was that brittle sense of
entitlement, fired by paranoia, that membership in the higher echelons of the
deep state’s nomenklatura breeds.
Brennan convened a “working group” at CIA headquarters
that included Peter Strzok, the disgraced FBI agent who was head of
counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, then director of national intelligence
(now, like Brennan, another mouthpiece for the left-wing media), in order to
stymie Trump’s campaign. It was Brennan, too, who first alerted James Comey,
the disgraced former director of the F.B.I., to the fantasy of possible
“collusion” between the Trump Campaign and “the Russians.”
Then came the infamous “Steele Dossier,” the
agglomeration of malicious gossip about Trump that was surreptitiously
commissioned by and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. This
fantastical piece of “opposition research” was essentially the sole warrant for
opening secret FISA investigations against Carter Page, a low-level Trump
campaign advisor, and others.
All this provided sensational pabulum for the anti-Trump
press, who spent countless hours peeling back the complex, hypertrophied onion
that the CIA, the FBI, and various figures within the Obama administration had
built up to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump without quite seeming to
target Trump himself.
Mirabile ditctu, it didn’t work. Still, it was impossible
that Trump could actually win the election. Nancy Pelosi told us that we could
“take it to the bank” that Donald Trump was not going to be president. Many
other politicians and talking heads made fools of themselves emitting similar
pseudo-certainties right up to the afternoon and early evening of election day.
But win he did, and that changed everything.
Now it was not a candidate who had to be stopped but a
duly elected president of the United States who had to be kept from knowing
exactly what lengths the government—soon to be his government—had gone to
destroy him.
From November 9, 2016, to January 20, 2017, the reins of
government were still in the hands of Barack Obama. The apparatus to stop Trump
the candidate was already in place.
Now it would be deployed against Trump the
president-elect and, later, Trump the president.