PHOTO: (Left to Right) Disgraced Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Acting DOJ Attorney Rod Rosenstein
The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by
Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court
media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated,
opposition smear dossier failed.
So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to
abort the Trump presidency failed.
There are many elements to what
in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American
political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government
bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S.
president.
Preparing the Battlefield
No palace coup can take place without the perception of popular anger at a president.
The deep state is by nature cowardly.
It does not move
unless it feels it can disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed,
those efforts will be seen as popular and necessary—as expressed in tell-all
book titles such as fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or
in disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The
Threat.
In candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of
the battlefield translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political
progressives and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal
likely would appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to
that end.
All through the 2016 campaign and during the first two
years of the Trump presidency the media’s treatment, according to liberal
adjudicators of press coverage, ran about 90 percent negative toward Trump—a
landmark bias that continues today.
Journalists themselves consulted with the Clinton campaign
to coordinate attacks.
From the Wikileaks trove, journalistic grandees such as
John Harwood, Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, and Glenn Thrush often communicated
(and even post factum were unapologetic about doing so) with John Podesta’s
staff to construct various anti-Trump themes and have the Clinton campaign
review or even audit them in advance.
Some contract “journalists” apparently were paid directly
by Fusion GPS—created by former reporters Glen Simpson of the Wall
Street Journal and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post—to
spread lurid stories from the dossier.
Others more refined like Christiane
Amanpour and James Rutenberg had argued for a new journalistic ethos that
partisan coverage was certainly justified in the age of Trump, given his assumed
existential threat to The Truth.
Or as Rutenberg put it in 2016: “If you view a
Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting
is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being
oppositional.
That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every
mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards,
untenable.
But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal
standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”
I suppose Rutenberg never considered that half the
country might have considered the Hillary Clinton presidency “potentially
dangerous,” and yet did not expect the evening news, in 90 percent of its
coverage, to reflect such suspicions.
The Democratic National Committee’s appendages often
helped to massage CNN news coverage—such as Donna Brazile’s primary debate
tip-off to the Clinton campaign or CNN’s consultation with the DNC about
forming talking points for a scheduled Trump interview.
So-called “bombshell,” “watershed,” “turning-point,” and
“walls closing in” fake news aired in 24-hour news bulletin cycles.
The media
went from fabrications about Trump’s supposed removal of the bust of Martin
Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office, to the mythologies in the Steele
dossier, to lies about the Trump Tower meeting, to assurances that Michael
Cohen would testify to Trump’s suborning perjury, and on and on.
CNN soon proved that it is no longer a news organization
at all—as reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju,
Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl
Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, and Lex Harris all
trafficked in false rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump, while
hosts and guest hosts such as Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, and
Anderson Cooper stooped to obscenity and grossness to attack Trump.
Both politicos and celebrities tried to drive Trump’s
numbers down to facilitate some sort of popular ratification for his removal.
Hollywood and the coastal corridor punditry exhausted public expressions of
assassinating or injuring the president, as the likes of Jim Carrey, Johnny
Depp, Robert de Niro, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and a
host of others vied rhetorically to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead,
and blow up the president.
Left wing social media and mainstream journalism spread
sensational lies about supposed maniacal Trump supporters in MAGA hats.
They
constructed fantasies that veritable white racists were now liberated to run
amuck insulting and beating up people of color as they taunted the poor and
victimized minorities with vicious Trump sloganeering—even as the Covington
farce and now the even more embarrassing Jussie Smollett charade evaporated
without apologies from the media and progressive merchants of such hate.
At the same time, liberal attorneys, foundations,
Democratic politicians, and progressive activists variously sued to overturn
the election on false charges of rigged voting machines.
They sought to subvert
the Electoral College.
They introduced articles of impeachment.
They sued to
remove Trump under the Emoluments Clause.
They attempted to invoke the 25th
Amendment. And they even resurrected the ossified Logan Act—before focusing on
the appointment of a special counsel to discredit the Trump presidency. Waiting
for the 2020 election was seen as too quaint.
Weaponizing the Deep State
During the 2016 election, the Obama Department of Justice warped the Clinton email scandal investigation, from Bill Clinton’s secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to unethical immunity given to the unveracious Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to James Comey’s convoluted predetermined treatment of “likely winner” Clinton, and to DOJ’s Bruce Ohr’s flagrant conflict of interests in relation to Fusion GPS.
About a dozen FBI and DOJ grandees have now resigned,
retired, been fired, or reassigned for unethical and likely illegal behavior—and
yet have not faced criminal indictments.
The reputation of the FBI as venerable
agency is all but wrecked.
Its administrators variously have libeled the Trump
voters, expressed hatred for Trump, talked of “insurance policies” in ending
the Trump candidacy, and inserted informants into the Trump campaign.
The former Obama directors of the CIA and National
Intelligence, with security clearances intact, hit the television airways as
paid “consultants” and almost daily accused the sitting president of Russian
collusion and treason—without cross-examination or notice that both previously
had lied under oath to Congress (and did so without subsequent legal exposure),
and both were likely knee-deep in the dissemination of the Steele dossier among
Obama administration officials.
John Brennan’s CIA likely helped to spread the Fusion GPS
dossier among elected and administrative state officials.
Some in the NSC in
massive and unprecedented fashion requested the unmasking of surveilled names
of Trump subordinates, and then illegally leaked them to the press.
The FISA courts, fairly or not, are now mostly
discredited, given they either were willingly or naively hoodwinked by FBI and
DOJ officials who submitted as chief evidence for surveillance on American
citizens, an unverified dossier—without disclosure that the bought campaign
hit-piece was paid for by Hillary Clinton, authored by a discredited has-been
British agent, relied on murky purchased Russian sources, and used in circular
fashion to seed news accounts of supposed Trump misbehavior.
The Mueller Investigation
The Crown Jewel in the coup was the appointment of special counsel Robert Muller to discover supposed 2016 Trump-Russian election collusion. Never has any special investigation been so ill-starred from its conception.
Mueller’s appointment was a result of his own friend
James Comey’s bitter stunt of releasing secret, confidential and even
classified memos of presidential conversations.
Acting DOJ Attorney Rod
Rosenstein appointed a former colleague Mueller—although as a veteran himself
of the Clinton email scandal investigations and the FISA fraudulent writ
requests, Rosenstein was far more conflicted than was the recused Attorney
General Jeff Sessions.
Mueller then packed his investigative team with lots of
Clinton donors and partisans, some of whom had legally represented Clinton
subordinates and even the Clinton Foundation or voiced support for anti-Trump
movements.
Mueller himself and Andrew Weissmann have had a long
record of investigatory and prosecutorial overreach that had on occasion
resulted in government liability and court mandated federal restitution. In
such polarized times, neither should have involved in such an investigation.
Two subordinate FBI investigators were caught earlier on conducting an affair
over their FBI-issued cell phones, and during the election cycle they slurred
the object of their subsequent investigation, ridiculed Trump voters, and
bragged that Trump would never be elected. Mueller later staggered, and then
hid for weeks the reasons for, their respective firings.
The team soon discovered there was no Trump-Russian 2016
election collusion—and yet went ahead to leverage Trump campaign subordinates
on process crimes in hopes of finding some culpability in Trump’s past 50-year
business, legal, and tax records.
The point was not to find who colluded with
whom (if it had been, then Hillary Clinton would be now indicted for illegally
hiring with campaign funds a foreign national to buy foreign fabrications to
discredit her opponent), but to find the proper mechanism to destroy the
presumed guilty Donald Trump.
The Mueller probe has now failed in that gambit of
proving “collusion” (as even progressive investigative reporters and some FBI
investigators had predicted), but succeeded brilliantly in two ways.
The “counterintelligence” investigation subverted two
years of the Trump presidency by constant leaks that Trump soon would be
indicted, jailed, disgraced, or impeached.
As a result, Trump’s stellar
economic and foreign policy record would never earn fifty percent of public
support.
Second, Mueller’s preemptive attacks offered an effective
offensive defense for the likely felonious behavior of John Brennan, James
Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, and a host of
others.
While the Mueller lawyers threatened to destroy the lives of bit
players like Jerome Corsi, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone, they de facto
provided exemption to a host of the Washington hierarchy who had lied under
oath, obstructed justice, illegally leaked to the press, unmasked and leaked
names of surveilled Americans, and misled federal courts under the guise of a
“higher loyalty” to the cause of destroying Donald J. Trump.
The Palace Coup
All of the above came to a head with the firing of the chronic leaker FBI Director James Comey (who would lie to the president about his not being a target of an FBI investigation, lie to House investigatory committees by pleading amnesia and ignorance on 245 occasions, and repeatedly lie to his own FBI bureaucrats).
In May 2017, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe took over
from the fired Comey.
His candidate wife recently had been a recipient of huge
Clinton-related campaign PAC donations shortly before he began investigating
the Clinton email scandal. McCabe would soon be cited by the Inspector General
for lying to federal investigators on numerous occasions—cynically stooping
even to lie to his own New York FBI subordinates to invest scarce resources to
hunt for their own nonexistent leaks as a mechanism for disguising his own
quite real and illegal leaking.
The newly promoted McCabe apparently felt that it was his
moment to become famous for taking out a now President Trump.
Thus, he
assembled a FBI and DOJ cadre to open a counterintelligence investigation of
the sitting president on no other grounds but the fumes of an evaporating
Clinton opposition dossier and perceived anger among the FBI that their
director had just been fired.
In addition, apparently now posing as Andrew
McCabe, MD, he informally head counted how many of Trump’s own cabinet members
could be convinced by McCabe’s own apparent medical expertise to help remove
the president on grounds of physical and mental incapacity under the 25th
Amendment. This was an attempted, albeit pathetic, coup against an elected
president and the first really in the history of the United States.
At one point, McCabe claims that the acting Attorney
General of the United States Rod Rosenstein volunteered to wear a wire to
entrap his boss President Trump—in the manner of Trump’s own attorney Michael
Cohen’s entrapment of Trump, in the manner of James Comey taking entrapment
notes on confidential Trump one-on-one meetings and leaking them to the press,
and in the manner of the Department of Justice surveilling Trump subordinates
through FISA and other court authorizations.
McCabe was iconic of an utterly corrupt FBI Washington
hierarchy, which we now know from the behavior of its disgraced and departed
leadership. They posed as patriotic scouts, but in reality proved themselves
arrogant, smug, and incompetent. They harbored such a sense of superiority that
they were convinced they could act outside the law in reifying an “insurance
policy” that would end the Trump presidency.
The thinking of the conspirators initially had been
predicated on three assumptions thematic during this three-year long government
effort to destroy Trump:
One, during 2016, Hillary
Clinton would certainly win the election and FBI and DOJ unethical and illegal
behavior would be forgotten if not rewarded, given the Clintons’ own signature
transgressions and proven indifference to the law;
Two, Trump was so controversial
and the fabricated dossier was so vile and salacious, that seeded rumors of
Trump’s faked perversity gave them de facto exemptions to do whatever they
damned pleased;
Three, Trump’s low polls, his
controversial reset of American policy, and the general contempt in which he
was held by the bipartisan coastal elite, celebrities, and the deep state,
meant that even illegal means to continue the campaign-era effort to destroy
Trump and now abort his presidency were felt to be moral and heroic acts
without legal consequences, and the media would see the conspirators as heroes.
In sum, the Left and the administrative state, in concert
with the media, after failing to stop the Trump campaign, regrouped. They
ginned up a media-induced public hysteria, with the residue of the Hillary
Clinton campaign’s illegal opposition research, and manipulated it to put in
place a special counsel, stocked with partisans.
Then, not thugs in sunglasses and epaulettes, not
oligarchs in private jets, not shaggy would-be Marxists, but sanctimonious
arrogant bureaucrats in suits and ties used their government agencies to seek
to overturn the 2016 election, abort a presidency, and subvert the U.S.
Constitution. And they did all that and more on the premise that they were our
moral superiors and had uniquely divine rights to destroy a presidency that
they loathed.
Shame on all these failed conspirators and their
abettors, and may these immoral people finally earn a long deserved legal and
moral reckoning.
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Victor
Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics
professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at
California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie
Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been
a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the
National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a
farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a
critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author
most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was
Fought and Won (Basic
Books).
