For the last seventeen months now, the daily serving of American political news has included a generous helping of Robert Mueller, the Russiagate investigation that has morphed into an “is there any way possible we can get rid of Trump?” investigation, and a never changing but frothy lack of evidence to show that anything dishonest or disingenuous happened in Donald Trump’s campaign to be President of the United States.
Now, according to an opinion piece released by the Hill on Sunday 20 May, one of the issues that has been hiding in plain sight is getting some attention.
That issue is the increasingly evident amount of corruption in the US government agencies, notably the intelligence services and the Justice Department.
Mark Penn, the writer of this piece, puts his thought forward:
At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton“matter,” but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a year-long investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.
This is a very clear conclusion. The use of intelligence services, which are supposed to help protect the American people from dangers foreign and domestic, as tools of opposition research, (slander in six syllables) has become increasingly transparent, even as the investigation that this “research” helped launch was supposedly intended to find fault with the candidate Donald Trump and so set the wheels of outrage in motion so as to have him removed from office.
But it is not working.
And as time goes on, these selfsame groups appear to be impugning themselves in a manner that is actually amazing to see. The amazement comes from how such a corrupt operation could be put in motion, and how that operation is only succeeding in outing itself, and yet, it continues, on and on.
The fanciful “dossier” assembled by Christopher Steele and its use by the Clinton camp to create a story out of nothing is one aspect of this level of corruption.
Another is the fact that no evidence against Mr. Trump has arisen that connects him in any way to some sort of illicit or illegal interference with the American election.
In other words, If you are not going to play by the Deep State playbook, get out. If you don’t get out, we will make your life hell until you do.
The "deep state" is in a deep state of desperation. With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general's report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton "matter," but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won't come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn't playing mahjong in a secret "no aides allowed" meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.
No seriously, this is coming from Bill Clinton's former pollster.
With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.
But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That's left out of their narrative. Downer's signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don't need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn't intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.
Note that Bill Clinton's former pollster is more skeptical of the Deep State's current story than alleged Bad Boy of Conservatism Ben Shapiro.
In no way would a fourth-hand report from a Maltese professor justify wholesale targeting of four or five members of the Trump campaign. It took Christopher Steele, with his funding concealed through false campaign filings, to be incredibly successful at creating a vast echo chamber around his unverified, fanciful dossier, bouncing it back and forth between the press and the FBI so it appeared that there were multiple sources all coming to the same conclusion.
Time and time again, investigators came up empty. Even several sting operations with an FBI spy we just learned about failed to produce a DeLorean-like video with cash on the table. But rather than close the probe, the deep state just expanded it. All they had were a few isolated contacts with Russians and absolutely nothing related to Trump himself, yet they pressed forward. Egged on by Steele, they simply believed Trump and his team must be dirty. They just needed to dig deep enough.
Mark Penn concludes that stopping Mueller isn't about party or politics or any particular president, but necessary to preserve the normal functioning of democracy itself.
Obviously, worth the read.
Richard Fernandez has previously written that we are now experiencing what we had long avoided in America -- a deadly fight of a King vs. another King (the current president versus the Deep State embeds of the previous president), and that this fight may change America forever.
He now elaborates on that idea, as he watches two scorpions with a death-grip on each other trying to kill each other before the other kills first.
The Deep State understands that either they must find some claim that Trump is a criminal, or else they'll be prosecuted for their own rampant criminal acts.
The invaluable timeline of the investigations compiled by Sharyl Attkisson seems to confirm what Lee Smith of Tablet Magazine has already suggested: that the roots of domestic spying predated the Trump candidacy. He notes that "Obama officials vastly expand[ed] their searches through NSA database for Americans and the content of their communications. In 2013, there were 9,600 searches involving 195 Americans. But in 2016, there are 30,355 searches of 5,288 Americans."
On January 20, 2017, "Fifteen minutes after Trump becomes president, former National Security Adviser Susan Rice emails memo to herself purporting to summarize the Jan. 5 Oval Office meeting with President Obama and other top officials. She states that Obama instructed the group to investigate 'by the book' and asked them to be mindful whether there were certain things that “could not be fully shared with the incoming administration."
In response to Trump's demand, Rod Rosenstein has asked the DOJ inspector general to review the possible infiltration of the Trump campaign. The hunters have themselves become the hunted. For better or worse, two major American political factions are trying to jail each other. The outcome of their struggle may determine not only who occupies the White House, but what future role the intelligence agencies play in public life.
The specifics of the individual accusations may be fake, but the struggle over the control of the bureaucracy is frighteningly real. Concern over the independence of powerful bureaucracies has long been paramount for a reason. The biggest problem with weaponizing intelligence agencies is it CREATES a pathway for the foreign takeover of the system. If a once hostile power takes over the White House and that president corrupts the agencies, an unfettered secret police will have the ability to remain in power indefinitely.
On Sunday a justifiably outraged President Trump called for the former Obama administration to be investigated for its unprecedented and profoundly un-American spying and sabotage operation against the 2016 Trump campaign.
“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the [Federal Bureau of Investigation/Department of Justice] infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump tweeted Sunday at 1:37 p.m.
Just the day before, President Trump had written on Twitter, “If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal.”
The presidential demand for action comes after days of dramatic, detailed revelations about the plot to undermine the Trump campaign, transition team, and presidency began surfacing in news accounts.
On Thursday it was revealed that the FBI illicitly put together a spy ring as part of something called Operation Crossfire Hurricane and that at least one informant was a member of the Trump campaign.
On Friday the New York Times reported the campaign-embedded snitch was an American teaching in the United Kingdom.
By Saturday, media reports indicated the rat-fink in question was Stefan Halper, who is currently Director of American Studies in Cambridge University's Department of Politics and International Studies and a research professor at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C. Halper served in the White House during the Nixon and Ford administrations. Halper hates Trump. How he got on Trump’s campaign staff is not clear.
“Unless WaPo & NYT articles are wrong, it seems that an informant (spy) for the Obama administration (paid tax payer dollars?!) kept tabs (spied) on the Trump campaign,” tweeted Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). “Of all the disturbing revelations about the deep state in the last 2 years, I find this one most disturbing.”
With the flood of new evidence from recent days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to deny that President Obama – undeniably the most pro-Russian president in American history – and his men abused the powers of their offices not only to spy on then-candidate Donald Trump but also to undermine and lay the foundation for the overthrow of Trump’s administration.
No matter how many idiots and liars from both parties embarrass themselves by blathering on about the Left’s utterly insane conspiracy theory by which Russia and Trump are said to have engaged in electoral collusion, whatever that may be, we now know there was a conspiracy born in the summer of 2016 – and that Trump and his people had nothing to do with it.
This shameful real-life conspiracy is called Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Crossfire Hurricane is the codename for the FBI’s now-confirmed spying on the Trump campaign, which included placing at least one infiltrator within the campaign apparatus.
As I wrote 14 months ago here at FrontPage,
Now the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact. Here Obama likely masterminded, or oversaw someone like the diabolical Benghazi cover-up artist Ben Rhodes, masterminding the whole thing.
Now we have more than mere outlines. After a year of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s reign of terror, complete with a rotten, corrupt FBI at his service that since the closing days of the Obama administration has become a secret police agency more like the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo, than the supposedly most respected law enforcement agency in the world, routinely committing outrages against America’s free institutions that would have made J. Edgar Hoover blush.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz may soon recommend criminal charges in the handling of the Clinton investigations by the department and the FBI, reports investigative journalist Paul Sperry.
“Those invited to review the report were told they would have to sign nondisclosure agreements in order to read it, people familiar with the matter said. They are expected to have a few days to craft a response to any criticism in the report, which will then be incorporated in the final version to be released in coming weeks,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Who in the upper echelons of the FBI is guilty of participating in this rolling coup attempt hardly seems relevant anymore. The only question is, who among senior FBI officials isn’t an enemy of We The People.
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