Rep. Adam Schiff, whom colleagues censured for fomenting the Russia hoax, practically won Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat Tuesday night. Schiff captured the Democrat nomination in the deep-blue state and will face Republican baseball star Steve Garvey in the fall general.
Corporate media coverage of Schiff’s part in the years-long effort to impeach former President Donald Trump over deep-state conspiracies ignored his repeat abuses of power. They also ignored Schiff’s use of his intelligence committee chairmanship to peddle lies about Democrats’ political opponents.
To the New York Times, Schiff is “the chief tormentor of former President Donald J. Trump.” To Politico, Schiff is “a scourge of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.” To Axios, Schiff is simply a “Top Trump foe.”
Schiff is the Democrat conspiracy theorist who falsely claimed he had evidence of treasonous Russia collusion when he did not. Democrat voters in California expected to reward the conspiracy theorist with a Senate seat. https://t.co/95Zob52kw1
Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, on the other hand, may have grounds to sue MSNBC and Slate for defamation over calling him a “Holocaust denier.”
The network’s Joy Reid tossed out the moniker following Robinson’s Tuesday night win in his state’s GOP gubernatorial primary when she introduced North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for an interview. Slate went with the headline — now apparently altered — “Mark Robinson: North Carolina Republican primary for governor goes to a Holocaust denier.”
Below is all the evidence the Slate article presents to frame the gubernatorial nominee as a denier of the Holocaust:
The Holocaust “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered. There is also a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million PEOPLE they murdered throughout the 20th century.”
(He also, in a 2014 post, quoted Hitler without context.)
The quote from Adolf Hitler comes from The New Republic, which linked two Facebookposts to claim Robinson “has minimized the horrors of the Holocaust.” Neither, however, comes anywhere close to Holocaust denial.
“We often speak of the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler,” Robinson wrote in one. “But the biggest ‘appeasement’ of ALL TIME is how we turned a blind eye to the clear and present danger of MARXISM.”
“It is EXTREMELY distressing that many well meaning and intelligent people are so focused on long dead Hitler while the living political dissidents of Stalin are currently fighting to destroy our REPUBLIC,” Robinson wrote in the other.
The press can have their opinions about Robinson’s eccentricity, but to call him a Holocaust denier is exceedingly dishonest.
In high contrast, Rachel Maddow positively described conspiracy theorist Schiff as a “major, major player in Trump impeachments and investigations” when MSNBC called the Senate primary for the California congressman.
BREAKING: NBC News projects Democratic congressman Adam Schiff will advance to the general election in the hotly contested California Senate race pic.twitter.com/T4aD6J1Jdd
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Stop leaking to the media, peddling false narratives, and obstructing congressional oversight into the FBI’s handling of allegations that President Joe Biden was part of a criminal bribery scheme, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told FBI Director Christopher Wray in a floor speech Tuesday.
“Quit playing games,” Grassley said. “The Justice Department and FBI no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt,” he added, pointing to the FBI and Department of Justice’s track record of deception from the Russia-collusion hoax to the present.
Wray “made one excuse after another to not produce” the document detailing the bribery allegation against Biden, Grassley said, even refusing to admit it existed until Grassley revealed to him that he’d already seen a copy. The existence of the explosive allegation, which reportedly describes a Ukrainian energy concern seeking to pay then-Vice President Biden $5 million in return for a policy decision during his time as Ukrainian point man for the Obama administration, was revealed to Grassley by multiple FBI whistleblowers.
The continued practice of leaking false narratives to friendly media outlets instead of complying with constitutional oversight requests particularly bothered Grassley, he said. Everyone knows the “FBI has a penchant for leaking classified information to the media and producing documents to the media,” Grassley said.
Instead of complying with congressional requests, including a subpoena for the document, the FBI and its associates began leaking to Democrat media, in some cases to the exact same media figures they had worked with to spread the false Russia-collusion narrative. Grassley mentioned a May 18 article in The New York Times, likely the one by Adam Goldman, in which the noted Russia-collusion hoaxer wrote a glowing profile of Timothy Thibault that appeared to be sourced to Thibault and the FBI. The profile attempted to discredit decorated FBI agents who opposed his political handling of sensitive investigations.
Thibault was one of the FBI agents who reportedly shut down legitimate investigations into the Biden family business and spoke openly of his animus toward President Trump and former Attorney General Bill Barr. He was reportedly forced out of the bureau last year after questions about his conduct became public. Brian Auten is another FBI official under scrutiny, reportedly for pushing Trump-Russia collusion and inappropriately discrediting Hunter Biden stories.
Other examples of FBI leaks abound. CNN’s Evan Perez was used to push the FBI’s spin on the document Grassley seeks. He famously joined with Jake Tapper and Jim Sciutto to launder the Steele dossier to the American public on Jan. 12, 2017.
To mislead investigators, anonymous sources peddled to Perez the idea that the document was related to allegations supplied by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Republican operative.
“The document has origins in a tranche of documents that Rudy Giuliani provided to the Justice Department in 2020, people briefed on the matter said,” Perez asserted without evidence. It turns out it’s not true. Not only is the document, which details information from a longtime trusted confidential human source, unrelated to the information Giuliani brought to the FBI, it includes information from a previous interview of the source in 2017, three years before the Giuliani inquiry.
Jamie Raskin Is the New Adam Schiff
Still, the unsubstantiated story was enough for Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to spread the falsehood even further. Raskin is the ranking Democrat on the House’s Oversight Committee, which is investigating FBI mishandling of investigations into the Biden family business. He serves a similar role to the one Adam Schiff played when Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was attempting to unravel the FBI’s Russia-collusion hoax. Schiff’s office was known for misleading leaks to CNN and other Democrat media outfits. He also falsely claimed for years to have evidence of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., is the House member overseeing the attempt to get information from Wray’s FBI. After threatening to hold Wray in contempt, the FBI director had a staffer brief Raskin and Comer on the document.
FBI briefings, leaks to friendly media outlets, and official statements include a frustrating mixture of unsubstantiated insinuations that the documented allegation was legitimately “closed,” contrary to whistleblower claims, were coupled with a refusal to answer questions about the documented allegation or its closing because it is part of an ongoing, “open” investigation. Grassley referenced the Kafka-esque situation in his jeremiad against Wray’s game-playing.
In any case, following his briefing, Raskin came out and claimed his FBI briefing showed him, “[i]n August 2020, Attorney General Barr and his hand-picked U.S. Attorney signed off on closing the assessment, having found no evidence to corroborate Mr. Giuliani’s allegations.”
First off, that’s not true in any way. Not only were these allegations not Giuliani’s, but Barr himself has also stated on the record to The Federalist that the investigation of the allegation was not closed and was in fact sent to the Delaware U.S. attorney for further investigation.
But the lie from Raskin was credulously reported by the Post for further dissemination to left-wing audiences.
Washington Post Joins the FBI Info Op
The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for its role in pushing the information operation the FBI and other malign actors orchestrated against President Donald Trump, in which he was falsely accused of being a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The widespread information operation was so effective that it led to the appointment of a damaging special counsel, the derailing of the Trump administration’s effectiveness, and a large majority of Democrats still believing the falsehood even years after it has been soundly and repeatedly debunked. One of the reporters who shared in the prize was Devlin Barrett, who reportedly spent time with Wray last week.
Along with Perry Stein and Jacqueline Alemany, Barrett helped the FBI and other Democrat operatives attempt a cover-up of the dispute with Congress. They claimed the FBI and Department of Justice, under the guidance of Barr, “reviewed allegations from a confidential informant about Joe Biden and his family, and they determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps,” according to Raskin and “other people familiar with the investigation.”
We already know Raskin’s claims are false. Whether the “other people” mentioned include Wray or other anonymous FBI officials is unclear. What is clear is that the spin is deceptive.
The media and other Democrats ignored the claim that a documented allegation existed. Once Wray finally admitted the document did, in fact, exist, the spin machine worked to say it had been investigated and found lacking. The issue is that Grassley and Comer are not as willing to believe the FBI’s unsubstantiated claims as The Washington “Democracy Dies In Darkness” Post’s operatives are.
Not only do they have whistleblowers telling them in detail that the investigation was not handled properly, but journalistic common sense says the same.
We know that the document, which has repeatedly been described by those who have seen it as “detailed,” was dated June 30, 2020. We also are told that Auten closed the investigation in early August 2020. To believe that the details of a complicated criminal enterprise allegation were fully and legitimately investigated and closed by the FBI in four weeks is almost impossible. It’s particularly difficult to believe given that the FBI is apparently leaking false narratives and refusing to substantiate the implausible claim with anything other than a request that they be trusted to tell the truth.
For comparison, the completely idiotic claim that Carter Page was a Russian spy was investigated for years, including securing four invasive warrants to spy on the individual, using extensive electronic surveillance, deploying human sources against Page, and more. Literally no one believes that the detailed claim from a highly trusted confidential human source who had specifics that matched up with verified Biden shell companies was fully investigated and put to bed in a matter of four weeks. Not even Devlin Barrett believes that, even if he pretends to.
No More FBI Lies
The Russia-collusion hoax perpetrated against the American people by the FBI, Democrats, and the media was remarkably effective. But because it was evil and false, the FBI, Democrats, and the media will have a much more difficult time running the operation with the same level of effectiveness again.
Still, Republicans on the Hill must be much savvier this time around, refusing to go along with the FBI’s misleading leaks for even a moment before they demand full compliance with congressional oversight. The good news is that any patience that Grassley and Comer seemed to have for Wray’s game-playing has already run out.
Former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann and others lied to the nation about the special counsel report released Monday that deeply documents years of systemic FBI corruption in favor of the Democratic Party. That report reveals and adds detail to multiple instances in which FBI employees used high-level intelligence and law-enforcement positions to promote misinformation that affected at least two presidential elections, always on behalf of Democrats.
Special Counsel John Durham’s report lists and compares multiple such instances to illustrate “Systemic Problems” that are “difficult to explain.” Many more have been uncovered in the past few years. This information key to Americans’ oversight of their government through free and fair elections has been blacked out on corporate media airwaves and censored online by private grantees and social media companies obeying funding conditions and threats from federal officials.
1. Weaponizing Democrat Party Misinformation Developed With Probable Foreign Spies
It just so happens that the false information the FBI used to immediately open a spy operation on Democrats’ opposition was developed by the Democrat presidential campaign, in conjunction with at least two potential or allegedly former foreign spies.
Danchenko is the guy who may be a Russian spy. Your tax dollars at work funding disinformation that helps the Democrat Party. https://t.co/dFMyHnnC2m
According to the Durham report, top FBI, DOJ, and CIA officials, as well as President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, were told “within days of its receipt” that the Hillary Clinton campaign had developed a “plan to vilify Trump by tying him to Vladimir Putin so as to divert attention from her own concerns relating to her use of a private email server.”
CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama, Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and Attorney General Eric Holder on this intelligence on Aug. 3, 2016, a few days after Clinton’s campaign developed the plan. The CIA reportedly got this info about Clinton’s smear plan from its surveillance of Russian intelligence.
This means that, in the summer of 2016, the FBI and DOJ, and the head of the Democrat Party, knew that the Steele dossier, Alfa Bank allegations, and other claims of Donald Trump being a traitorous Russian stooge “were part of a political effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political objective.”
This should have gotten the FBI to question its Crossfire Hurricane operation, Durham’s report says. Instead, however, the FBI raced ahead, with FBI headquarters demanding faster pursuit of Trump under what they knew were false pretenses.
The FBI’s actions indicated a clear double standard for Republicans and Democrats, the report shows. “Unlike the FBI’s opening of a full investigation of unknown members of the Trump campaign based on raw, uncorroborated information, in this separate matter involving a purported Clinton campaign plan, the FBI never opened any type of inquiry, issued any taskings, employed any analytical personnel, or produced any analytical products in connection with the information,” notes the Durham report.
The report says if the Clinton campaign knowingly supplied this false information to the government, that’s a criminal offense. Durham claims his team was unable to establish this criminal intent, but it’s obvious it existed even if it can’t be established with emails and voice recordings.
The Durham report is damning. It shows the FBI operating as a disinformation shop for the Clinton campaign, ignoring its own rules, and blatantly & maliciously interfering in a presidential election. The Steele dossier was fake, and FBI knew it all along. pic.twitter.com/vGkPYloz5B
— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) May 15, 2023
So, again, months before the press started stampeding false claims of Russian collusion into three impeachment attempts that strangled Trump’s ability to wield the power voters had given him, the heads of U.S. intelligence agencies, the sitting president and head of the Democratic Party, and Democrats’ next president were aware it was a political disinformation operation with no basis in fact. The head of that same FBI that ran a multi-year spy operation against Trump based on this claim knew it was politically motivated disinformation before the lie even got its boots on.
This goes far beyond agency “bias.” It is the complete corruption of half of the nation’s political party system and its federal law enforcement. It is the systematic disenfranchisement of Americans who don’t agree with the national security blob — or wouldn’t, if that blob allowed them to learn true facts about its evil machinations.
It is the systematic weaponization of the U.S. national security apparatus against constitutional self-government. It is the end of government of the people, by the people, and for the people in the United States of America. That’s what Durham’s report shows. Anyone who doesn’t treat this as a five-alarm fire set by saboteurs is helping fan the flames.
2. Protecting Democrats’ POTUS Pick While Slandering Republicans’ POTUS Pick
Several times, the Durham report notes that FBI and Department of Justice officials treated the Clinton and Trump campaigns completely differently. Another notable way was in regard to potential contacts with agents from foreign governments.
When the feds learned of a foreign influence operation seeking to target Hillary Clinton, they gave her campaign what is called a “defensive briefing.” That means they warned the campaign about the potential for undue foreign influence.
When the feds learned that a foreign influence operation might be seeking to target Trump, they warned almost everyone except the Trump campaign. The FBI, DOJ, and CIA not only gave Trump’s campaign no defensive briefings on such potential threats, the report says, these agencies used the threats as an excuse to surveil Trump’s campaign and boost Clinton’s disinformation operation linking Trump to Russia in the press.
“The speed with which surveillance of a U.S. person associated with Trump’s campaign was authorized … are difficult to explain compared to the FBI’s and the [Justice] Department’s actions nearly two years earlier when confronted with corroborated allegations of attempted foreign influence involving Clinton, who at the time was still an undeclared candidate for the presidency,” says the report on pages 73 and 74.
3. Dismissing Foreign Funds Transfers for Clinton, Not for Trump
In contrast to the bureau’s full-scale rush to use its powers to smear Republicans with known falsehoods, the report shows that when the FBI knew the Democrat presidential campaign might be violating federal law, the FBI stood down. When an informant told the FBI the Clinton campaign was likely accepting illegal foreign campaign contributions, the FBI told the informant to drop it and did nothing further.
According to an FBI CHS in early 2016, the Clinton Campaign was "fully aware" of and "ok with" a foreign contribution in violation of federal law.
The FBI agent didn't get receipts – and asked the source to stay away from the Clinton campaign.
“Once again, the investigative actions taken by FBI Headquarters in the [Clinton] Foundation matters contrast with those taken in Crossfire Hurricane,” says Durham’s report. “As an initial matter, the NYFO [FBI New York Field Office] and WFO [Washington Field Office] investigations appear to have been opened as preliminary investigations due to the political sensitivity and their reliance on unvetted hearsay information (the Clinton Cash book) and CHS reporting. By contrast, the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was immediately opened as a full investigation despite the fact that it was similarly predicated on unvetted hearsay information.”
Another double standard was revealed in this contrasting FBI treatment of different political parties: “Furthermore, while the Department appears to have had legitimate concerns about the Foundation investigation occurring so close to a presidential election, it does not appear that similar concerns were expressed by the [Justice] Department or FBI regarding the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
4. Putting Powerful Democrats Above the Law
We already knew from the years The Federalist has spent unraveling Spygate that former FBI Counterintelligence Division Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and his mistress, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s staff lawyer Lisa Page, weaponized their government positions to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. These are the two who infamously texted that they’d “stop” Trump from becoming president.
Durham’s report shows multiple instances of McCabe, Strzok, Page, and their superiors wielding federal law enforcement positions as weapons against Republicans. The Durham report contains more evidence that high-level federal intelligence officials see it as routine to put powerful Democrats above the law.
Besides the disparate treatment outlined above and many other such instances, Durham’s report includes a telling text exchange between Strzok and Page. It shows them deciding not to apply the law to Hillary Clinton because of her powerful position. It seems that the powerful are indeed above the law in the United States — provided they’re affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Report makes it clear that DOJ and FBI officials are afraid of Democrat retribution, but not of Republicans. See exchange between FBI's McCabe and Page: https://t.co/CUxd78rFRKpic.twitter.com/7kkSf4U5ai
Key FBI figures refused interviews with Durham’s team, including Comey, Strzok, the Clinton campaign’s Marc Elias, McCabe, Page, and Glenn Simpson of the opposition research firm that cooked up the Steele dossier for Clinton’s campaign.
Add that to the many instances of “former” FBI and CIA figures being employed in social media companies to assist with government censorship demands, and going on TV to fuel the Russiagate hoax and other lies to Americans about crucial public issues. It adds up to yet another indication of an intelligence state using its vast — and unconstitutional — powers on behalf of the Democrat Party.
Oh, look, another FBI Counterintelligence Division guy smearing the Durham report that outed his former department — acting like he's still working for the FBI https://t.co/AoaiCFdbg4
6. Refusing to Obey Congressional Subpoenas About Records on Biden Corruption
Durham’s report indicates that the FBI repeatedly sat on evidence the Clinton campaign was accepting bribes — payments in exchange for policy preferences. The FBI is still doing that with Joe Biden. According to several high-level members of Congress, the FBI has been refusing to release to them subpoenaed, non-classified information about how it handled documentation alleging that Biden also traded political favors for campaign donations.
“We know the FBI relied on unverified claims to relentlessly target a Republican president. What did the FBI do to investigate claims involving a Democrat President?” asked Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Numerous private and congressional watchdogs have documented that the Biden family has received millions of dollars from foreign individuals and companies connected to hostile governments including communist China.
“We believe the FBI possesses an unclassified internal document that includes very serious and detailed allegations implicating the current President of the United States,” Grassley said in a press release earlier this month. “What we don’t know is what, if anything, the FBI has done to verify these claims or investigate further.”
Congressional subpoenas have the force of law. Federal agencies operate at the discretion and funding of Congress, according to the Constitution. The FBI’s leadership doesn’t seem to believe, however, that constitutional checks and balances apply to them. So long as Congress doesn’t enforce its own prerogatives, the FBI’s corrupt leaders are right.
Durham report concludes that FBI had evidence the Steele Dossier could have been sourced to Russian disinformation and didn't disclose this fact to keep getting warrants to spy on Trump. pic.twitter.com/61pbBO0kNb
I was so disgusted by the Jan. 6 riot that I deleted my Twitter account. I wrote introspective pieces on wanting to be part of the solution. (And I never liked Trump, and I thought Biden beat him.)
The Durham Report is 100x worse than Jan. 6. It didn’t reveal a handful of nuts… pic.twitter.com/xYS4Kar9T6
It’s been publicly known for decades that the FBI uses its surveillance, investigatory, and other law enforcement powers to manipulate American politics. Recall its surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. and infamous FBI head J. Edgar Hoover’s spying on the Supreme Court, Congress, and presidents.
The Durham report is, in that respect, nothing new. What would be new would be punishing the FBI’s use of blackmail, smear operations, threats, censorship, illegal spying, and election rigging. If that doesn’t happen, the United States is quite simply not a free country anymore.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long, crooked political careers have been marked by multiple well-established high crimes and misdemeanors. Not the least of these was Hillary’s decision to commit what amounts to multiple felonies by using an insecure private email system to conduct top-secret public business while U.S. secretary of state under Barack Obama.
This criminal behavior that so-called U.S. justice systems openly and repeatedly refused to punish was undertaken to hide treasonous actions. Those include selling political access and favors to foreign adversaries, as journalist Peter Schweizer and others, including The Federalist and members of Congress, have repeatedly and thoroughly documented.
Selling political favors to foreign opponents, including communist China and authoritarian Russia, is clearly treason. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “treason” as: “The betrayal of allegiance toward one’s own country, especially by committing hostile acts against it or aiding its enemies in committing such acts.” The Clintons got filthy rich from it.
Clinton then compounded that with more treasonous conduct when she lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump.
It is by now well-established that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid various actors to lie to U.S. intelligence agencies about Trump in an operation that eventually essentially negated the 2016 election — including encouraging federal employees’ treasonous behavior and two falsely predicated impeachments — and helped lose Republicans the 2020 election. Her campaign even tacitly confirmed this by paying a slap-on-the-wrist Federal Election Commission fine while still refusing to admit guilt for it a few weeks ago, seven years after the fact.
BREAKING: Last year Hillary Clinton quietly settled a campaign finance violation over reporting the *Steele Dossier* funding as legal services
Did FBI agents ever show up at Hillary Clinton’s house over her clearly criminal and treasonous “documents dispute”? Nope. The FBI’s director instead essentially confirmed she had committed multiple felonies but decided not to investigate or prosecute her for it because she was a presidential candidate for a major political party.
Hillary paid to have Trump falsely smeared as a traitor, laundering the slander through U.S. agencies that are supposed to provide equal justice under the law but now function as weapons to damage Democrats’ political opposition. In conjunction with others in the Obama administration that likely include Obama himself, she colluded with multiple security-state agencies to slander, undermine, hamper, and now threaten with jail time Democrats’ top political opponent.
That’s treason. It’s election erasure. It’s ongoing. And these traitors are all running about totally scot-free, while they jail their political opponents for what at best are misdemeanors, and for which they refuse to prosecute anyone on the left who perpetrates them — from street rioters all the way up to their presidential candidates.
My colleague Elle Purnell pointed out that when Trump countenanced chants of “lock her up” at his rallies over Clinton’s never-penalized repeat criminal behavior, Democrats lost their minds, and insisted this was the stuff of dictatorships, tyranny, and political repression.
“Dictatorships lock up the opposition, not democracies,”said Spygate intelligence official Michael McFaul. “Since when do Americans advocate jailing political opponents?” said top Spygate propagandist Julia Ioffe, then at Politico.
“In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents,” Obama said in 2016. “We have fought against those kinds of things.” “In America, we don’t send our political opponents to jail,”tweeted an official Democratic National Committee Twitter account.
REMINDER In 2016 Trump got huge laughs for telling Hillary Clinton she'd be in jail if he was in charge of the law Then there was four years of agitprop about how this proved that Trump was "a dictator who wanted to imprison his political opponents."https://t.co/jJADWmsMSjpic.twitter.com/hNgTVnmI5W
The Clintons are clearly traitors willing to endanger their nation for profit, and it would be fully just to prosecute them as such. Yet as president when he had the chance, Trump decided not to pursue it. According to Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s recently published memoir, “Trump brought up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and surprised Barr by saying that he had wanted the matter to be dropped after the 2016 election,” according to a review of Barr’s memoir in the fall 2022 Claremont Review of Books.
“‘Even if she were guilty,’ he told Barr, “for the election winner to seek prosecution of the loser would make the country look like a ‘banana republic.’”
Ever since riding down his golden escalator, Trump has been ceaselessly vilified as a tinpot dictator, an evil supervillain, an authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. But Democrats cannot change the facts, which include that Trump had fully legitimate justification to prosecute his horribly corrupt political opponent and refused to do so. They can make no such argument for themselves.
So, if it is indeed the stuff of banana republics and ending democracies to jail one’s political opponents, let’s all be clear about which political party is dragging the nation down that route. And let all in authority who care about equal justice under the law begin fiercely applying Democrats’ standards to them until they stop perverting justice to destroy our country.
The no-holds-barred legal shutdown and prosecution of leftist insurrectionists filling state capitols in support of a transgender child murderer would be one such proportionate response.
American media has bombarded us daily from all directions to make sure we know that Donald Trump indirectly paid a woman to shut her mouth as she and her now-convict lawyer, Michael Avenatti, shook him down for money.
In New York, false financial accounting can be a low-level misdemeanor, but it’s rarely prosecuted. Now Alvin Bragg, a municipal prosecutor, is trying to make a name for himself by charging former President Trump with that crime.
This is the equivalent of a nationally televised jaywalking arrest to humiliate a person due solely to personal hate. George Soros, Bragg’s benefactor, must be grinning from ear to ear.
Hillary Clinton Got Off For a Worse Deed
Trump’s former lawyer accounted for the payment as consulting or attorney’s fees. Allegedly, so did President Trump, and $130,000 changed hands.
For perspective, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid $1 million for the infamous fictional “Steele dossier.” They paid for this using one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent lawyers, Marc Elias, as a cutout to hide who was paying for this opposition research that falsely claimed Trump was colluding with Russia.
They then laundered the dossier through various contacts to try to destroy Trump and get Clinton elected president. Those people officially accounted for the $1 million dossier expense as “legal fees.” So, one side paid people to lie. The other paid someone not to lie, or at least not to speak.
Clinton lives in New York, the state in which Trump is likely to be charged over a $130,000 payment. She has not been charged for the $1 million payment. Do these events really sound vastly different to you?
Bragg hopes to spin that unserious charge into a federal campaign finance violation. Meanwhile, the dossier fraud, which affected two presidential elections and two presidential impeachments, was settled with a $113,000 fine.
Bragg’s Case Is a Mess
City prosecutors cannot charge people with federal crimes. Only feds can charge federal crimes, not some city prosecutor. Bragg has allegedly met with the Secret Service about how they will react to a New York City police officer approaching President Trump with handcuffs (if they can find one who will do it). Bragg is way over his head and wading into deep political waters.
New York Attorney General Tish James ran for office almost exclusively on a “get Trump” platform. She hated the man and promised to find a crime he committed, rather than responding to a crime and looking for a perpetrator. After years of not finding anything, she did not charge Trump with any crimes. Same state. Same New York laws. More investigative tools. Yet she passed on the opportunity to arrest a president.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the same alleged crime and also chose not to prosecute. Every prosecutor in the state above Bragg’s office passed on this one knowing they could not prove President Trump committed a crime. Or they realized that no serious person could charge Trump and not also indict Democrats.
Bragg is the same Manhattan DA who has publicly decriminalized crimes in the name of wokeness. This alleged prosecutor will ignore criminal violence and release people on their own recognizance after a stern talking to for beating someone half to death or attacking police. But he wants to charge Trump for this garbage after every one of his superiors has declined to do so. Why? Incompetence? Tunnel vision? Irrational hate? Why choose?
Democrats’ Hate Could Prompt a Constitutional Crisis
Many Democrats want Trump arrested for anything. They want to see him in cuffs more than they want their own kids to be happy and healthy. They have been searching for someone stupid or reckless enough to “perp walk” the man for the cameras. They might very well have found him. If Bragg does it over this fluff, it will prove to be a poor career choice for him and could have much broader implications that are rungs above his pay grade.
Some Dems even want conservatives to riot if a cop cuffs Trump, just like a lack of security made it easy for people to barge into the Capitol through open doors just to be charged and arrested. They might get their wish. And it is likely a trap. If it happens and people protest, see whether New York City will give them all “room to vent” like city officials gave lefty rioters for months. Hopefully, any protests will be peaceful. I will not be involved in any of it.
A lot of people continue to be surprised at these events and have truly had enough of the second set of rules for conservatives. If the hard left keeps pushing this kind of thing, it will eventually be deeply sorry.
Feds raided Trump’s house with a tactical team over papers a librarian wanted. Oddly, CNN was present and ran the story on a loop. Joe Biden dropped 50 years of classified documents all over the country and the feds let his personal lawyers (who lacked security clearances) sort them before giving them to the government at their leisure.
They investigate Trump from all sides. They give Biden a pass on everything. The feds investigated Trump’s sons and son-in-law for any irregularity. Yet Hunter Biden, a man in a long line of alleged Biden bag men, lives in a $40,000-per-month Malibu beach house and sells splatter paintings to anonymous purchasers for exorbitant amounts.
Wildly Unequal Legal Treatment
Everyone is supposed to just sit back and accept the different treatment and think it is okay and normal. This is far from normal—it is a thumb in the eye of half the American population.
Even apparently peaceful Jan. 6, 2021 protestors have been in pre-trial detention for two years. Black Lives Matter and Antifa got carte blanch to riot and burn courthouses with impunity with at least tacit support from the White House and open support from the vice president, who encouraged people to donate money to bail the rioters out of jail.
Firebomb a pro-life crisis pregnancy center and take credit for it, and Biden’s inept AG will give you a pass. Pray in front of an abortion clinic and you will be charged with a list of felonies. This is not sustainable. People, in large numbers, will eventually stop taking it.
The Acceleration of Dangerous Trends
In accordance with their oaths, prosecutors are not supposed to charge people with crimes they cannot prove, since doing so can ruin people’s lives even if they are eventually acquitted. The citizenry remembers the charge, not the acquittal.
Likewise, presidents are not supposed to issue executive orders they know will be overturned as unlawful, just for political gain and show. Both have been happening for the last two years at a clip never before encountered. Team Biden is daring half the country. Stand up, but do not take the bait.
Many think Bragg will charge Trump soon because he can. These people might not be ready for the fallout they will provoke. And by that, I do not mean violence. I mean turnabout.
Republicans may politically finally address Democratic Party lawfare, taking an eye for an eye. Some have recently shown backbone their predecessors lacked. Their voters will increasingly elect officials who promise to do so. Trump himself was a harbinger of this.
Republicans Need to Respond, Good and Hard
If Bragg pulls the proverbial trigger, everyone had better be really sure about his next moves. Bragg and his upstream cronies will not be able to take it back, apologize, call for calm, or put that leftist authoritarian genie back in the bottle.
If they think they are right and their ideas the best, Democrats should square up and try to beat at the polls whomever the Republican candidate is in 2024. Another round of transparent politically driven rigging, especially like this, after the ridiculous failures of their impeachment efforts and Jan. 6 show trials, will light a dangerous fuse for which the American people have lost patience.
Most countries that fail to address unequal treatment start dying from within. Every American should want to avoid that for all our sakes. Bragg staying out of presidential politics and focusing on the skyrocketing violent crime rate in his own backyard would be a welcome next step.
When Republicans take the White House, they should make sure prosecutors at every level have every resource and unclassified document they require to investigate and, if mandated, charge everyone on team leftist. No letting things slide. If the Dems want old-fashioned dirty politics, the other side might finally give it to them good, hard, and thoroughly.
Thomas Crist is a husband, father, lawyer, and political conservative who loves his country and despises all myopic hypocrisy regardless of its source.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on Feb. 7, 2023.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the “Twitter Files” by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The “Twitter Files” story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the “Twitter Files” reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair elections, and indeed our country.
After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered (and still borders) on parody. In the process, Musk coordinated with Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political events going back years:
the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter’s secret policy of shadowbanning,
President Trump’s suspension from Twitter after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot,
the co-opting of Twitter by the FBI to suppress “election disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election,
Twitter’s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign,
its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative,
its complicity in the Russiagate hoax,
and its gradual capitulation to the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community — with the FBI as a go-between — in content moderation.
As Taibbi has written, the “Twitter Files” “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
The “Twitter Files” contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and their related implications: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump, and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.
Hunter Biden’s Laptop
On Oct. 14, 2020, the New York Post published its first major exposé based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked up. It was the first of several stories detailing Biden family corruption and revealing the close involvement of Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business ventures in the years during and after Biden’s vice presidency. Hunter, although doing no real work, was making tens of millions of dollars from foreign companies in places like Ukraine and China. The Post’s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what was happening.
According to the emails on the laptop, Hunter introduced then-Vice President Biden to a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter (who had no credentials or experience in the energy business) up to $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Soon after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company.
In an earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit the company. The Post’s ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking level of corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose emails suggest his father was closely connected to his overseas business ventures. Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter providing access to Joe Biden.
Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It removed links to the Post’s reporting, appended warnings that they might be “unsafe,” and prevented users from sharing them via direct message — a restriction previously reserved for child pornography and other extreme cases. In an extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the Post’s account and the accounts of people who shared links to its reporting, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. These actions were justified under the pretext that the stories violated Twitter’s hacked-materials policy, even though there was no evidence, then or now, that anything on the laptop was hacked.
Twitter executives at the highest levels were directly involved in these decisions. Former head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde, the company’s chief censor, played a key role, as did former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems to have been done without the knowledge of Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey. And it was done despite internal pushback from other departments.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote a Twitter communications executive in an email to Gadde and Roth. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” asked former VP of global communications Brandon Borman. His question was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker — a former top lawyer for the FBI and the most powerful member of a growing cadre of former FBI employees working at Twitter — who said that “caution is warranted” and that some facts “indicate the materials may have been hacked.”
But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the White House.
If there were no hacked materials in the Post’s reporting, why did Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the Post published its first laptop story, there had been an organized effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden. The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody since the previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer repair shop. So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of straightforward criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as of corruption and influence-peddling.
The evening before the Post ran its first story on the laptop, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Roth at Twitter through a special one-way communications channel the FBI had established with the company. For months, the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss news reports about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election as “hack-and-leak” operations by state actors. They had done the same thing with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan in an August 2022 podcast.
As Michael Shellenberger reported in the seventh installment of the “Twitter Files,” the FBI repeatedly asked Roth and others at Twitter about foreign influence operations on the platform and were repeatedly told there were none of any significance. The FBI also routinely pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal search warrant process, which Twitter at first resisted.
In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter executives to get top secret security clearances so the FBI could share intelligence about possible threats to the upcoming presidential election. The next month, Chan sent Roth information about a Russian hacking group called APT28. Roth later said that when the Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop broke, “It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.” Even though there was never any evidence that anything on the laptop was hacked, Roth reacted to it just as the FBI had conditioned him to do, using the company’s hacked-materials policy to suppress the story as soon as it appeared, just as the agency suggested it would, less than a month before the election.
Suspending the President
The erosion of Twitter’s content moderation standards would continue after the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, reaching its apogee on Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the extraordinary decision to suspend President Trump, even though he had not violated any Twitter policies.
As the “Twitter Files” show, the suspension came amid ongoing interactions with federal agencies — interactions that were increasing in frequency in the months leading up to the 2020 election, during which Roth was meeting weekly with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As the election neared, Twitter’s unevenly applied, rules-based content moderation policies would steadily deteriorate.
Content moderation on Twitter had always been an unstable mix of automatic enforcement of rules and subjective interventions by top executives, most of whom used Twitter’s censorship tools to diminish the reach of Trump and others on the right through shadowbanning and other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote in the third installment of the “Twitter Files”:
As the election approached, senior executives — perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed — increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of ‘vios’ [violations] as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.
After Jan. 6, Twitter jettisoned even the appearance of a rules-based moderation policy, suspending Trump for a pair of tweets that top executives falsely claimed were violations of Twitter’s terms of service. The first, sent early in the morning on Jan. 8, stated: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” The second, sent about an hour later, simply stated that Trump would not be attending Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
That same day, key Twitter staffers correctly determined that Trump’s tweets did not constitute incitement of violence or violate any other Twitter policies. But pressure kept building from people like Gadde, who wanted to know whether the tweets amounted to “coded incitement to further violence.” Some suggested that Trump’s first tweet might have violated the company’s policy on the glorification of violence. Internal discussions then took an even more bizarre turn. Members of Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” reportedly viewed Trump “as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”
Later on the afternoon of Jan. 8, Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” — a nonsense phrase that corresponded to no written Twitter policy. The suspension of a sitting head of state was unprecedented. Twitter had never taken such a step, even with heads of state in Nigeria and Ethiopia who actually had incited violence. Internal deliberations unveiled by the “Twitter Files” show that Trump’s suspension was partly justified based on the “overall context and narrative” of Trump’s words and actions — as one executive put it — “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”
That is, it was not anything Trump said or did; it was that Twitter’s censors wanted to blame the president for everything that happened on Jan. 6 and remove him from the platform. To do that, they were willing to shift the entire intellectual framework of content moderation from the enforcement of objective rules to the consideration of “context and narrative,” thereby allowing executives to engage in what amounts to viewpoint discrimination.
Private companies, of course, for the most part have the right to engage in viewpoint discrimination — something the government is prohibited from doing by the First Amendment. The problem is that when Twitter suspended Trump, it was operating less like a private company than like an extension of the federal government.
***
Among the most shocking revelations of the “Twitter Files” is the extent to which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies came to view Twitter as a tool for censorship and narrative control. In part six of the “Twitter Files,” Taibbi chronicles the “constant and pervasive” contact between the FBI and Twitter after January 2020, “as if [Twitter] were a subsidiary.” In particular, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security wanted Twitter to censor tweets and lock accounts it believed were engaged in “election misinformation,” and would regularly send the company content it had pre-flagged for moderation, essentially dragooning Twitter into what would otherwise be illegal government censorship. Taibbi calls it a “master-canine” relationship. When requests for censorship came in from the feds, Twitter obediently complied — even when the tweets in question were clearly jokes or posted on accounts with few followers.
Some Twitter executives were unsure what to make of this relationship. Policy Director Nick Pickles at one point asked how he should refer to the company’s cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, suggesting it be described in terms of “partnerships.” Time and again, federal agencies stressed the need for close collaboration with their “private sector partners,” using the alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 election as the pretext for a massive government surveillance and censorship regime operating from inside Twitter.
Requests for content moderation, which increasingly resembled demands, came not only from the FBI and DHS, but also from a tangled web of other federal agencies, contractors, and government-affiliated think tanks such as the Election Integrity Project at Stanford University. As Taibbi writes, the lines between government and its “partners” in this effort were “so blurred as to be meaningless.”
The Deputization of Twitter
After the 2016 election, both Twitter and Facebook faced pressure from Democrats and their media allies to root out Russian “election meddling” under the thoroughly debunked theory that a Moscow-based social media influence operation was responsible for Trump’s election victory. In reality, Russia’s supposed meddling amounted to a minuscule ad buy on Facebook and a handful of Twitter bots. But the truth was not acceptable to Democrats, the media, or the anti-Trump federal bureaucracy.
In 2017, Twitter came under tremendous pressure to “keep producing material” on Russian interference, and in response it created a Russia Task Force to hunt for accounts tied to Moscow’s Internet Research Agency. The task force did not find much. Out of some 2,700 accounts reviewed, only two came back as significant, and one of those was Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet.
But in the face of bad press and threats from Democrats in Congress, Twitter executives decided to go along with the official narrative and pretend they had a Russia problem. To placate Washington and avoid costly new regulations, they pledged to “work with [members of Congress] on their desire to legislate.” When someone in Congress leaked the list of the 2,700 accounts Twitter’s task force had reviewed, the media exploded with stories suggesting that Twitter was swarming with Russian bots — and Twitter continued to go along.
After that, as described by Taibbi, “This cycle — threatened legislation wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to [content] moderation asks — [came to] be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.”
Late in 2017, Twitter quietly adopted a new policy. In public, it would say that all content moderation took place “at [Twitter’s] sole discretion.” But its internal guidance would stipulate censorship of anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” Thus Twitter increasingly allowed the intelligence community, the State Department, and a dizzying array of federal and state agencies to submit content moderation requests through the FBI, which Chan suggested could function as “the belly button of the [U.S. government].” These requests would grow and intensify during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to the 2020 election.
By 2020, there was a torrent of demands for censorship, sometimes with no explanation — just an Excel spreadsheet with a list of accounts to be banned. These demands poured in from FBI offices all over the country, overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the government would pay Twitter $3.4 million in compensation. It was a pittance considering the work Twitter did at the government’s behest, but the payment illustrated a stark reality: Twitter, a leading gatekeeper of the digital public square and arguably the most powerful social media platform in the world, had become a subcontractor for the U.S. intelligence community.
***
The “Twitter Files” have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state.
First, the entire concept of “content moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,” as libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of pervasive government censorship.
Second, Twitter was taking marching orders from a deep state security apparatus that was created to fight terrorists, not to censor or manipulate public discourse. To the extent that the deep state is using social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to subvert the First Amendment and run information psy-ops on the American public, these companies have become malevolent government actors. As a policy matter, the hands-off, laissez-faire regulatory approach we have taken to them should come to an immediate end.
Third, the administrative state has metastasized into a destructive deep state that threatens to bring about the collapse of America’s constitutional system within our lifetimes. Emblematic of the threat is the fact that “the intelligence community” has proven itself incapable of not interfering in American elections. The FBI in particular has directly meddled in the last two presidential elections to a degree that should call into question its continued existence. Indeed, the FBI’s post-9/11 transformation from a law enforcement agency to a counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering agency with seemingly limitless remit has been a disaster for civil liberties and the First Amendment. We need either to impose radical reforms or scrap it entirely and start over.
The late great political scientist Angelo Codevilla argued that our response to 9/11 was completely wrong. Instead of erecting a sprawling security and surveillance apparatus to detect and disrupt potential terrorist plots, we should have issued an ultimatum to the regimes that were harboring Al Qaeda: You make war on these terrorists and bring them to justice or we will make war on you. The reason not to do what we did, Codevilla argued, is that a security and surveillance apparatus powerful and pervasive enough to do what we wanted it to do was incompatible with a free society. It might defeat the terrorists, but it would eventually be turned on the American people.
The “Twitter Files” leave little doubt that Codevilla’s prediction has come to pass. The question we face now is whether the American people and their elected representatives will fight back. The fate of the republic rests on the answer.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
The Trump years saw a massive acceleration in the trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information.
Procedural complaints about classified documents are quickly turning into a catch-all trap that can depose duly elected officials, especially those tasked with oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Last August, an unprecedented classified document complaint provided a pretext for an FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, in an eerie echo of the use of police and military resources against opposing politicians typical of banana republics.
That administrative power flex has now been turned into the unprecedented appointment of three special counsels, most recently against the deeply unpopular current Democrat Party figurehead, Joe Biden. This all reverses the American structure of elected officials maintaining oversight of unelected permanent administrators. Instead, we now have unelected bureaucrats performing selective “oversight” of elected officials.
Of course, that pattern erases Americans’ deepest political birthright: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A government not ultimately controlled by elected representatives of the citizenry is not a republic, nor is it any kind of democracy. Without elections truly affecting government policies, the original United States is no more, and its elections are a sham.
The subversion of elected representative government via weaponized intelligence has been expanding for some time. The Trump presidential years saw a massive acceleration in this pre-existing trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising increasing power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information, usually via highly selective leaks to leftist media.
Recall that Michael Flynn, a would-be reformer of U.S. intelligence, was neatly precluded from becoming Trump’s national security advisor via leaks of classified intel to the media that a (still) gullible Vice President Mike Pence bought hook, line, and sinker. Rather than the leaker being sought, caught, and punished, Flynn was. The selective and deceptive leaks were shanghaied into a Justice Department investigation that ended with Flynn narrowly escaping jail time and professional repercussions for his son so long as he promised to disappear from public view.
The same pattern occurred in multiple cycles with Spygate, the wholly manufactured projection of treasonous collusion with Russia from the Democratic Party onto Trump. Rep. Adam Schiff, who has been recently kicked off the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly used his access to classified intelligence to fan the Spygate flames as well as the two impeachments of Trump. So did multiple other deep-state actors, including the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Notice there’s no probe into Schiff’s blatant and repeated misuse of the classified information he was privileged to receive on the House Intelligence Committee. But there could be if he stopped being such a useful Democrat.
This is how, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Trump early in the latter’s term, intelligence agencies “have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” It is how the intelligence tail can — and now does — wag the congressional dog. This has been ongoing now for decades and is perpetually expanding its reach.
This allows the document-holders to function as a shadow government that essentially controls the elected government by picking what bits of information to release to achieve its own ends rather than the priorities of American voters. This selective deployment of intelligence has been even used to goad the United States into wars it doesn’t win that expand the military-industrial complex and distract U.S. officials while defenestrating U.S. national interests. It was used to lie to Trump about U.S. military activities and prevent him from exercising his due presidential authority over U.S. military affairs.
Those who presented unreliable, counterproductive, and false intelligence to presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Trump have not been punished, nor often even identified. Neither has the person who compromised the safety and collegiality of the U.S. Supreme Court by leaking the pro-life Dobbs decision last May.
Curiously, neither have there been any administrative-state leaks about the many connections between the Biden family and the Chinese Communist Party. This is not a tool to be applied equally, you see, or in service of the public good. It’s only yet another knife to pull out against those who cross the wrong people.
That’s how expansive, vague, and proliferating laws, regulations, and bureaucracies all work: as tools of selective prosecution to be wielded at the whims of the powerful against those who threaten their power. The erasure of self-government and the rule of law go hand in hand, collapsed by the administrative state’s erasure of the separation of powers that protect individual liberty and justice for all.
This expanding weaponization of classified intel into selective probes of those who have access to at least some of it allows deep-state entities even more control over elected officials. This standard of probes for possessing “unauthorized” classified documents can be applied to any current or former president, as well as many other officials.
As a Project for Government Oversight lawyer told USA Today: “I’d bet you that if they go back to all of the living presidents and root through their homes and their libraries and their warehouses and garages, they’re going to unearth some classified documents there.” Other presidential experts told USA Today that essentially every presidential administration since 1978 has mishandled classified documents.
The same applies to numerous other elected and unelected officials, such as those on House and Senate military intelligence committees and in the executive branch. This is partly because U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.
U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.
This all recalls one of the famous lines of one of the world’s most famous of secret police, Joseph Stalin’s NKVD chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” That is how secret police function. It is how U.S. intelligence agencies function now, with help from their administrative-state allies such as the Department of So-Called Justice. Their use of selective prosecutions and investigations to hamstring and punish their enemies may not be unlimited now, but it is expanding.
All members of Congress must be aware of this and use all the powers at their disposal to fight it, for as the administrative apparatus strengthens, the American republic dissolves.
On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.
“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.
Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.
Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does
An indictment of former President Donald Trump would be a breathtakingly authoritarian turn. It would amount to the U.S. security state refusing to accept “no” from America’s voters yet again. An indictment would be an unelected and unaccountable federal agency overruling voters’ two-time rejection of impeachment through their elected representatives.
This is the core danger of the administrative state: Its now open propensity to go rogue. It is apparently hellbent now on turning the United States into a banana republic.
Democrats called Donald Trump a fascist, authoritarian, and wannabe dictator for chants at his rallies of “Lock her up,” referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. At the time, leftists pointed out that imprisoning, interrogating, investigating, and otherwise using government resources to harass and prosecute one’s political opponents was the mark of tyrannical regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s and Adolf Hitler. “Democracies don’t lock up political opponents,” the Washington Post editorial board told us in 2016.
That is still true when the ones pushing the interrogations, investigations, entrapments into committing felonies, show trials in unusual venues with no cross-examination or due process, early morning home raids, excessive detainment, and asymmetrical punishments are Democrats. Democrats are trashing republican institutions, expectations, and guarantees for political purposes, most visibly now in their Jan. 6 effort to destroy the lives of protestors largely charged with misdemeanors and to expand Spygate tactics more broadly.
Spygate Is Setting Up Field Offices In Swing States
It’s not just the de facto head of the opposition party whom powerful government agencies are putting in their sights, it’s down-ballot party leaders. The FBI has gone from using its spy resources to affect the results of presidential elections with Spygate and its Hunter Biden laptop disinformation to using its police powers to affect gubernatorial elections. And these are just the operations we know about.
In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley’s home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.
The Jan. 6 Committee is now demanding documents and interviews with Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally. The sole allegation against him is that he walked past “police lines,” which could mean anything, as the scene was chaotic and police were woefully understaffed.
This means Mastriano is being targeted for peacefully exercising his rights to free speech and public assembly. The Jan. 6 Committee won’t allow him to record their planned interrogation, a basic feature of legal self-defense and impartial justice. In fact, selectively excerpted video clips and quotes from these secret interrogations have been a constant feature of the commission, further reinforcing its use as a political weapon against the right rather than a pursuit of justice.
Of the 120,000 people the FBI alleges were present on Jan. 6, 2021 — perhaps 1 percent of whom entered the Capitol building — the vast majority were garden-variety Trump supporters, which include numerous state and local officials. State and local lawmakers are a party’s farm team. Subjecting them to investigation for peacefully protesting is a way to kneecap their entire party.
Weeks before the 2020 election, the FBI announced it had foiled an alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor.
But now, in 2022, the story is VERY different. What happened, who authorized this operation, and is this typical of the DOJ's domestic terrorism unit?
Put all of this against the systematic refusal of Democrat DAs, judges, and juries to prosecute people who openly engage in political violence from the left. In 2020, leftist rioters who coordinated across state lines and in far greater numbers and criminal activity than Jan. 6 attendees firebombed federal buildings, murdered people, looted, burned down downtowns, and assaulted police officers. Of course, essentially nobody involved in perpetrating the Spygate setup of an American president has been brought to justice, most recently including Michael Sussmann.
This summer, a leftist group has allegedly attacked two dozen pro-life maternal care centers in multiple states and a congressional office and promises to continue, but Wray couldn’t provide almost any information on alleged FBI investigations into it. Despite an assassination attempt on one Supreme Court justice this summer, the DOJ has still not filed charges against the people harassing and threatening justices and their families at their homes. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland failed for weeks on end to enforce laws against such harassment of justices, creating the conditions for the aggression to intensify.
This is unacceptable, and Wray and Garland should be fired. They won’t be, though, and that’s the problem.
The @FBI is too busy hunting down every grandma and goofball who trespassed and took selfies on January 6th.
And too busy harassing Loudoun County parents who dared to speak up at public school board meetings.
Amplifying pre-existing double standards of justice is far beyond troubling, it’s a destruction of the justice system. A country that harshly prosecutes people or lets them off Scot-free based on their political affiliation is a banana republic.
A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control. The more people see that moving into place, the more likely it is that some guy gets raided by the FBI for political reasons one morning and — God forbid — goes postal because he has no hope for a fair trial after they take him in.
Certainly even more ordinary Americans are realizing through all of this that the entire federal deck is prejudiced against them. Desperation makes people do wild things. Whatever happens, Republicans can be sure it will be wrapped around their necks with ropes of lies to further subjugate them and everyone who votes for them with the further erasure of our constitutional rights and way of life.
Equality Under the Law Is the Nonviolent Way Out
Remember, 75 million people voted for Trump in 2020. This isn’t some fringe Davidian cult, it’s half of the nation’s voters. Democrats are scaring them, for good reason. And Republicans are doing jack nothing to calm things down.
We’re watching federal agencies use their powers not to catch criminals but to criminalize peaceful political views and actions. We’re witnessing a growing campaign to lock people up for their opposition to the ruling political party, which is not only profoundly un-American but profoundly dangerous societally. This is the prosecution of a political cold civil war that could very easily heat up again in another January 6-like outburst, or worse.
As Mike Anton writes, Democrats may want that. But do Republicans? Any who thinks he might after what we’ve been through in the past seven years is either fool or quisling.
If Republicans think this is all going to blow over just because they haul in the FBI director for another no-consequences hearing, or even if they promise yet another goes-nowhere, punishes-nobody investigation of agencies we know are meddling in elections, framing elected officials, and telling elected members of Congress what to do instead of the reverse, they’re idiots. Their only hope of averting even worse political circumstances is to make damned sure they kneecap these scary federal agencies as their top priority ASAP.
We aren’t in business-as-usual Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in crisis times that call for serious leadership, not LARPing as leaders on screens.
Sending billions to Ukraine while China grows stronger and every domestic sector is on fire isn’t serious. Lambasting Joe Biden for inflation while not pledging to pass the policies that reverse it, starting with slashing the federal government’s spending, isn’t serious. Yelling at the FBI director Republicans helped confirm isn’t serious (get better vetting staff, folks). Confirming a Supreme Court justice who obviously hates the Constitution isn’t serious. Not going on a crusade to clean out the FBI and DOJ Agean-stables-style isn’t serious. And pretending the Jan. 6 commission is anything but a miscarriage of justice is disqualifying.
We need the GOP to provide serious leadership, because Democrats are a serious threat to equal justice for all, and that’s going to destroy the country for good if it’s not stopped post-haste. Americans desperately need swift and prudent action to avert even more unthinkably dangerous events. Those who refuse to plan and take that action despite accepting from voters the responsibility to do so will be infamous to history as cowards and traitors.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Nearly six years have passed since Hillary Clinton and her cronies launched their plot to frame Donald Trump as a co-conspirator of Russia to distract Americans from Clinton’s scandals. Since then, by bits and pieces, the public has learned of Clinton’s role in peddling the Russia collusion hoax to both the press and intelligence agencies. While there is still much to uncover, a recent exposé of the man the FBI tapped as the key Confidential Human Source (CHS) in investigating the Trump campaign confirmed Spygate’s method of operation: creating mythical men on whose deceitful shoulders the media and the FBI then stood.
While Stefan Halper’s name and the monikers used to identify him in government reports—“Source 2,” or merely “CHS”—appeared regularly in reporting unraveling the Russia collusion hoax, only lately did Halper’s history undergo a thorough vetting. In a recent article, Real Clear Investigations’ Mark Hemingway traced Halper’s history through archived documents and interviews with associates. He uncovered two themes girding Halper’s parallel careers of government informant and Cambridge academic.
Stefan Halper’s Recipe for Success
From his earliest days in government until his retreat from Cambridge University following his outing as a player in the Russian collusion hoax, Halper advanced his professional persona, decade upon decade, by taking creative license with his credentials and exploiting his connections. Puffery appeared in both Halper’s public biography and resumes reviewed by Real Clear Investigations, leaving unanswered the question of whether Halper ever obtained the Ph.D. he claimed later allowed him to reinvent himself as an academic at Cambridge. Before then, Halper appeared to muddle through a variety of low-level jobs in the federal government, until the mid-1970s. That’s when Halper’s career received a boost when he married Sibyl Cline, the daughter of the well-respected Ray S. Cline.
The senior Cline, who held top intelligence positions with the federal government since the second world war, reportedly arranged for the Ronald Reagan State Department to hire Halper. During the Reagan administration, Halper became close to, among others, Oliver North, but after the Iran-Contra scandal and some time in banking and D.C. think tanks, Halper transitioned to academia. He became a professor at Cambridge University in 2001, where three years later he would claim a second Ph.D.
In addition to the political and other connections Halper accumulated during his 30 years in the D.C. bubble, once at Cambridge, Halper expanded his network across the Atlantic. Halper became cozy with three other characters who later played roles—some prominent—in the Russia collusion hoax. These included Richard Dearlove, the former chief of the British intelligence service MI6; Christopher Andrew, the official historian for the domestic intelligence agency, MI5; and Christopher Steele, who worked under Dearlove at MI6.
Highly Useful Connections
While at Cambridge, the reinvented Halper leveraged his professorship, profiting to the tune of nearly $1 million by writing research papers of questionable worth for the U.S. Department of Defense. Halper added to his wallet by serving as a CHS for the FBI from 2008 until January 2011, when the FBI dropped him for aggressiveness toward a handling agent over a fee dispute. Two months later, the FBI reopened Halper as a CHS, giving him a stern warning that this was his last opportunity with the bureau.
Beyond these money-making ventures that kept Halper connected with players at the DOD and FBI, the academic apparently stayed close to elite members of the American media, including David Ignatius, the foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post. According to Steven Schrage, who completed his Cambridge Ph.D. under Halper’s supervision, “Halper knew Ignatius for decades” and “bragged’ that “Ignatius was his press contact.”
Another Cambridge student, the Russian-born U.K. historian Svetlana Lokhova who was later sold as a Russian “honey pot,” likewise connected Halper to Ignatius. Lokhova told The Federalist that in May 2018, shortly after Halper was outed as a CIA and FBI informant, she spoke with Ignatius, and when she “registered surprise about Halper’s role” as a CHS, that prompted Ignatius to say he “always found Halper reliable as a source.”
These connections all later proved key to advancing the Russia collusion hoax, but it was Halper’s role as a Cambridge academic that cemented his insertion into the scandal. As a faculty member at the British university, Halper participated in seminars and conferences, including the mid-July 2016 Cambridge University conference at which Halper first met then-Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
Enter: 2016 Campaign
While initially Halper seemed uninterested in the young Trump advisor, that suddenly changed after Dearlove arrived at the conference and spoke privately with Halper. According to the conference organizer, Halper suddenly “seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign.”
Hillary Clinton surrogate Madeline Albright also attended the conference, serving as a keynote speaker. While there, Albright attended a small, private dinner with Halper. Then, just days after the Cambridge conference ended, Albright proclaimed that “Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton.” The Clinton booster added that “Russia was likely behind the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails.”
That Albright began peddling the Russia collusion hoax in late July 2016, not long after leaving Halper’s side, seems suspect given that earlier that month Halper had forecast a similar approach to defeating Trump during a Cambridge lecture series on “the phenomenon which is ‘Trump’s maverick candidacy.’” At the time, Halper told his audience that “the deficits in Clinton’s campaign” left the election “almost too close to call.” “If the media focuses on Clinton, she will lose, whereas if they continue to focus on Trump, he will lose,” Halper predicted.
Worming Into Trump Campaign Connections
Two weeks later, the FBI launched the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign. Soon after that, Halper’s long-time handler, Stephen Somma, visited Halper at his home to request his assistance. According to Somma, he proposed meeting with Halper because Halper “had been affiliated with national political campaigns since the early 1970s,” while Somma “lacked a basic understanding of simple issues, for example what the role of a ‘foreign policy advisor’ entails.”
During Somma’s August 11, 2016, visit with Halper, the FBI handler asked Halper whether he knew George Papadopoulos, who then was serving as a Trump campaign advisor. Halper didn’t, but agreed to speak with Papadopoulos.
Halper then volunteered that he knew a second foreign policy advisor, Page, and asked whether Somma and his team had any interest in Page. Halper also told Somma he “had known Trump’s then campaign manager, [Paul] Manafort, for a number of years and that he had been previously acquainted with Michael Flynn.”
Halper’s claim to know Flynn proved another unsupported boast. He nonetheless told Somma and the other members of the Crossfire Hurricane team of an “incident” he supposedly witnessed at Cambridge involving Flynn. According to Halper, after Flynn spoke to a small group over dinner and drinks at Cambridge, another attendee, the Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova, “surprised everyone” and jumped in Flynn’s cab, then left with Flynn to London. Halper added that he was “suspicious of Lokhova” because of her Russian connections. However, contrary to Halper’s tale, Flynn had never met Halper and Halper had not attended the Cambridge gathering at which both Flynn and Lokhova were guests. Halper’s claim that Lokhova left with Flynn also proved false. Nonetheless, press reports later repeated the story and suggested Flynn had been compromised by the unnamed Russian student. Lokhova would later sue Halper for defamation, pinning him as the source of the false reports.
Somma and others, however, seemed unaware of Halper’s fabrication. They couldn’t believe their “luck” that Halper supposedly knew three of the four subjects of Crossfire Hurricane. So, over the ensuing weeks, Halper would wear a wire and question Papadopoulos, Page, and even the co-chair of the Trump campaign, Sam Clovis.
Fabricating an Excuse to Spy on Trump’s Campaign
That Halper could arrange a meeting with one of Trump’s top campaign officials mere months before the November election is a testament to Halper’s 50 years of political schmoozing and ladder climbing—further confirmed when Clovis proceeded to have an unguarded hour-long chat with Halper discussing details about Trump’s strategy to defeat Hillary.
Halper came away from these meetings with nothing of import to the investigation into Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. Nonetheless, the FBI referenced Halper and portions of his wired conversations with Page in the four FISA applications that resulted in the FBI illegally surveilling Page. Omitted from the FISA applications, however, were comments Page made to Halper that conflicted with portions of the Steele dossier.
While the FBI used only minor details acquired by Halper in the FISA applications, Halper’s cross-continental connections with the intelligence communities, political players, and the press, likely advanced the Russia collusion hoax in ways still fully unknown. This likelihood seems strong when one considers how, when the Spygate scandal began to unravel, the same media that had peddled the Russia collusion hoax began a public relations campaign for the players behind the plot, including Halper.
Running Cover for Spies
At first, the press presented the unidentified Halper as “an American academic” and as “an informant” or “source” whose anonymity had to be preserved to safeguard him. To bolster his credentials, the reporting stressed Halper’s position as a professor, highlighted his longtime work for both the FBI and CIA, and cast him as an informant who “aided the Russia investigation both before and after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III‘s appointment.” Then, in a transparent attempt to paint the still-unnamed Halper as a selflessness patriot, the media focused on the “great risks” informants take “when working for intelligence services.”
After he was outed, the Russia-hoax team continued to highlight Halper’s position as a “Cambridge professor” and long-time CHS to preserve the myth of a respected academic and dedicated and reliable informant. The Washington Post ran a puff piece on Halper soon after his name became public, telling its audience “Halper’s connections to the intelligence world have been present throughout his career and at Cambridge, where he ran an intelligence seminar that brought together past and present intelligence officials.”
The Post continued its gushing profile by highlighting Halper’s collaboration with Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, and their sponsorship of a “seminar that drew Michael Flynn, then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” to attend. Also stressed was Halper’s academic work, with the Post noting that Halper had taught “international affairs and American studies at Cambridge from 2001 until 2015, when he stepped down with the honorary title of emeritus senior fellow of the Centre of International Studies, . . .”
The remainder of the article then unquestioningly parroted much of Halper’s resume, before quoting an unnamed U.S. government official saying of Halper: “He thinks well. He writes critically. And he knows a lot of people whose insights he can tap for us as well.”
However, as Real Clear Investigations revealed in its exposé on Halper, he held neither the academic cachet nor the gravitas a seasoned informant might. But what Halper lacked in pedigree, he compensated for with his arsenal of connections that allowed him to whisper into the right ears just what the listener wanted to hear.
In this respect, Halper proves no different than Steele or Rodney Joffe: They are all mythical men, molded by the Clinton campaign, the media, and those complicit in the government to sell the tale of Trump colluding with Russia. In reality, though, they aren’t the James Bond, Jack Ryan, and Jason Bourne that we were sold—they are the Three Stooges with better agents.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
After Democrats crying “wolf” over Russian interference, will we take a closer look at Obama”s Russian connections?
Get McCain some smelling salts for this one. He’ll need it.
The #NotMyPresident #Russian witchhunt has been relentless. The scenarios painted about Republicans cooperating with Russian operatives have shot way past shrill and are now approaching apocalyptic. The same media that laughed Romney to scorn when Obama quipped about “Romney’s 1980’s foreign policy is suddenly Hawkish about Russia.”
The mudslinging, the presumption of guilt, the innuendo, the “anonymous sources”and the leading questions on par with “do you still beat your wife”about Russian collusion fill the news cycle almost wall-to-wall. It’s all the networks really want to talk about. Because they DESPERATELY want Trump’s scalp nailed to their wall.
For example, they’re now making noise about Trump’s son-in-law. One problem¦ that actually undercuts their own narrative.
No surprise, really. These are the same media that conveniently overlook any REAL evidence of collusion with Russia…like Obama’s infamous hot mic where he as much as admits putting American interests at odds with Russian national ones. (Isn’t that EXACTLY the accusation they’ve been desperate to pin on Trump?)
So in light of the fuss and fear, even McCain calls Russia a “greater threat than ISIS”,then does THIS headline seem a little out of place?Inside Obama’s Secret Outreach to Russia
That was 2014. Before Russia was ˜bad news”.But all this talk about Russia has it making the rounds again. Because the contents are suddenly relevant.
There was another one, in April of this year, with another interesting headline:Turns out Obama was the real Russian stoogeIt lists a lot of areas where Obama did exactly what Putin would have wanted him to do, with little or nothing in return. (Is he a sellout, traitor or the worst negotiator ever?) Even CNN was forced to acknowledge potential implications against Obama, the weaponization of this issue. (It must have nearly killed them to write THIS headline):Obama administration under scrutiny for its response to Russia’s meddling
And that’s only half the story.
The OTHER half is no better for Obama. Remember, they are alleging Russia has HACKED (or tried to) the American election. And, more important, that he is dangerous BECAUSE he is trying to do the same with other elections. (That’s the part that has McCain’s panties in a twist, if you recall.) One small problem. Obama is accused of using taxpayer money to try to deep-six Netanyahu in THIER Democratic election.
So, does that mean that Obama is just like Putin? Does that make Putin good, or does it make Obama bad?
(Is doing that with tax dollars even Constitutional?)
The problem with having lost House, Senate, AND Executive? Obama’s crowd doesn’t have anyone with enough power to shield them from scrutiny anymore. Obama’s henchmen, maybe Obama himself, will have some difficult questions to answer.
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So in light of the fuss and fear, even McCain calls Russia a “greater threat than ISIS”, then does THIS headline seem a little out of place?
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