Never before in American history has a departing president connived to sabotage and destroy the man who would replace him.
Newly revealed documents show that in 2016 then-President Barack Obama and his national security team “manufactured and politicized” phony intelligence to help frame Donald Trump as a Russian asset when they knew it was untrue.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard who unearthed and released the declassified documents on Friday described it as an “egregious abuse of power” that amounts to a “treasonous conspiracy.”
Treason is a strong term with an exceedingly high legal standard. So, too, is seditious conspiracy. The use of violence or force is often a central element for both.
Closer to the mark are other serious crimes. They include conspiracy to defraud the government and deprivation of rights under the color of law. That is, using knowingly false or fabricated evidence to support a case against Trump and to obstruct or impair a lawful government function such as an election.
Not surprisingly, the genesis of the plot began with Hillary Clinton. On July 26, 2016, she allegedly approved an illicit scheme to sully her political opponent for colluding with Russia to rig the upcoming presidential election. The bogus smear was intended to distract from her own burgeoning email scandal. Hillary’s campaign commissioned and funded a dossier that was little more than a collection of lies supplied by Clinton confederates.
The CIA discovered what Hillary had done and immediately alerted the Obama White House. In two successive meetings on July 28 and Aug. 3, 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed the president and other top officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director James Comey.
Brennan’s handwritten notes from the Situation Room show how he recounted Clinton’s plan “to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” From that point on, it was a closely guarded secret.
It was all a hoax, and the above-named participants well knew it. Yet, none of them had the integrity to step forward to tell either Congress or the American people the truth.
Instead, they watched in silence as Comey and his FBI acolytes launched a dilating investigation of Trump dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane.” They shamelessly weaponized their authority and contorted the law to persecute Trump. As planned, the fake collusion narrative was leaked to the Trump-hating media.
Almost from the outset, the FBI had debunked the dossier and later fired its author, Christopher Steele, for lying. The ex-British spy had been a paid source for the FBI. By concealing this vital information, Comey sought and obtained surveillance warrants from the FISA court on a Trump campaign associate, Carter Page. No evidence of wrongdoing was ever discovered because none existed.
When the Russia hoax failed to prevent Trump from winning the presidency, the same malevolent adversaries doubled down on the Clinton-inspired scheme.
The new documents released by Gabbard show that a Dec. 8, 2016 draft of the President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) assessed that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.”
But that conclusion, compiled by top intelligence agencies, did not conform to the Trump collusion narrative. Comey and others apparently scuttled the PDB and concocted an alternative plan.
The next day, Dec. 9, Obama convened select cabinet officials, along with Clapper, Brennan, and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. A new Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was ordered that would undermine the PDB and perpetuate the Trump-Russia collusion fiction.
The replacement narrative would claim that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Trump win the presidency. It didn’t seem to matter that it was not true.
Brennan and Comey ensured that the discredited dossier was incorporated in the ICA, which was rushed to completion before the new president took office. Why the urgency? So that Comey could use it to entrap Trump into a false confession before his inauguration.
On Jan. 6, 2017, the FBI director traveled to Trump Tower armed with the ICA that deceptively alleged Russian interference in the campaign and also confronted the president-elect with salacious accusations in the dossier that the bureau knew were untrue. Comey’s unscrupulous gambit failed when Trump vigorously denied the allegations as utterly preposterous, which they were.
None of that deterred Comey and his minions at the FBI. They escalated their investigation of Trump and propagated the collusion lie. Clapper leaked the dossier to CNN, as reporters and pundits spent the next year happily convicting the new president in the court of public opinion without a shred of plausible evidence.
When Comey was eventually fired, he purloined FBI documents on his way out the door and promptly leaked them to a friend in the media to trigger the appointment of a special counsel who just happened to be his former colleague and mentor, Robert Mueller. In the end, of course, Mueller and his team of partisans —try as they may— could find no evidence of a criminal collusion conspiracy.
Those of us who fairly and honestly covered the faux scandal knew it all along. In my 2018 book titled The Russia Hoax, I wrote on page one that “there was not a whiff of credible evidence to legally justify the probe” initiated by Comey. I described it as “a clever feint for a covert criminal investigation in search of a crime, reversing and bastardizing the legal process.” I laid out the facts which still hold true today.
In my follow-up book the next year, Witch Hunt, I offered more incriminating details of exactly how malign actors aspired and conspired to evict Trump from office: “Evidence against him was invented or embellished. Laws were perverted or ignored. Trump was framed for a ‘collusion’ conspiracy that had never existed. They knew it was untrue.”
The newly constituted FBI has already opened a criminal investigation of Brennan and Comey. That is a good start. But they were not the only ones who should be held to account. The list is a long one, and it goes right to the top —Obama and Clinton.
It started with the collusion hoax, but it didn’t end there. Trump appears to have been the victim of an ongoing criminal conspiracy that stretched for nearly a decade. It eventually evolved into the specious prosecutions brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith that were engineered by the Biden administration and simultaneous coverups of suspected illegality by the Biden family, many of whom received preemptive pardons.
On that basis, the FBI is reportedly examining the possibility of bringing a “grand conspiracy” case that would encompass many of the above-noted acts that were intended to unduly influence three presidential elections, 2016, 2020, and 2024.
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The advantage of adopting this legal avenue is two-fold. First, it would extend any expired statute of limitations to the date of more recent overt acts such as the raid on Mar-a-Lago and events thereafter. Second, it would allow any prosecutions to be brought in a venue other than Washington, D.C., where the endemic bias of jurors make it nearly impossible to gain convictions.
Meanwhile, there is still more damning evidence that must be declassified —some of it sealed for nearly a decade and buried in the bowels of the FBI and other intel agencies. But even without it, there is little doubt that top officials at the FBI, CIA, Department of Justice and the White House abused their authority for political purposes. Armed with immense power and often lurking in the shadows, they were capable of uncommon corruption.
Their allegiance was not to the Constitution and the rule of law but to themselves. Personal animus and a voracious appetite for control motivated their zeal. Trump was their obstacle. He jeopardized their hold on power, so they schemed to destroy him by any means and at any cost.
The only cure for lies is the truth. And the only remedy for lawlessness is justice. The pursuit of what is right depends on both principles.
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