Corrupt From the Get Go
Beware the Secret Intelligence and Propaganda Complex
On May 15, the American people received confirmation of what millions already knew. The mainstream media’s relentless promotion of the conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence services to undermine the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and install himself in the White House was a hoax.
Apparently it had two independent sources, one the result of a bar room conversation between a minor Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos and an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer in which the former mentioned that the Russians may have some dirt on Clinton that they might be willing to share. This led the FBI to open operation Crossfire Hurricane in May 2016 even though they realized that the evidence was extremely “thin.” The second began in July when Mrs. Clinton gave her assent to a “proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference [in the election] by the Russian security services." This led the Clinton campaign, in July, to hire a former British spy named Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on Trump. The campaign paid Steele for his salacious dirt through a pair of cutouts, Fusion/GPS, and the law firm Perkins, Coie. The purpose of the effort was to divert the attention of the American people from the scandal caused by the the revelation of Clinton’s use of an insecure email server while Secretary of State. The dirt in the resultant “Steele Dossier,” was totally false, but that didn’t make any difference to either Steele, who hated Trump and would have written anything if it damaged him, or to Clinton who was happy to pay for anything that damaged Trump. The initial charges against Trump were made public in a Yahoo News story published in late September, some six weeks before the election, by Michael Isakoff. The story was based upon information leaked to Isakoff by Steele. It was a classic “October surprise.”
It didn’t make any difference to Mrs. Clinton or her campaign advisers, that the charges against Trump were false. Nor did it make any difference to the nation’s top intelligence agencies that they were false. In fact, leaders of the FBI, submitted false information to the nation’s FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court to obtain warrants to spy on various Trump campaign associates. Nor did it matter to the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC and a host of other news outlets which in turn were eager to spread the lies as they began to leak out. Although the hoax was intended to destroy Trump’s electoral chances, once he was elected, the same story was dutifully repeated almost 24/7 throughout the country and even around the world for several years in a continuing campaign to destroy his presidency. According to what is now being called the Durham Report, even then President Barack Obama, Vice-President Joseph R. Biden, CIA Director James Brennan, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, among others were content to see the lie disseminated despite the enormous damage it has done to the confidence that the American people have in the honesty of their government. The highest ranks of both the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agencies upon which the people rely for fair, thorough, and impartial justice, were corrupt from the start. Based upon flimsy evidence which quickly proved invalid, the FBI launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane in order to spy upon Donald Trump’s political campaign and subvert his presidency. Such malicious behavior is unprecedented in American political history. Neither the Iran-Contra scandal, nor even the Watergate scandal comes close to equalling the malice or the mendacity of the Clinton plot to destroy Trump. Nor did either rival the magnitude of the damage that the Trump/Russia collusion hoax has done to the nation. What began as a campaign dirty trick, morphed into an attempt to take down a president.
For over two years after the inauguration of President Trump, the nightly drumbeat continued as many of the nation’s highest ranking members of Congress such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Adam Schiff, insisted that they had seen classified intelligence that demonstrated conclusively that Donald Trump was a traitor. They had not. Former CIA Director John Brennan repeatedly told his CNN audience that it was likely that the president was a Russian intelligence asset. That was untrue and he knew it. Likewise, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, made the rounds of the news shows to assert that Trump was colluding with Russian intelligence. He too knew that was a lie. They traded on their security clearances in order to lead the American people to believe they had inside information about Trump’s alleged perfidy. They had no such information. They just made it up. Mrs. Clinton, America’s Lady Macbeth, went on TV to claim that Donald Trump had stolen the presidency from her.
Despite the inability of the Mueller investigation to find any evidence to substantiate the charges, after almost two years of looking, the media refused to acknowledge that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. Instead, Congressional Democrats ginned up a ludicrous impeachment trial. Now, seven years and two impeachment trails later, one wonders whether it was all set in motion by Donald Trump’s idle joke that we might be able to obtain Clinton’s missing emails by asking the Russians for them, and by his crowds chanting “lock her up, lock her up!”
Meanwhile, hundreds, if not thousands of lower ranking staffers in the executive branch, led by the highest ranking officers of the FBI, the Justice Department, and other agencies, engaged in a sub rosa “resistance” movement directed against the duly elected president of the United States. If the officers and crew of a naval vessel behaved in the same way, it would be treated as mutiny on the high seas. These events did not just constitute mutiny against the president, but mutiny against the American people and their constitutional government.
Those who drafted the American Constitution feared precisely the sort of usurpation of power which has played out over the course of the last several years. Men who had no legitimate right under the Constitution to defy the president, colluded among themselves to wage a bureaucratic guerrilla war against the Commander-in-Chief, in order to undermine his authority and thwart the enactment of policies the American public had voted for. Not only was it an attempted bureaucratic coup d’etat, as such, it was an attempt to subvert democracy itself. Special counsel John Durham recommends no indictments or prosecutions. It is not clear why, although it may be that technically no literal violations of law took place, or that Durham realizes that it would be very difficult to obtain convictions in a D.C. courtroom.
Regardless of the reason that no prosecutions are forthcoming, this is a serious problem. Famed attorney Alan Dershowitz, commenting on the lack of indictments, pointed out that he knows many of the individuals who participated in the perpetuation of the Russia collusion hoax, and that they are actually good men who believe they were doing the right thing. But this is what tyrants always say in their own defense. In effect, they contend that “we had to undermine the rule of law in order to save it.” This sounds very much like the American officer who defended the destruction of a Vietnamese village by saying that “we had to destroy the village to save it.” If such behavior is permitted in future administrations, then we no longer live in a democratic or constitutional system and the rule of law has perished. We might as well abolish the presidency and turn the powers of government over to the bureaucrats entirely. Progressives are constantly lecturing the public that “no man is above the law.” That is especially true when their behavior threatens the constitutional order.
Nobody will serve a moment in prison for these crimes against the American people. What is equally problematic is that as recently as the 2020 election the FBI intervened in an American election once again, this time to discredit the true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Some 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter asserting that in their opinion the laptop had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation. Not only that, but as the “twitter files”released by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger demonstrate, the threat to free speech posed by politically motivated ideologues in positions of power in secretive organizations such as the FBI and the CIA is not limited to surreptitiously influencing elections, but extends to open public discussion on social media platforms of all sorts of politically charged issues that the American people face. All of the nation’s debates about Covid policy and the effectiveness of vaccines that transpired between 2020 and the present are a case in point. If the intelligence agencies can take sides in American elections, then we no longer have fair and honest elections. In 1960, retiring President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the American people about the threat posed by the growing power of the “military-industrial complex.” In our time we have to worry about the power of the secret intelligence and propaganda complex.
It’s hard to overestimate the seriousness of these events. The Watergate scandal pales in comparison. Richard Nixon did not authorize the Watergate burglary. He merely attempted to cover up what one official at the time called a “third rate burglary.” It was obstruction of justice. What we are witnessing today is a rolling coup against the American form of government being carried out at the highest levels of government behind a veil of secrecy.
Meanwhile, now that the truth has finally been revealed, where does Donald Trump go to get his reputation back? More important, where do the American people go to get their government back?