Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to aim hypersonic missiles at Washington produced dire warnings everywhere of a coming new Cold War. Everywhere, that is, except in the Trump-deranged nation’s capital, where the big news was a coup plot straight out of the old Cold War.
In 1962, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey published a political thriller called Seven Days in May. Later made into a movie, it tells the story of a right-wing conspiracy by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to overthrow a liberal president for what now would be called “colluding” with the Russians. The coup fails, though not before the United States is pushed to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
Suppose a similar plot were hatched today—not by reactionary generals but by left-wing bureaucrats intent on removing a conservative president for, get ready, “colluding” with the Russians. And suppose those same bureaucrats were top officials in the FBI and Justice Department.
It’s not that hard to imagine, since now we know the effort to depose President Donald Trump, begun more than two years ago, has been ongoing ever since.
At the center of everything was a group of high-level plotters pretending to be patriots hunting down a Kremlin spy in the White House. Along the way, they rigged legal proceedings, set up scapegoats and generally laid the groundwork for the biggest political scandal in American history.
Here’s early ringleader Andrew McCabe, former acting director of the FBI (until he was fired for lying), explaining himself on CNN:
Anderson Cooper: Do you still believe the president could be a Russian asset?
Andrew McCabe: I think it’s possible. I think that’s why we started our investigation.
And what evidence was there the president might be conspiring with Russia against the United States? According to McCabe, it was Trump’s totally legal and long overdue firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
Obama’s Leftist Legacy
By November 2016 the country was one election away from making Barack Obama’s far-left legacy Washington’s permanent way of doing business. Staying in town following his second term was how Obama planned to have a direct hand in the process. Trump’s surprise victory changed that, and more. Along with losing the election, certain members of the previous administration also lost their cover for crimes they committed to make sure Hillary Clinton would be the next president.
The first hint of trouble ahead came when British voters passed the Brexit referendum taking England out the European Union. During a press conference the next day at his golf resort in Scotland, Donald Trump said, Brexit proved the British people “want to take their country back.” Imagine the reaction that caused in Her Majesty’s deep state.
The same thing “is happening in the United States,” Trump said. To emphasize the point he invited Nigel Farage, architect of Brexit, to campaign with him, and at every stop the soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee predicted a Brexit-style win for himself on Election Day.
The Clinton campaign, with a commanding lead in every poll, had already hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which subcontracted retired British spy Christopher Steele to look into Trump’s dealings with Russia.
It would be hard to find a better source of all-purpose bad guys. Russians are good at luring foreign businessmen into financial crime. But they’re also hard to catch and bring to justice, making it easy to blame them for anything.
An admitted Trump hater, Steele claimed the information contained in his infamous dossier came from sources inside Russia. But was the ex-spy, as some suspect, only lending his name to material supplied by Sidney Blumenthal, for years the Clintons’ purveyor of dark PR, and Nellie Ohr, wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, hired by Fusion to assist in gathering dirt on Trump?
A New Yorker profile in 2018 makes Steele sound less like a crack secret agent than a deep-state dweeb needing all the help he could get. In the story one former colleague notes Steele’s nervous reaction to the growing dossier uproar; another calls him “a little naïve about the public square.” Steele may be no James Bond, but what’s interesting is how eager British intelligence was to aid the Americans in taking down Trump.
The Russians Did It
The presidential fix was in for Hillary Clinton from the time she was appointed Barack Obama’s secretary of state, a position she used to turn the State Department into a pay-to-play cash cow for Clinton, Inc.
In July 2016, the FBI under Comey gave Clinton a pass on everything from setting up an illegal server to destroying evidence. Looking the other way again only weeks later, the bureau failed to examine the supposedly “hacked” (now destroyed) servers at the Democratic National Committee, a case of willful neglect that would lead directly to “Russiagate.”
As we learn from internal FBI emails, there were discussions, even at this early stage, about needing an “insurance policy” just in case Donald Trump pulled off the unthinkable. Which is where the Steele dossier came in.
Shopping his bogus document to friendly media pundits got Steele fired as an FBI consultant. But when the bureau applied for a series of fraudulent FISA court warrants to spy on Trump, it was one of Steele’s planted stories that helped close the deal.
In “Seven Days in May,” the military’s principal tool for taking over the government is a force called Emergency Communications Control (ECOMCON), designed to assume operation of the nation’s media. Today with most news outlets already active participants in the project to oust the president, ECOMCON would be redundant.
Trump’s upset win put the Obama Administration on high alert, presenting Democrats with two immediate problems: 1) explaining Clinton’s election loss without bringing up the real reason for it—Hillary Clinton; and 2) hiding criminal activity aimed at beating Trump by launching a coordinated effort to get rid of him.
Clinton’s failed campaign bosses John Podesta and Robby Mook decided the day after the election to blame her defeat on Russian interference, as described in the Steele dossier they paid for. Soon afterward the lame-duck Obama administration set in motion a plan to use FBI surveillance data and a nonstop media offensive to cripple Trump’s transition and destroy his presidency. Their secret weapon was the same suspect dossier later repurposed to help justify the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Full-Service Probe
After nearly two years of trying, Mueller’s investigation, said to be coming to a close, has yet to produce any evidence the Trump campaign colluded with Russians. (In a separate hoax the Chicago police took only two weeks to find more evidence against Jussie Smollett.) But that hardly matters. The Mueller probe has served its purpose: helping congressional Democrats take back the House; setting the stage for possible impeachment proceedings; and serving to divert public attention from wrongdoing by Obama officials and Clinton’s campaign where the Trump-Russia con job began.
In the movie version of “Seven Days in May,” the attempted coup falls apart when President Jordan Lyman, played by Fredric March, confronts General James Mattoon Scott, played by Burt Lancaster, with proof that he and the joint chiefs have been plotting his overthrow.
President Lyman: “You have such a fervid, passionate, evangelical affection for your country. Why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell bent to protect? You say I’ve duped the people, general… You accuse me of having lost their faith, deliberately and criminally shut my ears to the national voice.”
General Scott: “I do.”
President Lyman: “Well, where the hell have you heard that voice? . . . How did that voice seep into a locked room of conspirators? That’s not where you hear the voice of the people . . . Not in this republic. You want to defend the United States of America? Then defend it with the tools it supplies you with, its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, general, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it at midnight when the country has its back turned.”
If the country hasn’t exactly had its back turned, it has been deceived. Mueller’s report likely will conclude that Russia had nothing to do with Donald Trump’s election. Just the same, that doesn’t mean something very Soviet hasn’t been going on.
Never before in a U.S. presidential race has the White House used federal intelligence agencies to spy on a political opponent and then set in motion a plan to remove an elected president from office.
The Kremlin is all about this sort of treachery and revenge. Under Barack Obama and the bureaucrats his administration left behind, so was Washington.
Democrats must have thought they would be running the country for years to come. And why wouldn’t they? With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both claiming to be on the right side of history, what could go wrong?
Two words: Trump won.
Since then, a neo-McCarthyite hysteria has seized the nation, stirred up by Democratic socialists in Congress, amplified by propaganda in the anti-Trump news media and acted on by a special prosecutor fond of solitary confinement, coerced confessions and other police-state tactics.
Welcome to the new Cold War. Only this time we’re the Soviets.
Photo Credit: Paramount/Getty Images