The Russian collusion conspirators spend a lot of time in public seemingly unconcerned they will go to jail. That tells me they know something we don’t.
Here’s what I think it is.
In his press conference last week releasing Robert Mueller’s redacted report, Attorney General Bill Barr lauded the special counsel’s work in tracking down Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
That part of the investigation, Barr suggests, was justified.
John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper et al. will cite Barr’s congratulatory message to say that whatever they did to stop the Red Menace from interfering in our democracy makes them American heroes.
That will leave the question of why they spied on Trump. They’ll answer, “We can’t tell you because then Putin will know our secrets.”
Let’s say it doesn’t end there and somehow sufficient political will coalesces to get the conspirators to say why they targeted Trump. Here’s their story, and they’re going to stick with it:
Brennan will tell us that President Obama became concerned about Russian interference way back in 2015 and instructed the CIA to use all intelligence tools at its disposal to get to the bottom of it.
One of the tools at his disposal is the Five Eyes agreement, a 1946 anachronism that permits the CIA to work with British Intelligence to stop Russia when it is trying to mess with our way of life.
Brennan will say, “MI6 expressed serious concerns about persons associated with the Trump campaign and their connections to Russia. I then got the FBI involved because the CIA cannot gather intelligence about American citizens.”
The Brits, we will be told, started it.
That is why the head of FBI counterintelligence flew to London before launching Crossfire Hurricane; it is why Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were spied on there and not at the Hyatt Regency in Bethesda, Maryland.
Except the Brits probably didn’t start it. More likely, Brennan winked and nodded at his counterpart at MI6 and said, “Hey, can you do us a favor for the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, and help us collect dirt on her political opponent? We’ll owe you one.”
Nobody is going to admit any of that, though. The British government will say that Five Eyes expressly requires that details about its implementation never be disclosed and they’ll stay mum.
Or worse, they’ll say something vague that feeds the hysteria on the Left, like “We can’t say what we did or why we did it, except that everything we ever do is based on solid evidence.” Uh-huh.
The investigation into the investigators will thus scuttle upon phony spy arcana.
But how about abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?
That’s easy. The second-in-command at the Justice Department who stood on the dais with Barr last week, Rod Rosenstein, approved the FISA application in its last iterations when he should have known it was bogus.
If Obama’s administration is guilty of abusing the FISA process in the Russia investigation, so is Trump’s. Helluva job, Rod.
One has to admire, I guess, the pure audacity of the deep state and its friends in the media for pulling this one off.
For the first two and a half years of Trump’s presidency, they constructed an exquisite trap where if he denied that Russia interfered in the election it meant he himself was colluding in it.
Finally, exhausted and seeking a political out, Trump’s second attorney general (his first one self-castrated over Russia) copped to Russian interference to avoid the collusion and obstruction charges.
Except there is no evidence, really, that Russia interfered. With apologies to Barr, that assertion seems just as concocted as the collusion canard.
The FBI and, apparently, the special counsel never tested the supposedly hacked computers. That task was left to a private contractor, CrowdStrike, with connections to the Clinton Foundation and the government of Ukraine.
Politico told us on January 11, 2017 in a story headlined, “Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” that Ukraine was deeply involved in trying to create false Russian flags over Trump’s campaign.
The Steele dossier is evidence that Clinton’s campaign, too, was interested in raising a false Russian flag over Trump.
The dossier was authored by a former British spy with no possible contacts within the Russian government, which considered him a menace for lots of reasons, not the least of which was the mischief he had fomented over Russia’s successful World Cup bid.
The idea that Putin and Steele joined in an effort to undermine Trump is laughable, and political leaders and pundits on the Right should stop slavishly gobbling up this pile of cotton candy served to them by the deep state.
Obviously, Steele and unidentified foreigners claiming to have contacts within Russia—Ukrainians? British intelligence?—invented the dossier’s kompromat to achieve its singular purpose: to falsely connect Trump to Russia.
A highly credentialed group of intelligence specialists, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), have poked holes in CrowdStrike’s investigation partly based on forensic analysis.
If the special counsel uncritically accepted Russian interference as established fact, or worse, deferred to the CIA—which would bring us back to Five Eyes and British intelligence—surely its conclusion is an expensive example of circular reasoning not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Unfortunately, Trump’s second attorney general, who is today’s hero for ending the collusion hoax, has given the conspirators sanctuary on Russian interference by praising their efforts to uncover the plot that wasn’t.
As always with Trump, there is hope.
Maybe Julian Assange can come and tell us what really happened. Oh yeah, I forgot—he was taken into British custody a few days before Mueller’s report was released. Can’t wait for that extradition battle.
The Ukrainians just elected a comedian as their president because they’re as fed up by the West’s deep state shenanigans as we are. Maybe he’ll get to the bottom of it.
Maybe Trump himself will wonder out loud on Twitter why his Justice Department never tested the DNC server, as he did at the podium with Putin back in July—and that will get the party started.
Bring on round two. No longer facing indictment for collusion, it will be fun to see Trump fighting the plot against him when every punch will not be pulled by his team of lawyers as potential evidence of obstruction.
Photo Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images