Susan Rice describes the trio as family.
In her 2019 memoir, Rice, Barack Obama’s final national security advisor, wrote glowingly of the close bond she shared with two other women in Obama’s tight knit circle of confidants. “In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco,” Rice explained in her book, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For. “Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.”
Hard eye roll.
Rice’s self-aggrandizing flex notwithstanding, no one tried to “play” the little women off each other; to the contrary, Haines and Monaco—Obama’s deputy national security advisor and homeland security advisor, respectively—and Rice played the American people by helping engineer one of the biggest frauds in U.S. political history: the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.
Their sisterhood presumably strengthened during secret huddles in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Working off alleged intelligence collected by CIA Director John Brennan, Haines’ former boss, indicating the Kremlin planned to sabotage America’s election, Rice, Monaco, and Haines “convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond,” the Washington Post reported in June 2017.
Monaco accompanied then-FBI Director James Comey to Capitol Hill in September 2016 to “warn” top congressional leaders in both parties that Russia was up to no good. After the election, in a brazen attempt to sow doubt about its legitimacy, Monaco announced the intelligence community would conduct an assessment into how Russian “hacking” impacted the results.
Monaco’s handiwork quickly morphed into the phony collusion narrative, a two-year prosecutorial dragnet for Trump and his closest associates that ultimately ended with no evidence of collusion and a humiliating congressional appearance for Special Counsel Robert Mueller—the former FBI director for whom Monaco once served as chief of staff.
After going their separate ways for four years, the “sisters” are enjoying a family reunion of sorts. All three hold powerful positions in the Biden regime: Rice is Biden’s domestic policy advisor, Haines is Biden’s director of national intelligence, and Monaco is Biden’s deputy attorney general.
And the Obama-reared triplets are inflicting “woe” on Trump, his associates, and his voters—with the worst yet to come.
By all accounts, Monaco is overseeing the day-to-day details related to the sweeping criminal investigation into the four-hour disturbance at the Capitol complex on January 6, 2021. The prosecution so far has resulted in charges against 860 Americans with new arrests announced each week; the Justice Department has successfully sought grand jury indictments on a novel obstruction felony and the exceptionally rare charge of “seditious conspiracy,” an offense comparable to treason for which no American has even been convicted.
Her boss, Attorney General Merrick Garland, admitted he approved the unprecedented raid on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, a brazen act conducted either at the suggestion or approval of Monaco. Despite initial assurances the ransacking of Trump’s private home was necessary and long overdue, the Justice Department is losing its grip on the storyline. The release of a heavily redacted version of the affidavit detailing the government’s reason for the search raised more questions than it answered—poor timing for the Justice Department as news reports shifted from allegations the seized documents contained nuclear codes down to claims the records bore vague “classified markings.”
In more bad news for the Justice Department, a Florida judge is considering Trump’s request for the appointment of a “special master” to vet the material taken during the raid. In an August 27 ruling, Judge Aileen M. Cannon noted the “exceptional circumstances” surrounding the matter and ordered the government to file a response to Trump’s request. Cannon also asked for a “more detailed Receipt for Property specifying all property seized pursuant to the search warrant” and documentation as to the “dissemination of materials beyond the privilege review team” to be filed under seal.
The Justice Department’s response was due on Tuesday; a hearing is set for Thursday afternoon. If granted, a third-party would replace a team of federal investigators in determining the sensitivity of the records and could potentially introduce additional concerns about the Justice Department’s rationale for executing the raid.
But Monaco, it appears, may have found a safe haven to keep some—perhaps all?—of Trump’s documents away from both the court and an outside arbiter for now; the bowels of the equally untrustworthy and highly partisan intelligence community currently run by her “sister,” Avril Haines.
On the same day Judge Cannon issued her ruling, Haines notified Congress that her office is leading an “assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of the relevant documents.”
The Justice Department also informed Cannon of the pending review. “The Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are currently facilitating a classification review of materials recovered pursuant to the search,” the government wrote in an August 29 filing. “As the Director of National Intelligence advised Congress, ODNI is also leading an intelligence community assessment of the potential risk to national security that would result from the disclosure of these materials.”
In short, Monaco and Haines are up to their old tricks.
By relying on their well-worn trope about protecting “national security,” Monaco and Haines seem poised to again mislead the American people—and possibly a federal judge and outside party—into believing Donald Trump’s actions pose such an imminent danger to the country that special rules must apply. Records are concealed under some fabricated “procedure” while the flow of information to the public is tightly controlled through selected leaks to the New York Times and Washington Post. Court battles and congressional squabbles last just long enough for the “sisters” to coordinate their spin; by the time the facts are available, their propaganda machine has successfully planted the narrative regardless of the truth.
Just like the Russiagate scandal, the entire exercise is in service of destroying Donald Trump personally and politically. This time, the stakes are higher and the “sisters” control every lever of power inside the regime. Will this sisterhood succeed or will their exaggerated sense of self finally catch up with them? Who, this time around, gets played?