Crimes of the Deep State
Did the Justice Department, CIA and FBI break the law to get rid of Trump?
It’s now beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama administration minions launched an all-out effort to destroy, first, President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and, when that failed, his presidency. The only question is, knowing the truth, will the Justice Department charge these people with crimes?
The whole concern over “Russian interference” with the 2016 election was little more than a smokescreen for a much wider effort to go after Donald Trump. And that’s not us talking, but The New York Times.
A Times report titled “FBI Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia” shows that the investigation into Donald Trump for the non-crime of “collusion” with Russia’s government began before the election. The inquiry aimed at stopping Mr. Trump — and not, really, at determining whether Russians interfered in our presidential election.
The actual investigation by the Justice Department and FBI began during the election campaign. Using half-baked and “unverifiable” intelligence about Mr. Trump’s purported links to Russia, officials used the so-called Steele Dossier four separate times for FISA court approval to spy on the Trump campaign.
The bogus Steele Dossier
The only problem is, the Steele Dossier didn’t come from the FBI or Justice Department. It came from Fusion GPS, an opposition research group linked to the Democrats. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for it.
“Ostensibly, the surveillance application targeted Carter Page,” wrote Andrew McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and himself a former federal prosecutor. “But Page was just a side issue. The dossier was principally about Trump — not Page, not Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, or other Trump associates referred to by Steele. The dossier’s main allegation was that Trump was in an espionage conspiracy with Russia to swing the election to Trump, after which Trump would do Putin’s bidding from the White House.”
So for all intents and purposes, the Deep State holdovers from the Obama administration were serving as an adjunct to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Early on in the investigation, CIA chief John Brennan convened multi-agency meetings about Mr. Trump. They included Peter Strzok, the head of the FBI’s counter-intelligence, and James Clapper, national intelligence director under Mr. Obama, among others.
The premise of the meetings, again, was that Mr. Trump possibly colluded with the Russians to hack our election and might even be an agent of Russia.
Where’s the evidence?
Yet, as The Times itself admitted, virtually “no evidence” existed for such a charge.
Such actions are illegal, an attempt by supposedly nonpartisan government employees to subvert the 2016 presidential election, bureaucrats attempting to veto the legitimate will of the people.
Ironically, these extra-legal machinations posed a far greater direct threat to our democracy than anything Mr. Trump allegedly did. And yet the perpetrators still walk free. They make hundreds of thousands of dollars on the lecture circuit and as talking heads on TV.
As The Times points out, even as he deepened his investigation into Mr. Trump on behalf of the Democratic Party, former FBI Director James Comey lied repeatedly to Mr. Trump about whether he was under investigation. He also leaked the contents of a private meeting with Mr. Trump in the White House to the media.
The idea: Create doubts about Mr. Trump and sow the seeds of broader action by the Deep State against his presidency. For anyone still harboring any doubts: This was no vindictive political act. Mr. Trump had no real choice but to fire Mr. Comey.
Firing Comey
But as we know now, firing Mr. Comey didn’t end Mr. Trump’s problems. It multiplied them.
Within days of Mr. Comey’s firing in early May 2017, acting FBI Director Rod Rosenstein named Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the charges that Mr. Trump was, in essence, a Russian agent. Still worse, they did it not because they had actual evidence — the Clinton-financed Steele Dossier, remember, has never been verified — but because they didn’t like Mr. Trump’s foreign policy views, in particular on Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Some of those taking part in this conspiracy actually discussed invoking the 25th Amendment. It allows for removal of a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office.”
They had no basis for this, of course. But it was a weapon they could use. It begins to look like a silent coup, not an investigation.
We find ourselves in complete agreement with The Federalist’s Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway. She wrote: “Using the completely lawful and constitutional firing of the bumbling Comey as pretext for opening a criminal investigation into the president is a grand abuse of power by the FBI. Attempting to overtake the authority to determine U.S. foreign policy from the lawfully determined president of the United States is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
Crimes of the Deep State
Yes, these are crimes. And not minor ones. The real collusion, it turns out, was by the FBI, the Justice Department, the CIA and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not Mr. Trump and the Russians.
For many reasons, they all wanted Mr. Trump to lose the election. When he didn’t oblige, they tried to remove him from office. It’s still going on. The Democratic Party openly seeks to impeach Mr. Trump. Meanwhile, the Mueller investigation trundles on, with nothing so far to show for its efforts.
This was, as others have said before without exaggeration, a kind of silent coup. Top officials at the Justice Department, FBI and CIA, in cahoots with the Clinton campaign, used the extraordinary powers of the U.S. justice and intelligence agencies for purely political ends: to end the Trump presidency.
By the way, our own IBD/TIPP Poll this month shows Americans mostly believe that to be true. In the poll, 51 percent agreed the Mueller investigation is an attempt to delegitimize the 2016 election. And they’re right about that.
With the House now in the hands of far-left Democrats, we can expect no calls for investigations of this egregious behavior. Justice should investigate these crimes and those who committed them. And start prosecuting.