Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (15 page)

In an essay titled “But That Wasn't
Real
Socialism,” Kristian Niemietz, head of political economy at the United Kingdom's Institute of Economic Affairs, provides numerous examples of left-wing Western intellectuals and politicians praising Maoist China, the USSR, Eastern European communism, and other socialist disasters in their early years, only to repudiate them later. One example is renowned left-wing academic Noam Chomsky. On a trip to Venezuela in 2009 he gushed about the Bolivarian Revolution: “[W]hat's so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created…. The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact.” But eight years later, Chomsky was singing a different tune: “I never described Chavez's state capitalist government as ‘socialist' or even hinted at such an absurdity,” he claimed. “It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained…. Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”
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Bernie Sanders did a similar about-face on Venezuela. In 2006, he participated in a Hugo Chavez stunt in which Bernie bought discounted Venezuelan heating oil for distribution to Vermonters through government assistance programs.
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But in 2015, when Hillary Clinton supporters began attacking him over that deal, he denounced Chavez as a “dead communist dictator.”
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That makes it really hard to explain why, during the Venezuelan general strike of 2002–2003, Bernie signed a letter along with eighteen Democratic members of Congress expressing support for the dictator and opposing efforts to remove him from office.
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Today's crop of socialists in Washington claims they don't support communist or authoritarian socialism, insisting they have something more peaceful in mind. Bernie insists Denmark is his inspiration—which upset the Danish prime minister, who noted that Denmark actually isn't socialist at all.
⁵⁹

Despite these claims, Bernie can't seem to stop himself from blurting out praise for communist regimes. This is no one-time slip-
up, it's a decades-long habit. In 1988 he honeymooned in the USSR and returned to America declaring, “There are some things that [the USSR does] better than we do and which were, in fact, quite impressive,” going on to rave about the wonders of the Moscow subway system.
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True to form, after the USSR collapsed, Bernie's messaging was noticeably different. At a 2020 CNN town hall, an audience member told Bernie that his father's family had fled the USSR and asked, “How do you rectify your notion of democratic socialism with the failures of socialism in nearly every country that has tried it?” Bernie answered, “Is it your assumption that I supported or believe in authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union? I don't and never have. And I opposed it…. What do I mean when I talk about democratic socialism? It certainly is not the authoritarian communism that existed in the Soviet Union and in other communist countries.”
⁶¹

If that's the case, it's strange that Bernie continually praised the actions of the communist regimes he supposedly opposes. In 1985 he traveled to Nicaragua for celebrations commemorating the sixth anniversary of the communist Sandinista regime. According to the
New York Times
, “At the anniversary celebration, a wire report described a chant rising up: ‘Here, there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.' If Mr. Sanders harbored unease about the Sandinistas, he did not dwell on it.” After returning to Vermont, Bernie wrote a letter to Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega inviting him to Burlington and bemoaning the U.S. media's supposed bias against his regime. But today, with Ortega again ruling Nicaragua as Amnesty International and other human rights groups denounce him for committing crimes against humanity, Bernie voices concern about Ortega's “anti-democratic policies.”
⁶²

Similarly, after returning from a trip to Cuba in 1989, Bernie babbled, “I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people.” He admitted Cuba was “not a perfect society,” but insisted that the communist nation “not only has free health care but very high-quality health care…. The revolution there is far deeper and more profound
than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.”
⁶³
When asked by
60 Minutes
during the 2020 presidential campaign about his praise of the Castro regime, he again changed his tune, claiming, “We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba.” But Bernie just couldn't help himself, following that statement by lauding Castro's “massive literacy program.”
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So Castro may have thrown dissidents into prison camps and murdered them, but at least some of those who didn't resist learned how to read—and mostly government-sanctioned “news” and books.

Despite his halfhearted attempts to distance himself from hard-core communism, Bernie has a long history of supporting radical Marxist organizations. In the 1980 and 1984 U.S. presidential elections, Bernie campaigned for the Socialist Workers' Party, a fringe communist group. As the
Washington Examiner
reported,

In 1980, Sanders “proudly endorsed and supported” Andrew Pulley, the party's presidential candidate, who once said that American soldiers should “take up their guns and shoot their officers.” Sanders was one of three electors for Pulley on the Vermont ballot, stating in a press release: “I fully support the SWP's continued defense of the Cuban revolution.”

Four years later, he backed and campaigned for the SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, saying it was important for there to be “fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology.” During the campaign, Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions and said: “The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it's still developing.”
⁶⁵

And if Bernie now projects himself as merely supporting peaceful assistance for the poor, some of his followers haven't got the message. In video stings, Project Veritas captured multiple Bernie campaign workers and volunteers declaring support for “extreme action,”
warning of mass violence if Bernie doesn't win the Democratic nomination, discussing the need to keep quiet about Marxist-Leninists and anarchists participating in the campaign, and advocating sending their class enemies to Soviet-style forced labor camps.
⁶⁶

Bernie's ideological instincts are obvious. His proposal to abolish private health insurance through his Medicaid for All scheme is similar to his policy proposals from years ago, when he was less guarded about his program than he is today. In the 1970s, he called for “placing doctors on salaries” and implementing a 100 percent tax rate for income over a million dollars a year. He also advocated for the government to seize control of the energy industry, electricity and telephone utilities, banks, “corporations” in general, and drug companies.
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In other words, he called for state control over the main levers of the economy.

That is what socialists want, because that's what socialism means. According to socialism, free individuals can't be trusted to run industries; only the government can be trusted. Why government bureaucrats are smarter or less selfish or less corrupt than businesspeople remains to be seen. But if a socialist gains power, this state of affairs has the benefit of concentrating far more power in his or her own hands.

People can reasonably ask what would be needed to discredit socialism if the centuries-long record of disaster after disaster isn't enough. The answer, clearly, is that for true believers,
nothing
can discredit the ideology. No number of famines, mass murders, or economic collapses will ever be enough to make them question their socialist faith. To the contrary,
everything
is proof of the need for socialism. When the U.S. economy is doing poorly, they claim capitalism is broken and socialism will do better. When the economy is doing well, they say we need socialism to eliminate inequality between the rich and poor. For most reasonable people, the spread of the coronavirus showed the need to be more wary of communist China, but for Bernie and his supporters, it simply proved the need for more socialism.
⁶⁸

Although socialists often spend entire lifetimes arguing over the trivial details of their philosophy, it's possible that no one has
understood socialism better than Margaret Thatcher. She was elected prime minister of Britain in 1979 as a backlash against socialists, who had conducted a decades-long experiment on the British economy. The wide-scale nationalization of industry and other collectivist policies had produced the typical results—economic stagnation, labor unrest, and social strife. But Thatcher understood that the problem with socialism is not just that it fails to meet its goal. The problem is the goal itself. Leveling society to make everyone equal is not only impossible, it's inherently destructive, it breeds corruption, and it's totally incompatible with freedom and limited government. In 1976 Thatcher declared,

One of our principal and continuing priorities when we are returned to office will be to restore the freedoms which the socialists have usurped. Let them learn that it is not a function of the State to possess as much as possible. It is not a function of the State to grab as much as it can get away with. It is not a function of the State to act as ring-master, to crack the whip, dictate the load which all of us must carry or say how high we may climb. It is not a function of the State to ensure that no-one climbs higher than anyone else. All that is the philosophy of socialism. We reject it utterly for, however well-intended, it leads in one direction only: to the erosion and finally the destruction of the democratic way of life.
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So long as socialists continue to fight for their destructive policies, the rest of us will have to remind people, especially young people, about socialism's miserable real-life record. We have to recognize socialism's sinister appeal—its promise of utopian equality, and its relentless scapegoating and encouragement of class warfare. We have to emphasize not only socialism's failures throughout the world, but the dilution of freedom that socialism requires.

With her stunning victory over socialism in Britain, Thatcher provides an example of how to argue our case—relentlessly,
factually, fearlessly, and passionately. Never allow socialists to claim moral superiority—they have none. Never apologize for free markets and freedom, which produced the greatest system of wealth creation in human history. Instead let's put
them
on the defensive and make
them
justify their adherence to a failed, freakish ideology and their mystical faith in government planning that has resulted in anguish and squalor throughout the world.

Considering the American left's long fascination with socialist regimes and its romance with the USSR, it was a stunning turnaround when they suddenly decided in 2016 and 2017 that Russia was our chief enemy worldwide—a country so powerful and evil that it could supposedly corrupt a U.S. presidential election just by putting up some broken-English Facebook and Twitter posts. But if that's the argument they thought would get rid of President Trump, then that's the argument they had to make, and we turn to that topic in the next chapter.

On December 9, 2019, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported that FBI officials had perpetrated a massive fraud on a federal surveillance court when they applied for a warrant and three renewals to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The report was proof that a cabal of rogue agents in the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign, its transition team, and the presidency. For us at the Hannity team, it was proof of something else as well: that we had been right every step of the way.

Democrats and the media mob for three years had peddled lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. They started in the fall of 2016, with claims that Carter Page was working with the Kremlin to influence the election.
¹
By January 2017 they had made public Christopher Steele's infamous dirty dossier, with its wild claims that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was at the heart of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, and that the Trump team had promised foreign policy changes if the Russians helped Trump win the 2016 election. It even claimed the Russians had compromising information on Trump, showing him with hookers in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow.
²

The accusations grew wilder with each day. The left accused Trump of working with Russia to spread misinformation. They claimed to
have proof that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen snuck into Prague to discuss paying hush money to Russian hackers.
³
They claimed Trump Tower hosted a shady server that connected to Russia's Alfa Bank.
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Donald Trump Jr. was supposedly in on the Russia plot. So were Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, half of Congress, and even the National Rifle Association. Every day it was “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

This crazed narrative inflicted terrible harm on both the country and specific individuals. The FBI's investigation destroyed the reputations of patriotic American citizens like Flynn and Page. It inspired the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, who reigned as a dark shadow over 675 days of the Trump administration, tyrannizing Washington with a flood of subpoenas and witness demands. Mueller never found any Trump-Russia “collusion,” but he jailed more than a half dozen people for unrelated crimes. A corrupt media establishment abandoned its most basic duties to truth and fairness, even as the liberal elite abandoned that most core American concept: innocent until proven guilty.

Yet it was all a giant hoax—one unlike anything we've ever seen in our lives. It was brought to you by the very same people who rejected the 2016 election results. They hated that Donald Trump won that election fair and square, and were willing to spin any fantasy to take him out. And they stick to that fantasy even after four separate investigations have proven them wrong. The FBI found no evidence of Russian collusion. Neither did a House Intelligence Committee probe run by California's Devin Nunes. Nor has a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. Mueller, too, struck out.

Even as the mob peddled their lies, an all-star cast on my radio and TV shows was providing Americans the real story. Mark Levin, Dan Bongino, Sara Carter, John Solomon, Gregg Jarrett, Alan Dershowitz, David Limbaugh, Joe diGenova, Victoria Toensing, and many other standouts joined us to document how a corrupt upper echelon of law enforcement and intelligence officials abused their powers to spy
on a campaign and presidency they didn't like. They relied on phony intel, listened in on conversations, used undercover informants, and leaked bogus claims. We the people gave them powerful intelligence tools to protect us, and they turned that weaponry back on the man whom Americans duly elected to office. The Fake News Media trashed our Hannity ensemble cast every day for reporting these truths. But we never relented. We covered this very real abuse of power, and the 434-page Horowitz report was vindication. We were dead-on right.

We were right, for instance, that the FBI had launched a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016 on the thinnest of suspicions. Forget all the crazy later conspiracy claims. According to the IG report, the FBI started with one paltry piece of information: a tip from Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat then based in the United Kingdom.
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For some unknown reason, Downer arranged to have a drink in May 2016 with a lower-level Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos. Downer later claimed Papadopoulos told him the Russians intended to release information that would hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Papadopoulos later testified that he didn't even remember saying that to Downer. But suppose he did. So what? A lot of people at the time were talking about the secret server Clinton kept as secretary of state and whether it had been hacked by foreign governments. What we have here is our crack FBI admitting it launched a full-fledged probe on the basis of worldwide gossip.

Making this story even more mysterious is that Papadopoulos remembers a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud telling him in April 2016—right before he met with Downer—that the Russians had Clinton emails. In his report, Mueller claimed Mifsud had “connections to Russia,” to make it sound as if the FBI had good reason to
investigate all this.
⁶
(Notably, Mueller stopped short of FBI director James Comey's characterization of Mifsud as a “Russian agent”
⁷
or House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff's description of him as a “Russian cut-out.”)
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But reports show Mifsud is actually connected to all kinds of Western intelligence agencies, making him an unlikely Russian asset. The bottom line is that the FBI's claim that it had good reason for starting a full-fledged counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign doesn't wash.

We were also right that the FBI used the dirty dossier in their investigation. For nearly a year, Democrats and the media described the dossier as a series of high-value “intelligence reports,” passing off its author, Christopher Steele, as a “well-placed Western intelligence source,”
⁹
a “Russia expert,”
¹⁰
and “a veteran spy” for Britain's MI6 who “spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters.”
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NBC News actually ran this headline: “Christopher Steele, Trump Dossier Author, Is a Real-Life James Bond.”
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Comey would later insist Steele was “a credible source, someone with a track record, someone who was a credible and respected member of an allied intelligence service during his career.”
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America learned the ugly truth in October 2017, thanks to the Nunes investigation in the House Intelligence Committee. We reported on it, and the Horowitz report confirmed it. The dossier wasn't the work of a well-meaning intel professional. It was a political dirty trick, a hit job paid for by the Clinton campaign and fed to the FBI to sabotage Trump.
¹⁴
It was the source of all those claims that Page and Manafort were at the heart of a Trump-Russia “conspiracy.”

The dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, which paid more than $12.4 million during the 2016 campaign to a law firm called Perkins Coie. That legal outfit funneled cash to Fusion GPS, a political strategist firm, which in turn hired Steele.
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The Clinton campaign claimed all this as a legal expense and hid from the public its hiring of a notorious opposition research firm to dig up Russian dirt on Trump. Some people would
call that a campaign finance violation, but Clinton got away with it—as usual.

The FBI went running with its dossier to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get a surveillance warrant on Carter Page, who in early 2016 joined the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser. The FISA court not only granted a warrant against Page in October 2016, it agreed to three additional renewals—putting Page under surveillance for nearly an entire year. The surveillance was extremely intrusive, including physical searches and authorization to spy on Page when he traveled abroad.
¹⁶
And as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained, FISA warrants don't just cover “forward-going communications.” The Page warrants freed the FBI to snoop through any
past
Page calls, texts, or emails. “They were hoping to get a motherlode of communications involving Page and Trump campaign people,” McCarthy told radio's Hugh Hewitt in 2018.
¹⁷

We were right that the dirty dossier was the only reason the FBI could get its warrants. Comey obfuscated the facts about that early on, to protect the FBI. He told Fox News's Bret Baier that “there was a significant amount of additional material about Page and why there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of a foreign power, and the dossier was part of that but was not all of it or a critical part of it, to my recollection.”
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Comey's Fake News Media pals kept up that fiction for years.

We already knew Comey's statements did not reflect reality, thanks to the Nunes memo, which was issued in February 2018 after House Intel members finally were allowed to review the FBI's applications against Page. The memo said that the dossier “formed an essential part” of the Page applications, and that former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe testified to the committee in December 2017 that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the [FISA court] without the Steele dossier information.”
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It confirmed the FBI had hid from the FISA court the Clinton-DNC connection to the dossier (even though FBI officials knew about the shady connection and
had been warned that Steele had a bias against Trump). It revealed that the FBI had given the court the dossier before it was vetted.

We also reported on a criminal referral of Steele from Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley that was declassified the same month. The Grassley-Graham document confirmed key sections of the Nunes memo, noting that the Page applications “relied heavily on Mr. Steele's dossier claims”; that the FBI had failed to get “meaningful corroboration” of the dossier; and that the Bureau didn't tell the FISA court about the Clinton cash or Steele's bias. But the Grassley-Graham referral also delved into Steele's credibility, tearing up the FBI's claim to the court that Steele was a reliable source. Like the Nunes memo, the referral noted that the FBI had in fact fired Steele in October 2016 for leaking his dossier details to the press.
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Liberals and their press cheerleaders had a meltdown over both the memos and claimed Nunes, Grassley, and Graham were either lying or exaggerating. They were egged on by the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the fact-challenged Adam Schiff, who issued a rival memo to the Nunes memo that bluntly declared, “FBI and DOJ officials did
not
‘abuse' the [FISA] process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” It repeated Comey's unsubstantiated statement, saying the FBI had made “only narrow use” of the dossier, and also claimed DOJ had been transparent about the Clinton connection.
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The press circled the wagons and presented his memo as truth.

In December 2019, the report by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz confirmed everything we'd reported on the FISA warrants on Carter Page:

1. No dossier, no warrants.
   
2. The dossier was unverified garbage.
   
3. The FBI knew the dossier was a political hit job.
   
4. The FBI nonetheless used it to spy on the Trump campaign, duping the FISA court.
   

The details were gorier than even we expected. Comey had insisted that the FBI had behaved perfectly. “I have total confidence that the FISA process was followed and that the entire case was handled in a thoughtful, responsible way by DOJ and the FBI,” he said.
²²
Even former Trump deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein made it sound as if it would be impossible for the FBI to hoodwink the court. In May 2018, he lambasted House Republicans who were investigating the FBI and boasted, “There's a lot of talk about FISA applications. Many people I've seen talk about it seem not to recognize… In order to get a FISA warrant, you need an affidavit signed by a career federal law enforcement officer who swears that the information is true….”
²³

Or not. Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz blew up this narrative, reporting that the Clinton-bought-and-paid-for dossier “played a central and essential role in the FBI's” decision to get the warrant to spy on Page.
²⁴
The FBI had wanted a warrant in August 2016, but government lawyers said the Bureau didn't have enough evidence. It was only when the FBI investigating team (code name Crossfire Hurricane) obtained the Steele dossier on September 19, 2016, that the lawyers gave the green light.

The IG meanwhile went on to describe seventeen “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI's applications.
²⁵
That's a bureaucratic way of saying that the FBI repeatedly engaged in a premeditated fraud on the FISA court.

It turns out the Steele “intelligence” was little more than lies and conspiracy theories based largely on a single source who denied to the FBI that he had a network of sub-sources, as Steele repeatedly claimed.
²⁶
Steele himself described one supposed sub-source to the FBI as a “boaster” and an “egoist” and someone who “may engage in some embellishment.”
²⁷
The FBI didn't bother to do any vetting of this source prior to submitting its application on Page. And when it finally got around to speaking to this person (starting in January 2017), the source said that he/she never even expected Steele to include “statements in reports or present them as facts” since “it was just talk.” The
source “explained that his/her information came from ‘word of mouth and hearsay;' ‘conversation that [he/she] had with friends over beers;' and that some of the information, such as allegations about Trump's sexual activities, were statements he/she heard made in ‘jest.' ”
²⁸
In other words, the FBI's source was relaying bar gossip.