Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (17 page)

Speaking of weasel moves, also consider this: Comey admitted the entire reason he leaked that memo information to the
New York Times
was to pressure the DOJ to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump-Russia collusion. Thanks to all the Horowitz digging, however, we now know that by that time, Comey and his corrupt FBI cronies knew the collusion claim was a lie. They knew Clinton was behind the dossier, that Steele was a dirty political operator, that his own main source admitted the dossier was unconfirmed gossip, and that they hadn't verified a single accusation. Yet Comey still schemed to appoint
a special prosecutor, who spent two more years putting the country through hell. This one leak alone shows how political Comey was from the get-go. This was an FBI director out to get President Trump.

Or how about his underhanded ensnaring of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn? Only a few days after Trump was sworn into office, the FBI sent agents to interview the general about his transition-period conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. They'd discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia and a UN resolution condemning Israel. The FBI concocted the outrageous theory that Flynn might have violated the Logan Act, a law that bars U.S. citizens from engaging with foreign governments without sign-off. No serious person prosecutes the Logan Act. Only two people have ever been indicted for violating the act, and the last one was in 1852.

Comey later bragged that he took advantage of the “chaos” of the new administration by sending agents to interview Flynn without following protocol. That FBI interview was something “I probably wouldn't have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation, more organized administration, in the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration,” Comey boasted in 2018. “In both of those administrations, there was a process. And so, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel and there would be discussions and approvals, and who would be there. And I thought, it's early enough. Let's just send a couple guys over.”
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The sick reality is that Comey didn't need to ask Flynn about those conversations. The FBI already had the transcripts. The only reason to interview Flynn was to set him up for a perjury trap. This was confirmed by handwritten notes taken after a meeting consisting of Comey, McCabe, and FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap, in which the note taker—presumably Priestap—asked if the goal of the Flynn interrogation was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or
get him fired.”
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And McCabe admitted that he lulled Flynn into thinking he didn't need a lawyer present for the interview and purposely omitted the standard warning against lying to the FBI. They wanted Flynn “relaxed.”
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It later emerged that the FBI had decided to close its investigation of Flynn weeks before his interview, having found no derogatory information on him, but Strzok intervened, saying his superiors wanted it kept open.
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Flynn had conducted hundreds of discussions during the presidential transition, and his recollections of the Kislyak conversation didn't match what was in the transcript. The FBI interviewing agents nonetheless said they saw “nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying.”
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And why would he intentionally lie? Flynn had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and surely knew the FBI was monitoring Kislyak's calls. Despite all this, Mueller went after Flynn for “lying,” driving him to the edge of bankruptcy and threatening to indict Flynn's son on unrelated issues. Flynn fell on his sword for his family and pleaded guilty to lying.

This is how the FBI and a special prosecutor treated a thirty-three-year veteran who protected his country over many years in combat. They set him up, put the screws to him, and gloated over their “plea deal.” The case was drenched in malfeasance and could proceed only as long as the evidence of the government's abuses stayed hidden. Once Attorney General Barr appointed prosecutor Jeff Jensen to review the case, and Jensen began producing that evidence, the case disintegrated. Despite the judge's outrageous resistance, the Department of Justice then sought to drop the prosecution, admitting there was no legitimate reason for the FBI to have interviewed Flynn in the first place.

How about Saint Jim's claims that he doesn't lie? Comey signed off on the very first FISA application against Page and then two more renewals. Every one of those warrant requests was marked “verified” at the top of the document. He swore three times that the evidence in those applications was true, accurate, and verified. None of it was.

He also misled President-elect Trump when he went to “warn” him
about the dossier in January 2017. Comey outright told Trump that he was not the target of an investigation. But one of the Horowitz reports revealed that Comey was using that meeting to probe Trump for information and to get his reaction to the dirty dossier. He didn't tell Trump that just a couple of months earlier he'd signed a FISA into one of his campaign aides. He instead told Trump the very dossier that he'd verified as truthful in that application was “salacious and unverified.”
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About the only FBI official who even competed with Comey on the liar front was his deputy. Andrew McCabe was also fired from the FBI for lying. Horowitz issued a separate report about McCabe's behavior in February 2018, a seething rebuke of the fired deputy director. It examined McCabe's role in disclosing the existence of an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe's wife had run for state election in Virginia and taken money from a Clinton ally, and McCabe was getting questioned over his impartiality. So he authorized the release of information to the
Wall Street Journal
, resulting in a story that suggested McCabe was heroically pushing forward a Clinton investigation.

The Horowitz report slammed him for a leak designed solely to “advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and for lying about the leak. The IG said McCabe was guilty of “lack of candor”—that's “lying” in FBI-speak—at least three times under oath in talks with investigators. He also told Comey he didn't know who was behind the leak. And he was unclear with investigators about what he'd told Comey.
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And he blamed FBI colleagues for his own leak. This troubled relationship with the truth is presumably why Fake News CNN hired McCabe as a commentator—he fits right in.

This is the same McCabe who says that in the spring of 2017 he discussed with Rosenstein a plan to have the deputy attorney general wear a wire during conversations with Trump and secretly try to recruit cabinet members to remove the president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
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Assuming McCabe's being honest just this once, let's call this what it was: McCabe was actively working to stage a coup against the commander in chief.

Yet McCabe also skipped out of jail time. Washington prosecutors ended his case in February 2020, after the same disgraced FBI cabal that caused this mess came to his rescue. The
New York Times
earlier reported, “A key witness in the case—Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer whom Mr. McCabe authorized to speak to the
Wall Street Journal
reporter—also told the grand jury that he was not motivated to lie about the episode…. Her sympathetic testimony to Mr. McCabe would most likely be a problem for prosecutors.”
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These FBI officials weren't the only government players engaged in mass corruption. They had help from the intel community. Never forget Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's warning to Trump in January 2017. The Obama intel groups had rushed to release their official “assessment” of Russian interference in the 2016 election and to distort intelligence to claim that Putin had interfered specifically to get Trump elected. The president-elect correctly pointed out that intelligence forces were playing politics. Schumer crowed that Trump would rue the day he said that. “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC.
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They were already sabotaging Trump under the direction of partisans like former CIA head John Brennan. Intel community leaders were part of the plot to gin up the investigation into Trump, his associates, his campaign, his transition, and later his presidency. And they were likely behind the leaks of raw intelligence designed to sabotage Trump team members like Flynn.

Since crawling from the CIA straight into the arms of NBC News and MSNBC, Brennan has repeatedly made vicious, bitter accusations against Trump. He's called the president's behavior “treasonous” and once raged on Twitter at Trump, “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.” Maybe no surprise then that in a May 2017 congressional hearing, Brennan claimed he was the guy behind the Trump
investigation. He said the CIA discovered intelligence about contacts between Russian officials and Americans and made sure every “bit” of it was shared with the FBI. He claimed those details “served as the basis for the FBI investigation.”
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Brennan is also the reason the story exploded on the public in the fall of 2016. Brennan kept pushing through the spring and summer of 2016 for the intel community to take the line that Russia was working to get Trump elected, but he couldn't convince some of his colleagues to go that far. So he used an August meeting with former Senate minority leader Harry Reid to voice his conspiracy theory. And sure enough, Mr. Reid instantly sent a letter to Comey—which leaked—asking about the “direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign.” He demanded the FBI launch a full investigation, just as Brennan had hoped.
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It was law enforcement and intel figures who perpetrated the corruption. But we also need to hold to account the people who then aided it and covered it up, pursuing their own agenda against Trump. Mueller is at the top of that list. Mueller had the opportunity—the obligation—to get to the truth about the political corruption, the dossier, the FBI's abuse of power, and its lies. He instead kept alive the FBI's collusion hoax for years, feeding the fevered anti-Trump press and undermining the Trump administration's ability to govern.

The fix was in the minute Mueller chose for his team the same Obama holdovers who had worked side by side with Comey and McCabe and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates on their Trump takedown. That included prosecutors like Andrew “Pit Bull” Weissmann and Jeannie Rhee, both fervent Democrats. Of the seventeen attorneys whom Mueller had publicly appointed by 2018, thirteen were registered Democrats and half of those had donated to Clinton's
presidential campaign.
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This group hired an army of investigators, subpoenaed millions of documents, and spent more than $30 million in a desperate attempt to prove a collusion accusation that the FBI already knew was false.

Mueller's team left a trail of devastation. It went after Flynn and other Trump officials for “lying” to the FBI or the special counsel. That included George Papadopoulos, who from the start had cooperated with the FBI and the special counsel investigation but was sentenced to two weeks in jail anyway. The team jailed former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for unrelated financial crimes. Ditto former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Manafort—who was never accused of any violent crimes—was held in solitary confinement and locked in a cell for twenty-three hours a day as part of an intense pressure campaign to get him to plead guilty. Roger Stone endured a predawn raid by more than a dozen armed FBI agents at his house, where a CNN news crew just happened to be positioned at the time. This is not how our American democracy and system of justice are supposed to work.

And yet here's what Mueller never found: a single case of a Trump person conspiring with Russians. His final 448-page report had to admit he failed to discover a shred of evidence to support the insane conspiracy theories of the prior three years.

Still, Mueller's team couldn't leave it at that—his report included an entire second section meditating on whether President Trump had committed “obstruction of justice” throughout the Mueller probe. The team was furious Trump had questioned their motives and denounced their probe as a “witch hunt.” So they devoted 187 pages to Trump's tweets and whether he had ordered Mueller fired. The very fact that Mueller completed his project—and was provided every resource he needed—was proof there was never any obstruction. Unable to recommend prosecution for a nonexistent crime, Mueller left it to DOJ superiors to decide whether his obstruction “evidence” was worthy of an indictment. The DOJ determined there was absolutely no ground
for a case, but Mueller's real interest was in providing Democrats in Congress a road map for impeachment.

Cue the Mueller House testimony of July 2019. Democrats vowed the special counsel would bring his report “to life.”
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They promised Mueller would swoop in and prove that Trump remained an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a separate Mueller prosecution—thereby laying the groundwork for impeachment. Instead, Mueller's stumbling, incoherent House testimony was an epic embarrassment. He spent the day confused and dazed, unable to remember basic facts, slow to comprehend questions, and evasive or clueless on anything to do with Hillary, the dossier, or obvious FBI malfeasance. “I'm not going to get into that” was his favorite line. By the end, the media was in mourning, the most depressed they'd been since Trump was elected.