February
17th, 2019
The
illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s
use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high
Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.
So
has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump
presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will
become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history,
marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to
overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.
Preparing the Battlefield
No palace coup can take place without the perception of popular anger at a president.
No palace coup can take place without the perception of popular anger at a president.
The
deep state is by nature cowardly. It does not move unless it feels it can
disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed, those efforts will be
seen as popular and necessary ~ as expressed in tell-all book titles such as
fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or in disgraced Deputy FBI
Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The Threat.
In
candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of the battlefield
translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political progressives
and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal likely would
appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to that end.
All
through the 2016 campaign and during the first two years of the Trump
presidency the media’s treatment, according to liberal adjudicators of press
coverage, ran about 90 percent negative toward Trump ~ a landmark bias that
continues today.
Journalists
themselves consulted with the Clinton campaign to coordinate attacks. From the
Wikileaks trove, journalistic grandees such as John Harwood, Mark Leibovich, Dana
Milbank, and Glenn Thrush often communicated (and even post factum were
unapologetic about doing so) with John Podesta’s staff to construct various
anti-Trump themes and have the Clinton campaign review or even audit them in
advance.
Some
contract “journalists” apparently were paid directly by Fusion GPS ~ created by
former reporters Glen Simpson of the Wall Street Journal and Susan
Schmidt of the Washington Post ~ to spread lurid stories from the
dossier. Others more refined like Christiane Amanpour and James Rutenberg had
argued for a new journalistic ethos that partisan coverage was certainly
justified in the age of Trump, given his assumed existential threat to The
Truth. Or as Rutenberg put it in 2016:
I suppose Rutenberg never considered that half the country might have considered the Hillary Clinton presidency “potentially dangerous,” and yet did not expect the evening news, in 90 percent of its coverage, to reflect such suspicions.“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”
The
Democratic National Committee’s appendages often helped to massage CNN news
coverage ~ such as Donna Brazile’s primary debate tip-off to the Clinton
campaign or CNN’s consultation with the DNC about forming talking points for a
scheduled Trump interview.
So-called
“bombshell,” “watershed,” “turning-point,” and “walls closing in” fake news
aired in 24-hour news bulletin cycles. The media went from fabrications about
Trump’s supposed removal of the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval
Office, to the mythologies in the Steele dossier, to lies about the Trump Tower
meeting, to assurances that Michael Cohen would testify to Trump’s suborning
perjury, and on and on.
CNN
soon proved that it is no longer a news organization at all ~ as reporters like
Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake
Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and
Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, and Lex Harris all trafficked in false
rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump, while hosts and guest hosts
such as Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, and Anderson Cooper stooped to obscenity
and grossness to attack Trump.
Both
politicos and celebrities tried to drive Trump’s numbers down to facilitate
some sort of popular ratification for his removal. Hollywood and the coastal
corridor punditry exhausted public expressions of assassinating or injuring the
president, as the likes of Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp, Robert de Niro, Peter
Fonda, Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others vied
rhetorically to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead, and blow up the
president.
Left
wing social media and mainstream journalism spread sensational lies about
supposed maniacal Trump supporters in MAGA hats. They constructed fantasies
that veritable white racists were now liberated to run amuck insulting and
beating up people of color as they taunted the poor and victimized minorities
with vicious Trump sloganeering ~ even as the Covington farce and now the even
more embarrassing Jussie Smollett charade evaporated without apologies from the
media and progressive merchants of such hate.
At
the same time, liberal attorneys, foundations, Democratic politicians, and
progressive activists variously sued to overturn the election on false charges
of rigged voting machines. They sought to subvert the Electoral College. They
introduced articles of impeachment. They sued to remove Trump under the
Emoluments Clause. They attempted to invoke the 25th Amendment. And they even
resurrected the ossified Logan Act ~ before focusing on the appointment of a
special counsel to discredit the Trump presidency. Waiting for the 2020
election was seen as too quaint.
Weaponizing the Deep State
During the 2016 election, the Obama Department of Justice warped the Clinton email scandal investigation, from Bill Clinton’s secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to unethical immunity given to the unveracious Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to James Comey’s convoluted predetermined treatment of “likely winner” Clinton, and to DOJ’s Bruce Ohr’s flagrant conflict of interests in relation to Fusion GPS.
During the 2016 election, the Obama Department of Justice warped the Clinton email scandal investigation, from Bill Clinton’s secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to unethical immunity given to the unveracious Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to James Comey’s convoluted predetermined treatment of “likely winner” Clinton, and to DOJ’s Bruce Ohr’s flagrant conflict of interests in relation to Fusion GPS.
About
a dozen FBI and DOJ grandees have now resigned, retired, been fired, or
reassigned for unethical and likely illegal behavior ~ and yet have not faced
criminal indictments. The reputation of the FBI as venerable agency is all but
wrecked. Its administrators variously have libeled the Trump voters, expressed
hatred for Trump, talked of “insurance policies” in ending the Trump candidacy,
and inserted informants into the Trump campaign.
The
former Obama directors of the CIA and National Intelligence, with security
clearances intact, hit the television airways as paid “consultants” and almost
daily accused the sitting president of Russian collusion and treason ~ without
cross-examination or notice that both previously had lied under oath to Congress
(and did so without subsequent legal exposure), and both were likely knee-deep
in the dissemination of the Steele dossier among Obama administration
officials.
John
Brennan’s CIA likely helped to spread the Fusion GPS dossier among elected and
administrative state officials. Some in the NSC in massive and unprecedented
fashion requested the unmasking of surveilled names of Trump subordinates, and
then illegally leaked them to the press.
The
FISA courts, fairly or not, are now mostly discredited, given they either were
willingly or naively hoodwinked by FBI and DOJ officials who submitted as chief
evidence for surveillance on American citizens, an unverified dossier ~ without
disclosure that the bought campaign hit-piece was paid for by Hillary Clinton,
authored by a discredited has-been British agent, relied on murky purchased
Russian sources, and used in circular fashion to seed news accounts of supposed
Trump misbehavior.
The Mueller Investigation
The Crown Jewel in the coup was the appointment of special counsel Robert Muller to discover supposed 2016 Trump-Russian election collusion. Never has any special investigation been so ill-starred from its conception.
The Crown Jewel in the coup was the appointment of special counsel Robert Muller to discover supposed 2016 Trump-Russian election collusion. Never has any special investigation been so ill-starred from its conception.
Mueller’s
appointment was a result of his own friend James Comey’s bitter stunt of
releasing secret, confidential and even classified memos of presidential
conversations. Acting DOJ Attorney Rod Rosenstein appointed a former colleague
Mueller ~ although as a veteran himself of the Clinton email scandal
investigations and the FISA fraudulent writ requests, Rosenstein was far more
conflicted than was the recused Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Mueller
then packed his investigative team with lots of Clinton donors and partisans,
some of whom had legally represented Clinton subordinates and even the Clinton
Foundation or voiced support for anti-Trump movements.
Mueller
himself and Andrew Weissmann have had a long record of investigatory and
prosecutorial overreach that had on occasion resulted in government liability
and court mandated federal restitution. In such polarized times, neither should
have involved in such an investigation. Two subordinate FBI investigators were
caught earlier on conducting an affair over their FBI-issued cell phones, and
during the election cycle they slurred the object of their subsequent
investigation, ridiculed Trump voters, and bragged that Trump would never be
elected. Mueller later staggered, and then hid for weeks the reasons for, their
respective firings.
The
team soon discovered there was no Trump-Russian 2016 election collusion ~ and
yet went ahead to leverage Trump campaign subordinates on process crimes in
hopes of finding some culpability in Trump’s past 50-year business, legal, and
tax records. The point was not to find who colluded with whom (if it had been,
then Hillary Clinton would be now indicted for illegally hiring with campaign
funds a foreign national to buy foreign fabrications to discredit her
opponent), but to find the proper mechanism to destroy the presumed guilty
Donald Trump.
The
Mueller probe has now failed in that gambit of proving “collusion” (as even
progressive investigative reporters and some FBI investigators had predicted),
but succeeded brilliantly in two ways.
First, The “counterintelligence” investigation subverted two years of the Trump presidency by constant leaks that Trump soon would be indicted, jailed, disgraced, or impeached. As a result, Trump’s stellar economic and foreign policy record would never earn fifty percent of public support.Second, Mueller’s preemptive attacks offered an effective offensive defense for the likely felonious behavior of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, and a host of others. While the Mueller lawyers threatened to destroy the lives of bit players like Jerome Corsi, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone, they de facto provided exemption to a host of the Washington hierarchy who had lied under oath, obstructed justice, illegally leaked to the press, unmasked and leaked names of surveilled Americans, and misled federal courts under the guise of a “higher loyalty” to the cause of destroying Donald J. Trump.
The Palace Coup
All of the above came to a head with the firing of the chronic leaker FBI Director James Comey (who would lie to the president about his not being a target of an FBI investigation, lie to House investigatory committees by pleading amnesia and ignorance on 245 occasions, and repeatedly lie to his own FBI bureaucrats).
All of the above came to a head with the firing of the chronic leaker FBI Director James Comey (who would lie to the president about his not being a target of an FBI investigation, lie to House investigatory committees by pleading amnesia and ignorance on 245 occasions, and repeatedly lie to his own FBI bureaucrats).
In
May 2017, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe took over from the fired Comey. His
candidate wife recently had been a recipient of huge Clinton-related campaign
PAC donations shortly before he began investigating the Clinton email scandal.
McCabe would soon be cited by the Inspector General for lying to federal
investigators on numerous occasions ~ cynically stooping even to lie to his own
New York FBI subordinates to invest scarce resources to hunt for their own
nonexistent leaks as a mechanism for disguising his own quite real and illegal
leaking.
The
newly promoted McCabe apparently felt that it was his moment to become famous
for taking out a now President Trump. Thus, he assembled a FBI and DOJ cadre to
open a counterintelligence investigation of the sitting president on no other
grounds but the fumes of an evaporating Clinton opposition dossier and
perceived anger among the FBI that their director had just been fired. In
addition, apparently now posing as Andrew McCabe, MD, he informally head
counted how many of Trump’s own cabinet members could be convinced by McCabe’s
own apparent medical expertise to help remove the president on grounds of
physical and mental incapacity under the 25th Amendment. This was an attempted, albeit pathetic, coup against an elected
president and the first really in the history of the United States.
At
one point, McCabe claims that the acting Attorney General of the United States
Rod Rosenstein volunteered to wear a wire to entrap his boss President Trump ~ in
the manner of Trump’s own attorney Michael Cohen’s entrapment of Trump, in the
manner of James Comey taking entrapment notes on confidential Trump one-on-one
meetings and leaking them to the press, and in the manner of the Department of
Justice surveilling Trump subordinates through FISA and other court authorizations.
McCabe
was iconic of an utterly corrupt FBI Washington hierarchy, which we now know
from the behavior of its disgraced and departed leadership. They posed as
patriotic scouts, but in reality proved themselves arrogant, smug, and
incompetent. They harbored such a sense of superiority that they were convinced
they could act outside the law in reifying an “insurance policy” that would end
the Trump presidency.
The
thinking of the conspirators initially had been predicated on three assumptions
thematic during this three-year long government effort to destroy Trump:
One, during 2016, Hillary Clinton would certainly win the election and FBI and DOJ unethical and illegal behavior would be forgotten if not rewarded, given the Clintons’ own signature transgressions and proven indifference to the law;Two, Trump was so controversial and the fabricated dossier was so vile and salacious, that seeded rumors of Trump’s faked perversity gave them de facto exemptions to do whatever they damned pleased;Three, Trump’s low polls, his controversial reset of American policy, and the general contempt in which he was held by the bipartisan coastal elite, celebrities, and the deep state, meant that even illegal means to continue the campaign-era effort to destroy Trump and now abort his presidency were felt to be moral and heroic acts without legal consequences, and the media would see the conspirators as heroes.
In
sum, the Left and the administrative state, in concert with the media, after
failing to stop the Trump campaign, regrouped. They ginned up a media-induced
public hysteria, with the residue of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s illegal
opposition research, and manipulated it to put in place a special counsel,
stocked with partisans.
Then,
not thugs in sunglasses and epaulettes, not oligarchs in private jets, not
shaggy would-be Marxists, but sanctimonious arrogant bureaucrats in suits and
ties used their government agencies to seek to overturn the 2016 election,
abort a presidency, and subvert the U.S. Constitution. And they did all that
and more on the premise that they were our moral superiors and had uniquely
divine rights to destroy a presidency that they loathed.
Shame
on all these failed conspirators and their abettors, and may these immoral
people finally earn a long deserved legal and moral reckoning.
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Earlier work on this topic:
Trump
Under Attack By 187 Organizations Directly Funded By George Soros
Earlier work on this topic:
Not a bad article . . . only have one gripe.
ReplyDelete"This was an attempted, albeit pathetic, coup against an elected president and the first really in the history of the United States."
I can think of 2 earlier coups: one attempted & one successful (JFKs assassination) The attempted was back in the 30s against FDR by Prescott Bush, Henry Ford & other 1%ers who attempted to get Gen. Smedley Butler to mount a military coup. He refused,dobbed them into Congress who did a half assed protect-the-elite style investigation which amounted to nothing. Lets hope the current attempt leads to actual real punishment commensurate with the crimes. Colour me cynical as I'm not holding my breath.