The official House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence memo about intelligence surveillance abuses perpetrated during the 2016 election cycle finally came out today. It confirms the terrible things we’ve been hearing about the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice. The Left tried to use the power of government to rig a presidential election, and then when that failed, to frame Donald Trump for an offense he did not commit.
The memo is devastating. It shows how corrupt and downright evil many players in the nation’s capital are. No wonder Democrats shrieked so loudly in protest of the memo’s release: it indicts them. (Full memo here.)
So many people need to be fired, sued, imprisoned, or disbarred. Too bad tarring and feathering isn’t practiced anymore; it worked wonders for the Founders.
All of these unethical things — some of which are crimes — could never have been done without the personal knowledge and consent of President Obama. Obama is a Marxist and an Islamophile. He doesn’t care about democracy. He cares only about winning. If people get hurt or killed in the process, Obama is fine with that. The man even stayed behind in Washington after leaving the presidency in order to fight President Trump’s efforts to undo his destructive legacy.
The newly declassified four-page memo, compiled by HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), was based on classified information supplied by the FBI and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice. The two organizations coughed up the documents only after Nunes threatened contempt of Congress citations.
As expected, the memo provides evidence that during the 2016 election cycle top officials in the Obama administration abused their authority to obtain surveillance warrants against members of President Trump’s election campaign from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. There was, as writers like me have been saying all along, a vast left-wing/Deep State conspiracy to undemocratically reverse the results of the election that gave us Donald Trump as president. This conspiracy continues even now.
The Washington establishment wanted Hillary Clinton to become president — they still do — no matter the cost, and President Obama and his minions were more than happy to help undermine Trump’s candidacy and then later, his presidency.
The memo makes clear that DoJ and FBI officials relied on the ridiculous “piss-gate” dossier filled with Kremlin-supplied misinformation about President Trump’s virtually nonexistent ties to Russia to obtain surveillance warrants from the secret court. The dossier by sleazebag rent-a-spook Christopher Steele, whom the memo reveals as a frothing-at-the-mouth Trump-hater, was a Democrat work product. Steele was paid $160,000 by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign via the Perkins Coie law firm and Fusion GPS. Obama administration officials knew this and committed a fraud on the court by withholding the information. In fact, the administration, that is, the FBI, “had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information,” according to the memo.
The Obama administration compounded the fraud on the court by presenting a Yahoo News article as corroboration for the dossier, knowing that the article didn’t contain actual reporting and was a mere regurgitation of the major points in the dossier. The memo states, “This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News.” Of course, information about the leaking was conveniently left out of court documents.
On (at least) four occasions the Obama administration committed a grotesque abuse of process by failing to disclose the origins of the dossier in applications for surveillance of Carter Page, an American citizen and obscure Trump campaign volunteer. Russia supposedly tried and failed repeatedly to recruit Page as a spy, but despite this big nothing-burger of a data point, the corrupt leadership of the DoJ and FBI wouldn’t drop Page as a target because he was part of the Trump campaign. He was too valuable to them as a means of undermining Trump.
The Steele dossier was the sine qua non of the conspirators’ strategy. Without it, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would not have granted a warrant against Page.
The dossier’s centrality to the plot is not a figment of Republicans’ imagination.
As the memo states, “Deputy Director [Andrew] McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.”
This is only the beginning. More reports are coming.