She’s old, obsolete, and irrelevant, but when you search for who’s at the bottom of almost any political corruption, Hillary Clinton always manages to slither back into the spotlight. The September 29 letter from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham is only the latest example.
The letter makes three points:
Instead of investigating Clinton’s scheme, Comey and FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe — probably at Obama’s direction — buried it under the infamous “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and his 2016 campaign that was already under way.
Let’s set this in context. The Hillary Clinton campaign, through the Perkins, Coie law firm, hired a company called Fusion GPS to gather information about Trump’s supposed connections to the Russian government. Fusion hired former British spy Christopher Steele to gather the information, which became the “Steele dossier,” some three dozen memos that alleged all sorts of connections between Trump, his campaign, and Moscow.
Steele’s primary “sub-source” for the information in the dossier was Igor Danchenko, whom the FBI had been investigating because it believed Danchenko was a Russian spy.
The Crossfire Hurricane investigation, during which the FBI falsified surveillance warrant applications against Trump campaign officials and pursued people such as one-time Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and innocents such as Carter Page and Gen. Michael Flynn, lasted until then–deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to continue the investigation. Mueller’s two-year investigation found no evidence of conspiracy or collusion by Trump or his campaign with the Russian government.
Shocked and despondent at Mueller’s failure to find such evidence, the Democrats’ (and the media’s) irrational hatred of Trump led congressional Dems to their ridiculous impeachment of him in January.
Thus, for more than three years, these charades consumed the attention of Trump, much of his administration, and essentially all of the U.S. media. In short, with little effort on his part, Putin’s disinformation campaign — which it undoubtedly was — with the help of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the FBI, tied up an American president and our government for three years.
Few — if any — disinformation campaigns in history were as successful. In a perverse way, Putin’s campaign is almost admirable because of the way it played into the anxieties and frustrations of the Democrats and the media.
Its effluvia continue to plague us and the president and — most of all — Gen. Mike Flynn.
Let’s not forget that the wrongful prosecution of Flynn continues despite the Justice Department’s effort to dismiss the charges against him. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan is apparently waiting for the election to decide whether he will dismiss the charges against Flynn, hoping for a Biden administration that would withdraw the Justice Department’s motion and continue the persecution of Flynn.
According to Sean Davis, co-founder of the Federalist, Trump’s CIA Director Gina Haspel is personally blocking the declassification of documents that would detail the corrupt actions of some of the most senior members of the intelligence community during the 2016 election.
This should be no surprise to anyone because, as I detailed in July of last year, Haspel is John Brennan’s acolyte and protégé. Her allegiance is to Brennan and the intelligence community, not to the truth. In “Worse Than Watergate,” parts 1 and 2, I demonstrated how “Crossfire Hurricane” (and its offshoots such as “Crossfire Razor,” the Flynn investigation) were the worst examples of abuses of power by federal officials in the history of our nation.
As a couple of those articles point out, Brennan gave Haspel one of the choicest jobs in the CIA by making her London station chief, a job in which she served from 2016–17. That was the period in which the overseas parts of the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation were run out of the CIA station in London. That could not have happened without Haspel’s knowledge. Far more likely is that she personally directed “Crossfire Hurricane” from London for Brennan.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Davis’s report is correct and that Haspel is blocking the declassification of a pile of documents that would prove the corrupt involvement of herself and others up to and including Obama. Last year, Trump signed an executive order enabling Attorney General Barr to declassify anything he wanted to in pursuit of his investigation into the misconduct of the FBI and the intelligence agencies in 2016–17.
If Davis is correct, the easy answer to the problem is for Barr to intervene immediately, obtain whatever Haspel is holding back, and — if he determines the information contained in them is relevant or is likely to produce relevant evidence — give them to his investigator, U.S. Attorney John Durham.
Giving the documents to Durham would not require them to be declassified and published, but they should be. We are long past the time when the public should have found out just who were the knowing co-conspirators with Putin’s government who enabled Putin’s intelligence operation against the U.S. election and our government to succeed.
Durham’s investigation, still proceeding at a snail’s pace, would be another casualty of a Biden election. If Biden is elected, a new attorney general will cancel the Durham investigation immediately. Whatever crimes Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, Gina Haspel, Peter Strzok, and others committed will go unpublished and unpunished. You can take that to the bank.
