Now that we know there was no collusion or obstruction on the part of President Trump or his campaign, it’s time to find out how top government officials were able to turn a partisan conspiracy theory into a two-year witch hunt against the President.
Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey may have inadvertently said it best in his tweet shortly after Attorney General Bill Barr reported Robert Mueller’s principal findings to Congress: There are just “So many questions.”
How, for instance, were Comey and his fellow Trump-hating bureaucrats allowed to lie and drag the President’s name through the mud for 675 days without any repercussions?
How were the former directors of America’s most secretive law enforcement and spy agencies allowed to pollute both the airwaves and the halls of Congress with false allegations of the highest crime an American citizen can commit, treason?
Former CIA Director John Brennan, for instance, once said that President Trump is “not fit” for office and “treasonous,” and even predicted that members of the Trump family could be in trouble in the “final act” of Mueller’s investigation.
Brennan was clearly trying to imply that he had insider knowledge based on his former position, but now that Mueller has concluded his investigation without finding any evidence of collusion—and without charging any members of the Trump family with any crimes—it’s obvious that Brennan was just fabricating these claims from whole cloth.
ABC’s Terry Moran summed it up nicely, saying, “John Brennan has a lot to answer for — going before the American public for months, cloaked with CIA authority and openly suggesting he’s got secret info, and repeatedly turning in performances like this.”
Even liberal editor Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept criticized MSNBC for hiring Brennan to serve as a political analyst, suggesting that Brennan used this position to “abuse our airwaves to disseminate self-serving disinformation.”
Brennan wasn’t the only former high-ranking government official to take advantage of his insider status to aid the partisan witch hunt against the President.
We also know from his own testimony that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper played some kind of role in helping CNN report on the unverified “Steele dossier” filled with salacious allegations about President Trump.
Clapper also told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017 that there had been no FISA application to wiretap then-candidate Trump or his campaign, declaring, “I can deny it.”
The most charitable interpretation of Clapper’s assertion is that he was simply being technical, since a “wiretap” is not the specific form of surveillance used against members of the Trump campaign. At worst, he was being deliberately deceitful in an effort to make the President sound paranoid.
Comey, too, seems to have abused his authority for political purposes.
Internal FBI emails, for instance, indicate that Comey’s decision to brief President Trump on the Steele dossier gave CNN and other media outlets an opening to report on the unverified claims, which they had previously considered too risky to publish.
In addition, Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server has also come under renewed scrutiny.
According to Representative Mark Meadows, “we have a number of documents, a growing body of evidence“ to suggest that Comey may have lied when he told Congress there had been no coordination between the FBI and Justice Department in regards to the Hillary Clinton investigation. Not only was that false, but we know that over and over again now, we have emails that would suggest that that testimony was false and at best misled the American public, at worst was lying to Congress,” Meadows said.
Just as Comey said, there are so many questions.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham is determined to get answers to all of these questions and many more, saying his Committee will “unpack the other side of the story” of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe and other Justice Department discrepancies.
Had the duplicitousness of Comey, Brennan, and Clapper been revealed to the public sooner, perhaps we could have avoided the disgraceful witch hunt that virtually paralyzed Washington for two years. The American people deserve to know why they were misled so badly for so long.
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