The Spygate Scandal Only Keeps Growing

Carter Page participates in a discussion on 'politicization of DOJ and the intelligence community in their efforts to undermine the president' hosted by Judicial Watch on May 29, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Commentary

Watergate has nothing on this presently growing “Spygate” scandal.

We’re all about to watch the amazing spectacle of key Spygate plotters commenting on their own scandal’s developments as analysts and commentators on network news show panels.

ABC News didn’t have John Dean, G. Gordon Liddy, nor John Mitchell on a nightly panel discussing the day’s Watergate news. NBC will have John Brennan and Andrew Weismann, CNN will have Andrew McCabe and James Clapper, all of them hired and deliberately given a platform from which to spin attacks against Spygate investigators.

But will this massive spin machine assembled by the fake news media accomplish the task for which it has been created?

Will it be able to stop or turn back what Attorney General William Barr, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and U.S. Attorney John Durham will be rolling out?

I doubt it, because this isn’t a public-relations battle. Some people seem to think it is because the losing side has been reduced to a strategy in which they whine loudly on news network panels about how terrible it is that the president is victimizing them.

The release of Horowitz’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) report will answer many questions that still remain at this point. And the media spin machine, which isn’t going to like any of the answers, will have a terribly hard time trying to spin them.

What Is This FISA Report Really About?

After taking over the FBI’s probe, Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office tried for nearly two years to find any evidence that would prove a Trump–Russia election collusion conspiracy.

Mueller and his crack prosecution team failed to find any evidence whatsoever that anyone associated with the Trump campaign engaged in any foreign collusion with the Russians or anyone else. And a curious feature of the Mueller final report is that the infamous Steele dossier is hardly even mentioned in its 448 pages.

The Mueller report certainly doesn’t provide any proof Trump campaign associate Carter Page ever met the senior Russian officials the Steele dossier alleges he did.

So what specific and supposedly verified evidence did the FBI actually have against Page at the time it compiled and submitted this surveillance warrant to the FISA Court in late October 2016? We still don’t know. But we’re about to find out, thanks to Horowitz and Barr.

A Brief Timeline Review of How We Got Here

It’s easy to get lost in minute details. It helps sometimes to take a step back and take another look at the big picture. Here’s how we got to where we are now:

1. The FBI gets some kind of alert in early 2016 that there appears to be illegal activity going on between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
2. In late July 2016, the FBI thinks it has enough evidence on hand to open the “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.
3. In late October 2016, the FBI presents a surveillance warrant to the FISA Court that supposedly contains real evidence that minor Trump campaign adviser Page was acting as a foreign agent of the Russian government. The FISA Court grants the warrant.
4. The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation is then shifted to special counsel Mueller in May 2017. The special counsel spends nearly two years trying to find evidence of anyone in the Trump campaign colluding with the Russian government.
5. Mueller ends his investigation, and in his final report states that he found no evidence of any U.S. person colluding with the Russians in the 2016 election.
6. When it’s all over, Page is never charged with anything. No evidence of him being a Russian agent is ever produced by anyone. Not the FBI, not the Mueller special counsel, nobody.

So there appears to have been no legitimate predicate for seeking a warrant to spy on Carter Page. They never had anything real on him. I suspect, based on the public evidence thus far, that these FBI officials knew Steele’s dossier allegations against Page and others were fake propaganda when they made use of them in their official documents and investigations.

It should be recalled that in his testimony to Congress in June 2017, former FBI Director James Comey himself stated he knew the dossier and the allegations contained within it were “salacious and unverified.”

And yet it appears that dossier’s fake information was used to get an original FISA warrant application approved by the FISA Court and then to get three subsequent renewals.

Horowitz’s report will clear the air and demonstrate once and for all if any of the “salacious and unverified” Steele dossier allegations were used in the Page FISA warrant.

So, to sum up: If the FBI had no real collusion evidence against Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, or anybody else associated with Trump and his campaign, how did that FISA warrant end up getting approved?

This is what Horowitz has been investigating since March 28, 2018. And that is what this report is all about.

What occurred here is so serious. It must be remembered that Durham has several times expanded his criminal investigation into how the Russiagate hoax began.

This scandal is only going to continue to grow.

Watergate was about President Richard Nixon using the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate burglary, which involved a failed attempt of a sitting president’s campaign to spy on the headquarters of the DNC during the 1972 election.

In the unfolding Spygate scandal, it’s not a sitting president’s reelection campaign spying on the other side, but the FBI itself, a federal agency, spying on the campaign of a Washington outsider. The FBI had better have had a very, very good reason for doing that.

Dec. 9 is the official date of the FISA report’s release, and Horowitz’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee will take place just two days later, on Dec. 11.

Soon we'll have some answers to these pressing questions.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.