Mark America

Now that the country has had seventy-two hours to digest the memo released by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, it’s time to consider what the memo tells us, and to decide what we ought to do with this information.  In this examination, we must first ignore all of the shrill dismissals and whispered urgency that has characterized this release in the media all week.  On the one hand, we have hyperventilating leftists telling us that the Republicans have produced a “nothing-burger” that undermines national security and/or the rule of law.  On the other, we now have a DC establishment that’s interested in protecting Robert Mueller’s investigation, as though they’re under his thumb.  What’s never admitted by the latter, and what is completely obscured through the huffing and puffing of the former is what really happened, and what this memorandum really means, or where it should lead us.  What does the memo really say?  Is it really a “partisan nothing-burger that is intended to undermine national security?” Is it really “unrelated to Mueller and the Russia investigation?”  Let’s find out if there’s something hidden in plain sight.

The first thing to note is the subject of the memo:

Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigations

For those of you who may or may not be aware, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) is a law that governs the way surveillance is conducted on US citizens and legal residents in the foreign arena or with foreign actors.  It sets up a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court(FISC,) the purpose of which is to allow warrants to be granted in a secret process not open to the public, and not ordinarily subject to public scrutiny, all on the basis that such surveillance may be necessary from time to time for the purposes of national security, and that the rights of Americans must be protected even in this context.

What happened specifically in this case is muddied, but what we do know from this disclosure is that:

• FISA Warrants were sought and granted in the matter of US citizen Carter Page
• Carter Page was a low-level adviser with the Trump Campaign
• The primary basis for the granting of the warrant was the “Steele Dossier”
• The “Steele Dossier” was generated by former British agent Christopher Steele working with Fusion GPS
• Fusion GPS was at the time being paid by the DNC
• The DNC was under the functional control of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Campaign
• The information provided to the FISC was known by those seeking the warrants to be of dubious providence
• After Steele was let go by the FBI as a source, the FBI and DOJ continued to use Fusion GPS as a source because they hired Ohr’s wife

I might add another point, though it’s under dispute at this time:

• The entire “Russia Collusion” narrative is based on fabricated information largely derived from the Steele Dossier

On its face, this seems pretty damning, but there’s something not made clear by this memo, something to be found between the lines, or to be understood contextually if you prefer, that intimates something deeply disturbing and devious.  To understand this context, we have to view this in the time in which it occurred.  This was done in order to conduct surveillance on the Trump Campaign.  All of the rationalizations being offered now, after the fact, are cover stories being propagated by the actors and their ideological brethren.  The real order of events looks more like this:

• FISA Warrants are sought in order to permit extensive spying on the Trump campaign for political motives
• A justification is needed to have cover for doing the surveillance – enter “Russian Collusion”
• Internal polling showed Clinton was not invincible
• Trump wins the election, leaving the actors in a potentially ‘outed’ position
• The “Russian Collusion” narrative is furthered to justify the previous political activities of the Obama administration and executive departments
• Mueller is appointed as Special Counsel because somebody must be guilty to preserve that narrative
• The entire narrative becomes the basis for Democrat obstructionism in order to undermine and oppose the new president
• James Comey apparently perjured himself multiple times in testimony to Congress
• Barack Obama knew or ought to have known what was being done
• The entire Democrat-Media complex is now engaging in a coverup to protect the Mueller probe to give him time to find something

Ladies and gentlemen, when you boil it down, this document is damning, but it’s most damning in terms of what it does not explicitly state.  I don’t know if it constitutes “one-hundred times worse than Watergate,” but it is substantially worse than Watergate, and there are some critical reasons why this is true.

Watergate was about actions taken to hide or cover-up embarrassing actions by unofficial political actors. President Nixon covered-up, or attempted to cover-up embarrassing criminal actions of some political henchmen who acted without his foreknowledge, endorsement, authorization, or collusion.  That’s all about the conduct of a President using his office to conceal ugly criminal actions of political allies and underlings acting on his behalf, without his knowledge.

This case, for which there is strangely no agreed-upon catchy name(like “Watergate” for example,) is much worse because it involves the following elements:

• A President’s administration seems to have been complicit in conspiring to commit criminal actions under color of their official offices
• Actors within the various departments seem to have colluded with a political candidate in order to attack another political candidate
• The FISC seems to have gone along with this because it did not seek to validate the providence of the documents
• Much of the so-called “mainstream media” was complicit and acted as agents for this conspiracy
• The conspirators remain at large to propagate their defense from the shadows and from official offices
• Conspirators include a presidential candidate, at least one former President, his “kitchen cabinet,” and appointees, who remain in place in the government

Ladies and gentlemen, this is “the swamp.” This explains a good deal, because while the memo doesn’t go beyond the facts of the FISA abuses, it’s what those facts tell us about the overall corruption in Washington DC, how our government operates, and the extent to which abuses of power are the norm in the daily operation of government.  It also shows why we must from time to time clean out the Federal bureaucracy.  Too much power, too long-enjoyed by a like-minded group of people, perhaps operating from a shared ideological base, or from a common political organization, tends toward grotesque abuses of power.

This is just the first stone being overturned.  There are much worse abuses directly implied by the facts disclosed in this memo. For instance, was Peter Strzok the person who built the FISA application(s)? If so, aren’t the applications’ omissions of facts regarding the providence of the Steele Dossier essentially a defrauding of the FISC?  And if this is so, what happens to every case in which Strzok is or has been involved? Strzok interviewed Michael Flynn, for instance.  Is this the reason that Mueller requested a delay in the sentencing of Flynn last Thursday?

One of the things that we know, historically, is that when testimony from an officer or investigator is shown to be tainted in some way, and particularly when that witness is found to have known his testimony was false, there are generally sanctions from the court, but more, all other cases involving the witness are thrown into question.  When it is shown that a police officer lied in testimony to a court in obtaining a search warrant, not only is that warrant thrown out, but there is a high probability that every instance of testimony in any case in which that officer had been a witness is thrown into question. It essentially ends the officer’s career, as nothing he says from that date forward is given any veracity.  No prosecutor will use his testimony, and no judge will thereafter consider his warrant applications.  In other words, Strzok and every case in which he has been involved will be thrown into question.  Every case.  Strzok helped write the Clinton email exoneration.  Strzok interviewed Flynn.  There’s no end to the possibilities, and Strzok has been moved out of Mueller’s team, and out of field investigations, to the Human Resources department.  That’s because he’s of no use whatever as an investigator of any sort.  His career as a field agent is and should be over.  He may face civil and/or criminal sanctions if he lied to a court, either directly or by omission.

Who signed off on these applications at the DOJ and the FBI?  The memo makes that plain:

• James Comey
• Sally Yates
• Rod Rosenstein
• Andrew McCabe

Comey and Yates have been fired, Rosenstein is still in place, and McCabe was placed on administrative leave by FBI director Christopher Wray on Monday, after he read the memo on Sunday. These people may all face civil or criminal sanctions on the same basis.  Rosenstein is being left in place to protect Mueller, and on Sunday, we had the spectacle of Trey Gowdy claiming that this memo has nothing to do with “Russia” or Mueller.  This is a preposterous assertion, as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch made clear in a video briefing, and during an interview on Friday, when he was asked about Speaker Ryan’s claims to the same effect.  Here’s Fitton on Fox:

Now, compare this with what Trey Gowdy, (R-SC) had to say about it, Sunday, on [de]Face the Nation:

These two views are irreconcilable.  Either Fitton is correct, or Gowdy is correct. I don’t see room for any middle ground. Gowdy claims:

• The Steele Dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower
• The Steele Dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica
• The Steele Dossier has nothing to do with the meeting with George Papadopoulos in Great Britain
• The Steele Dossier has nothing to do with “obstruction of justice”

On their face, all but the fourth of these claims seem true, except for one significant problem: The first three are certainly independent events, unrelated in terms of the specific actors, however, they are related by virtue of a timeline.  These are independent events, each in a vacuum, but they are events that add up to something illegitimate once taken together in a timeline with other things like the Steele Dossier.  To analogize, let us imagine that conspirators had agreed to take their independent parts in a plot to ensure that I would slip on a banana peel in front of cameras on my birthday. (I could see my siblings setting something like this up.) One brother buys a banana, eats the fruit, and carries the peel to the appointed place. Another brother arranges for the cameras to be present at the appointed place and time. My sister finds me, and asks me to accompany her to look at something.  Upon my arrival, my sister on my arm, another sibling distracts me and gets me to look left, as from the right, the brother with the banana peel tosses it into my path and my sister nudges me over it.  I land on my backside, and all have a great laugh at my expense. If I’m gullible, I might believe that the brother with the banana peel innocently discarded it into my path.  I might believe another brother just happened to have arranged for the cameras to be right there at that moment to record it for posterity, and I might believe my sister hadn’t been complicit in walking me into it while another brother took my attention off the path immediately in front of me.  I might be that gullible.  Is Trey Gowdy that gullible?  Is speaker Ryan?

As for the “obstruction” nonsense, just in the last week, we’ve learned how Andrew McCabe tried to set up Reince Priebus, and this is another example of a Republican being walked onto a banana peel by a duplicitous Democrat, the whole point of which was to create the impression that the Trump administration was trying to improperly influence Mueller’s fiasco of an investigation.

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked congressman Chris Stewart(R-UT) if House Republicans are “more concerned with protecting us from the Russians or protecting us from the FBI?” Here’s the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYlh5f6eJdw?t=296

That’s disgraceful. You can watch the entire Fox News Sunday show if you like, but any time Chris Wallace is involved, it’s going to have a leftist slant.

This isn’t over, because the DC establishment intends to rid themselves of Trump.  As readers will know, I’m not a Trump fan, but I am a fan of the rule of law and the US Constitution.  The forces arrayed against Trump here are formidable, but the question remains: Will President Trump rise to the challenge?  Will he find a way to empower his Attorney General, who has been neutered almost from the outset?  By the way, I think what should happen at this point is that AG Sessions should fire Rosenstein, then rescind his recusal on the “Russian Collusion” matter, and appoint another Special Counsel to investigate corruption within the executive branch departments, including the FBI and the DOJ, and also the State Department.  Apparently, I’m not alone in believing this, as Rep Paul Gosar, (R-AZ) wants to see some criminal prosecutions. At the same time, Rep. Louis Gohmert(R-TX) is pressing to see the transcripts of the FISC hearings that adjudicated these warrant applications.

Note: All of this made me curious to see if I could find out a bit more about Fitton’s view on things, and so I went looking around, finding this, which was interesting: