The Great Smoky Mountain Journal

OUR VIEW

Posted: Tuesday, January 01, 2019 02:30 PM

OUR VIEW: There Is Something Rotten In Washington D.C. On The 7th Floor Of The FBI

The memo asserts that a high-ranking law enforcement official, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, stated in closed-door testimony that without the anti-Trump dossier, the FBI would not have been able to secure surveillance warrants on at least one member of the Trump campaign.

Here is the Memo for dummies summary of what took place according to the memo:
 

The FBI took an unverified political dossier funded by Hillary Clinton to illegally wiretap Trump. They never told the judge it was funded by DNC or Hillary’s Political forces then used government tools to silence their opponents
 

The FBI then takes "salacious and unverified" dossier to secret court to get secret warrant to spy on a fellow American, and FBI doesn't tell the court that the DNC/Clinton campaign paid for that dossier.

And they did this not once, not twice, not three, but FOUR times.

In addition, the memo also shows the media reporting that lent credibility to the dossier, which they failed to disclose was a political opposition document funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Those facts are undisputed!

Now enter former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the dossier and never blushed admitting he had a deep personal animus for President Donald Trump, literally bragging to the FBI that he wanted to do everything he could to make sure President Trump wasn't elected. Then as only corruption breads corruption, the FBI used an unverified Yahoo story, written by another Trump hater, Michael Issakof,  to give cover they had enough evidence to use the dossier for a search warrant.
 

Then things got even more interesting and criminal.

Deputy Director Rod Rosenstein then used the unverified dossier to "mislead and purposefully deceive" a federal court, in order to hurt Trump's presidential campaign and help Clinton's.

Are we living in Russia here or America? The Russians are laughing at us right now only hoping to have meddled in our elections such as this. Looks like the FBI, the Obama Justice and State Departments did plenty of that.

"That type of abuse of power, that type of corruption, that shredding of the Constitution, it is unprecedented in American history," said Sean Hannity on his Fox show Friday night.  "Mueller's investigation has been a witch hunt from the beginning, and it was built on a house of cards that is now crashing down. If we care about the Constitution, if we believe in civil liberties, if we believe in those protections, then the special counsel must be disbanded immediately."

Fellow Fox Host Laura Ingraham blasted the entire Mueller probe saying, "There was collusion after all, you bet. The collusion was between the Comey FBI, the Obama Justice Department and the Hillary Clinton campaign."

To hear the media talk yesterday however and this weekend, the Republicans have somehow done irreparable harm and damage to the FBI's reputation and ability to investigate.

No, the Republicans didn't do this, the hierarchy of the FBI did this because they didn't like a man's politics.

It's amazing to watch really. I’m just old enough to remember when liberals and major media organizations used to believe America’s national security apparatus had to be closely monitored to protect our civil liberties.

Remember the uproar during the Bush years right after 9-11. These same people screaming about the release of this memo railed on former Attorney General John Ashcroft and then President George W. Bush for their pushing of the "Patriot Act," a law was meant to keep us safer from terrorism and streamline agencies abilities to better communicate among themselves to make sure if someone was on Agency A's list, then Agency B knew it too.

The liberal left screamed we all were headed to concentration camps because of it.

This was not the first time they had acted like this.

The liberals and journalists brought to light the horrific abuses of power that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the National Security Agency undertook in the 1960’s against Martin Luther King and others. A couple years ago they were shocked at revelations that shoddy forensic analysis by the FBI crime lab had contributed to more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.

In the 1970s, liberal crusaders such as the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, exposed controversial CIA covert actions against foreign leaders and U.S. citizens. More recently, while many liberals deplored Edward Snowden’s leaks revealing how extensive U.S. government snooping has become, they also agreed that information he revealed showed the need for reforms.

But all of that was forgotten this week as Washington liberals rushed to microphones to demand that the “Nunes memo,” as they called it, be kept from the American people. Their sympathetic friends in the media were quick to give their complaints blanket and largely condescending coverage.

That's hilarious since the FBI brass confirmed earlier this week on Monday the document had been scrubbed of classified information and the public deserves to know how intelligence agencies have or have not followed U.S. law.

But to leading Democrats and the liberal hate-Trump press, the possible discussion of intelligence agency abuses is akin to Armageddon.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., sent a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Thursday claiming “dangerous partisanship among many House Republicans seems to have taken precedent over the oath we all take to protect our nation." Coughing on the BS of that statement. Schumer could care less about protecting the nation as he has been busy putting the rights of illegal aliens over American citizens.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the Nunes memo "dangerous" and "illegitimate," and called on Ryan to remove Nunes as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Poor Nancy has been on total nuclear meltdown this week since the State of the Union address Tuesday night and now this. Get that lady some Geritol.

The hilarious part of those statements by Schumer and Pelosi is that when they were made, they had note even read the memo yet. They have now I'm sure, or at least I hope they have, and they know something bad is about to come down on the heads of their liberal political hack cronies in the FBI who sought to destroy Trump from the day the President announced his historic run in June 2015.

Other Democratic Party members who’ve seen it sanctimoniously declare it paints a disturbing picture of violations of civil liberties and partisan bias.

The almost hysterical reaction of the critics to transparency is noteworthy. They could care less about transparency when this memo and what's to come will embarrass the Obama administration and destroy the investigation into possible Russian collusion with Team Trump. The media, which you would normally expect to be curious and prying about the Nunes memo, have now declared war on it because it helps the President and done all they can to discredit Nunes and the Republican Party.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid has wildly claimed that Nunes could be indicted for obstruction of justice for subverting the Russia investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Her guest on her “AM Joy” program, Scott Dworkin of the Democratic Coalition, bitterly criticized Speaker Ryan for backing up Nunes’ rights to investigate.

“To see somebody like Paul Ryan step out and go against our justice system and side with a traitor like Devin Nunes, it’s unbelievable at this point,” Dworkin said. Traitor? Wow, MSNBC pundits using big words they don't understand seems to be a norm for that network.

On the same program, "intelligence" expert Malcolm Nance said of Nunes: “If he were to use that intelligence – any information – to carry out a witch hunt or to carry out any type of investigation with the specific intent to block or obstruct justice in the Mueller investigation, that could expose Devin Nunes to obstruction of justice charges himself.” The witch hunt Mr. Nance is not being carried out by Devin Nunes, it's been carried out by Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on Nunes’ Intelligence Committee, did read the Nunes memo, but curiously dismissed it by saying that his Republican colleague wants “to investigate everyone except the Russians.”

Schiff says the memo is “is meant only to give Republican House members a distorted view of the FBI.”

Far from resembling the crusading liberals of the 1960s and 1970s who always screamed and wanted to probe law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, Schiff has found Jesus I guess and now taken on the role of the bureau’s lapdog.

Liberals have followed up their complaints about Nunes with calls for him to be investigated. The liberal Campaign for Accountability has called for the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether Nunes or committee staff leaked closed-door testimony of the head of Fusion GPS, the company that produced the controversial dossier on Donald Trump.

Curiously however, there was no call for an investigation of Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, when she earlier blamed a bad cold for why she released an entire transcript of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson’s Senate testimony.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., a former federal prosecutor and a senior member on the Intelligence Committee, reminded those having a mental breakdown over this in the media that the people who are complaining about the Nunes memo,  are the same ones who were silent when the Justice Department refused to answer House subpoenas for documents on surveillance activities for five months. There has been a massive attempt to subvert justice alright but it's not been Devin Nunes.

Gowdy said over weekend he didn't think the memo discredited the Mueller probe in any way. While I like Rep. Gowdy, me and him will agree to disagree on this one.

Don't forget these documents were only turned over early in January as the House prepared to hold Justice Department officials in contempt of Congress.

Nunes thankfully seems to be standing strong pushing back against the complaints that his memo will endanger national security calling them “spurious.”

“It seems the (Department of Justice) and FBI need to be investigating themselves," Nunes noted in a letter to the Justice Department, putting the sentence in bold, underlined text.

Remember this. NONE of the media or Democrats who are screaming about this memo are saying that anything in it is false! They are attacking the messenger because they cannot argue with the facts and the ugly picture the memo paints about an element in the FBI that wanted to see Trump defeated and when he won, see him impeached.

Not one Fact in the #FISAMemo has been disputed by the Democrats or anyone else. As Chuck Woolery, the former game show host tweeted out this week, "There are two sides to ever story but only one side to the FACTS."

So those who believe the Nunes memo is purely a partisan document need to take a deep breathe and answer us all a few questions. The first is if everything is so rosy in the upper levels of the FBI why then did on Monday, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe suddenly resign after it was revealed he is the subject of an internal Justice Department Inspector General probe into his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation? Silence.

On a related and probably even more disturbing development, Special Counsel Mueller suddenly delayed the sentencing of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn this week for lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russian officials.

According to Scoop News, the Flynn plea deal was delayed after evidence surfaced FBI agents fabricated the "302s" (notes summarizing witness interviews) in the Flynn investigation. From what is being gathered, the only person in the room who was taking notes was none other than Peter Styork, who evidently never told Flynn he was under oath and never recorded the interview for further review later.

 A soon to be released IG Report will reveal fabrication of other 302s, at the direction of Comey and others within DOJ soon according to the story.

Flynn was clearly foolish in lying, but there are unanswered questions about whether surveillance information about him was illegally leaked by U.S. intelligence agencies. Was he entrapped into meeting with FBI agents with no lawyer present? It seems that Flynn was never aware he was under oath or in an official FBI interrogation.

This all stinks to high heaven. We will be writing and discussing this more as the week unfolds both on pod casts, and more editorials. There are players in this hideous display of American justice like former FBI director James Comey, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton and James Clapper that we plan to call out in the days to come and discuss their roles on this.

One final thought. James Comey may need to spend more time getting a lawyer than tweeting. He called Nunes and others who released the memo "weasels and liars." Uh, Jim the only blanking weasel and liar in this is you. You need to go to jail along with several others.

The bigger question and one we will ask a lot this week is where is Attorney General Jeff Session? FBI Director Christopher Wray is also on the spot to do the right thing. Neither men have as of yet!

There is something rotten in Washington D.C.  on the seventh floor of the FBI and it's time to clean house in a way this never happens again. Bring on the orange jump suits.

Christopher McDonald, Publisher, Editor in Charge

Great Smoky Mountain Journal