Rule of Law Matters : Indict Obama-era Known FBI/DOJ Anti-Trump Cabal Criminal Conspirators Now

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THAT EVENTUALLY WE WILL GET THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE OBAMA WITCH HUNT ON TRUMP. The facts are dripping out like maple syrup on a very cold January morning. But, they ARE dripping out. • • • THE CHRISTOPHER STEELE RUSSIAN DOSSIER AND THE OBAMA STATE DEPARTMENT. Conservative Tribune's Joe Saunders wrote a column on Friday about "a 'Russian collusion' lead special counsel Robert Mueller might want to follow up on." Saunders wanted to point out to Mueller that : "The investigators who’ve spent more than a year trying to find evidence that the Donald Trump presidential campaign was working with the Russian government might have gotten a big clue from testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday about which influential Americans knew about Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election. And it wasn’t the circle around the man heading the Republican ticket. According to the Daily Caller, Obama administration 'cybersecurity coordinator' Michael Daniel told a Committee hearing that then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice had ordered him in August 2016 to 'stand down' rather than respond to Russian cyber-attacks during the campaign." • The Susan Rice order was first reported in March in the book “Russian Roulette,” by Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Washington bureau chief for the liberal magazine Mother Jones, according to the Daily Caller. These two are in Representative Nunes' frypan for having leaked news about the Russian Dossier. Keep in mind that Isikoff and Corn were the only two reporters to write about the Russian Dossier before the 2016 election, apparently after interviewing Dossier compiler Christopher Steele. They and Obama State Department senior staffers Victoria Nuland, Jonathan Winer and Elizabeth Dibble “appear to be key to the State Department’s role in handling Trump-related Russia information,” the Daily Caller article reports. Nuland came forward in February to acknowledge that she received and handled information from Steele. Winer wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post on February 8 asserting that he was being unfairly targeted by Nunes. The Daily Caller reported that : “Winer and Nuland suggested in their disclosures that they determined Steele’s reports were too hot for the State Department to handle. They have both claimed they referred the information to the FBI, which was better suited to verify Steele’s still-unverified allegations.” Winer “would later serve as a source for Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff and Mother Jones reporter David Corn, the two veteran reporters revealed in their recent book, ‘Russian Roulette.’ Winer vouched for Steele to both Isikoff and Corn...about Steele’s allegations....The State Department’s involvement in Trump-Russia matters has received little media attention, but it has grabbed the 'interest' of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes." Nunes has said he is investigating "major irregularities" in how the State Department handled unspecified information used in the Russia investigation. The Dossier, authored by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, was key in launching the investigation. Victoria Nuland, who was the Obama State Department’s top Russia expert, revealed in Senate testimony on June 20 that : “I was first shown excerpts from the Dossier, I believe in mid-July of 2016. It wasn’t the complete thing, which I didn’t see until it was published in the US press.” Dibble, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in London, “was reportedly one of the first US officials to receive information about a May 2016 conversation that Papadopoulos, the Trump advisor, had with Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner to the UK,” the Daily Caller noted. It was also revealed at the same Senate hearing on June 20 that Steele had briefed State Department officials in October 2016. “The briefing suggests closer contacts between Steele and the State Department than the agency has acknowledged,” the Daily Caller noted. • • • OBAMA’S CYBER CHIEF SAYS SUSAN RICE GAVE ‘STAND DOWN’ ORDER ABOUT RUSSIAN MEDDLING. The Daily Caller's Chuck Ross wrote an article on Wednesday detailing the Susan Rice stand-down order : "Former President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity czar confirmed Wednesday that former national security advisor Susan Rice told him to 'stand down' in response to Russian cyber attacks during the 2016 presidential campaign. Michael Daniel, whose official title was 'cybersecurity coordinator,' confirmed the stand-down order during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing held to review the Obama and President Donald Trump’s administrations’ policy response to Russian election interference. Rice’s order to Daniel was first reported in 'Russian Roulette'...by Michael Isikoff and David Corn [who] reported that Daniel was developing strategies to respond to Russian cyber attacks on US companies and political campaigns. He proposed using what’s known as denial of service attacks to take down Russian propaganda news sites and to attack Russian intelligence agencies. Another idea was to announce a bogus 'cyber exercise' against a Eurasian country. The goal was to put the Kremlin on notice that its infrastructure could easily be targeted by the US. Rice opposed the proposals, according to 'Russian Roulette.' 'Don’t get ahead of us,' she told Daniel in a meeting in August 2016, according to the book. Daniel informed his staff of the order, much to their frustration. 'I was incredulous and in disbelief,' Daniel Prieto, who worked under Daniel, is quoted saying in 'Russian Roulette.' 'Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand?” Prieto asked. Daniel confirmed the exchange on Wednesday, during a round of questions from Idaho Senator Jim Risch. 'That is an accurate rendering of the conversation at the staff meeting,' he testified. 'You were told to stand down, is that correct?' Risch, a Republican, asked Daniel. 'Those actions were put on the back burner, yes. That was not the focus of our activity during that time period,' Daniel replied. He noted the White House cybersecurity team did continue working to respond to Russia, but with a smaller staff and a less aggressive approach. 'It’s not accurate to say that all activity ceased at that point,' he said, declining to describe the activities in an unclassified hearing." • The Conservative Tribune's Joe Saunders column on Friday said : "Could it be because the Obama White House wasn’t terribly interested in reacting to the Russian interference? It’s important to remember that in August 2016, with the mainstream media acting as a national cheerleading squad for Hillary Clinton, it still looked to the Washington establishment that Barack Obama was going to be succeeded by a Democrat -- and if Russian activity wouldn’t stop it, or even helped it along, who was to complain? But on a more sinister note, it’s entirely possible that Rice was installing an insurance policy in the event of the unthinkable happening and Trump actually won the presidency. The anti-Trump crowd at the Obama administration’s FBI certainly knew about 'insurance policies.' In fact, text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page used those exact words, even though it’s never been clear exactly what they were referring to. What Rice was doing, by preventing her own cybersecurity czar from taking action on the Russians, could well have been setting up a trail of breadcrumbs that would lead to the Trump campaign if the election somehow turned out differently from how Democrats had tried to rig it. That would make it appear that Russian influence over the election’s outcome had boosted the Republican candidate, and tarnish Trump’s presidency even before he took the oath of office. Even without testimony about Rice’s intent -- which is unknowable at this point -- no one can deny that that’s pretty much how events eventually played out. This kind of setup for Trump isn’t the 'Russian collusion' Mueller and his team of Trump-hunting zealots are expecting, of course. But more than a year into his investigation, which has turned up exactly zero public evidence that the Trump campaign was working with the Russians, checking it out might give him something to follow up on. So far, the Mueller investigation has cost American taxpayers at least $17 million. It would be nice to get something for that money. Even if it’s not what Mueller is looking for." • • • STEELE INVESTIGATIONS HAVE FOCUSED ON THE FBI, BUT THE STATE DEPARTMENT WAS INVOLVED. The Daily Caller revealed on Wednesdat that : "Former British spy Christopher Steele visited the State Department in October 2016 and briefed officials there about his work on the infamous anti-Trump Dossier....'Based upon our review of the visitor logs at the State Department, Mr. Steele visited the State Department, briefing officials on the dossier in October 2016,' Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said during a hearing held to review the US government’s response to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Steele’s visit to Foggy Bottom in Washington, DC, prior to the election has not been previously reported. Burr revealed Steele’s visit during an exchange with Victoria Nuland, who served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs in former President Barack Obama’s administration. Burr’s revelations suggest the agency maintained interest in Steele and his report much longer than previously known. Nuland was the State Department official who in late-June 2016 signed off on a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland was familiar with Steele’s previous work on Russia- and Ukraine-related issues. Steele began investigating President Donald Trump in June 2016 on behalf of Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was working for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. A former MI6 officer with experience in Moscow, Steele wrote 17 separate reports for the 35-page Dossier. The first report was filed on June 20, 2016. The last one is dated December 13, 2016. Nuland said Wednesday that she first saw memos from Steele’s Dossier in mid-July 2016." • Prior to her testimony on June 20, Nuland had told CBS on February 4 that she and other State Department officials referred the Dossier to the FBI : “This needs to go to the FBI, if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian federation. That’s something for the FBI to investigate." Nuland said Wednesday that she “actively chose not to be a part” of the October 2016 briefing. She also claimed that she “was not aware of [the briefing] until afterwards.” [We might ask Nuland to choose between not wanting to be present and so not going to the meeting or not knowing about the meeting -- both cannot be right.] • The State Department’s handling of the Steele Dossier is being investigated by at least one congressional committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Republicans on the panel have questioned what Nuland and other State Department officials did with the Steele information. The Daily Caller says : "Another subject of interest in that investigation is Jonathan Winer, a longtime diplomat who left the State Department in 2017. Winer has acknowledged that he met Steele during the summer in 2016 and discussed the retired spy’s Trump-related work. Winer, who has known Steele since 2009, passed summaries of Steele’s Dossier to others at [State]. He gave the summary to then Secretary of State John Kerry. It has previously been reported that Kerry was briefed on the Dossier. It is unclear if he met with Steele during the former spy’s visit to State in October 2016. Winer was also a source for the only two journalists to write articles based on Steele’s allegations prior to the 2016 election. The journalists, Michael Isikoff and David Corn, revealed their contacts with Winer in their recent book, 'Russian Roulette.' ” • Susan Rice's unmasking of hundreds of Trump team names; her stand-down order about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, and her CYA "to self" memo on Inauguration Day trying to exonerate Obama of wrongdoing in the Trump witch hunt -- all suggest just how involved the Obama White House was in the attempt to falsely pin on Trump the Democrats' own collusion with Russia actually meant to destroy Trump. • • • SPECIAL COUNSEL MUELLER, THE SWAMP'S ATTACK DOG. The Gatestone Institute doesn't often write about the Mueller Russian "collusion" investigation. But on June 7, J. Christian Adams wrote a long piece titled "The Swamp Strikes Back." You can read the entire article at < https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12033/swamp-strikes-back >. • Adams writes : "The culture of the DC metropolitan area is one of wealth, privilege and self-proclaimed sophistication. The bureaucrats and insiders know what is best for you, best for your business, best for themselves, and they can make a nice living without being disrupted. Trump campaigned on disrupting this comfortable power perch; that is what they most hate about him. • We Deplorables know that we are talking "Swamp" here. And, Adams says : "Each week, Robert Mueller's Wonderlandian investigation into 'Russian Collusion' appears 'curiouser and curiouser.'....First, Mueller indicted General Michael Flynn for not telling the truth to an FBI squad that appeared unexpectedly at the White House to question him, when now it turns out that Peter Strzok, who interrogated him, said he had not lied. It also now turns out that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe may later have altered Strzok's interrogation notes, and then destroyed the evidence. Mueller then indicted Paul Manafort for allegedly laundering money through an Alexandria, Virginia, oriental rug store -- a 'process crime.' Notably absent from it in any indictment was the mention of Russia, collusion or even elections. Moreover, the order from the Department of Justice, signed by Rod Rosenstein, stipulated one more directive : '(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and (iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).' As well as : '(d) Sections 600.4 through 600. l 0 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations.' As Judge T.S. Ellis said to Mueller on May 4 : 'You don't really care about Mr. Manafort's bank fraud. You really care about getting information that Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever.' " • In fact, the only Mueller indictments that relate to Russia were aimed at a nest of Russians who could be labeled The Three Stooges trying to influence American public opinion using pro-Trump tweets during the 2016 election. The crimes alleged by Mueller were that the Russians were foreign agents trying to influence American elections through social media. In other words, says Adams : "the Russians were doing what they have internationally for decades -- attempting to influence domestic American politics through fronts and propaganda. When the sock puppets, incidentally, had the nerve to ask for proof, Mueller asked for a delay, which the judge refused to grant. As Andrew McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, noted, 'as all prosecutors are taught from their first day on the job : Never indict a case unless you are prepared to try the case.' " • As Adams point out, if Mueller was interested in indicting those who try to influence foreign elections, he should had taken aim at what the Obama State Department did in 2015 -- to Israel : "Then, the Obama State Department funneled $350 thousand US taxpayer dollars to OneVoice, an anti-Netanyahu political operation during Israel's parliamentary elections. OneVoice used American tax dollars to build a political voter database, train activists, and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama's campaign apparatus. American tax dollars were funneled through Netanyahu's foes and eventually ended up back in the pockets of Obama's political machine. Now the same gang that used American power to try to bring down the Israeli Prime Minister is sanctimoniously objecting to Russian interference-by-tweeting." • Adams does not spare the FBI, calling its frenzy about the Russian tweets sinister : "The singular lesson for history of the seemingly widespread corruption at the senior levels of the FBI, Department of Justice, and the State Department is that a phony 'Dossier' about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was used to obtain -- by misrepresenting its contents to a judge -- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against private citizens. The Dossier was cooked up and paid for by Democrat political operatives with ties to the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. When Representative Devin Nunes suspected that the admittedly 'unverified' phony Dossier was used to obtain wiretap warrants of American citizens, he was right. But it gets worse. After the warrants were obtained and telephone calls of private citizens were tapped by the FBI, Obama Department of Justice officials, and some people...inside the Obama White House, authorized the unmasking of the content of those conversations. Unmasking means that the transcripts and identities of Americans were revealed, violating their Fourth Amendment right to privacy. For good measure, Obama officials even changed the rules about how widely those unmasked transcripts could be distributed inside the DOJ, thus expanding the universe of potential leakers. And leak they did. In short, Democrats produced a phony document to make candidate Trump look creepy, then Obama DOJ officials working with sympathetic FBI staff and outside political operatives, obtained FISA search warrants by lying to FISA judges four times in order to target the Trump campaign in an apparently unlimited fishing expedition for a crime -- none ever having been specified as is required by law -- even after the President was duly elected. If all of this were not enough, a small core of powerful FBI senior staffers -- as opposed to the FBI's remarkable rank and file -- was steering this entire affair, while simultaneously texting each other about their hatred for candidate Donald Trump." • Adams accuses the Obama FBI and DOJ senior officials of using their powers first to do what could be done to "exonerate at least 13 possible crimes committed by Hillary Clinton. That, at least was the number committed before information emerged that her campaign and the DNC had funded the Dossier; later findings must have added a few more....The Swamp actors' other objective was apparently to sabotage Trump's presidency if Trump won. Peter Strzok wrote, 'I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that there's no way he gets elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40...' by using their powers in the Russia probe to destroy the President politically. • Adams is not the first to call the cabal's actions "banana republic" tactics used "where political differences are criminalized and weaponized -- and [it] is fundamentally anti-Constitutional. It appears to be -- on the part of some of the heads of the FBI, the Department of Justice, the State Department and President Obama's White House -- part of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice and abuse power in order -- as former US Attorney for the District of Columbia Joseph diGenova put it, 'to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn't win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime.'....What you are seeing is Constitutional political warfare unleashed by the bureaucracy against a President the bureaucracy apparently loathes. The bureaucracy seems now to believe that it is in charge, not the President. The bureaucrats make a good living, have comfy retirement plans, can buy life insurance at rates more reasonable than a private sector employee can, and likely think that Trump is a threat to their power. The bureaucrats have created a culture in Washington DC that extends beyond the hallways of their Departments....The Russian collusion investigation has not found any collusion because the investigation was never about collusion. It was always about an out-of-control federal government, emboldened by the lawless age of Obama, and flexing its newfound muscle. The Russian collusion investigation is about a clash of cultures, with one culture being the culture of DC insiders, and the other being the folks who pay their salaries." • • • ANDREW McCARTHY SAYS THE SAME THING. Back on May 30, the National Review published an Andrew McCarthy essay titled "Yes, the FBI Was Investigating the Trump Campaign When It Spied." McCarthy wrote : "The Obama administration recklessly chose to deploy the government’s awesome counterintelligence powers to investigate -- and, more to the point, to smear -- its political opposition as a Kremlin confederate. Now that this ploy has blown up on the Justice Department and the FBI, these agencies -- the ones that went out of their way, and outside their guidelines, to announce to the world that the Trump campaign was under investigation -- want you to know the President and his campaign were not investigated at all, no siree. What could possibly have made you imagine such a thing? And so, to douse the controversy with cold water, dutifully stepping forward in fine bipartisan fettle are the Obama administration’s top intelligence official and two influential Capitol Hill Republicans [Senator Rubio and Representative Gowdy] who evidently pay little attention to major testimony before their own committees. Former National Intelligence director James Clapper was first to the scene of the blaze. Clapper concedes that, well, yes, the FBI did run an informant -- 'spy' is such an icky word -- at Trump campaign officials; but you must understand that this was merely to investigate Russia. Cross his heart, it had nothing to do with the Trump campaign. No, no, no. Indeed, they only used an informant because -- bet you didn’t know this -- doing so is the most benign, least intrusive mode of conducting an investigation....I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine the Democrats’ response if, say, the Bush administration had run a covert intelligence operative against Obama 2008 campaign officials, including the campaign’s co-chairman. I’m sure David Axelrod, Chuck Schumer, the New York Times, and Rachel Maddow would chirp that 'all is forgiven' once they heard Republicans punctiliously parse the nuances between investigating campaign officials versus the campaign proper; between 'spies,' 'informants,' and other government-directed covert operatives. Sure!" • McCarthy took on both Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Trey Gowdy, calling them "General Clapper’s fellow fire extinguishers." McCarthy wrote : "Rubio is a member in good standing of that Washington pillar, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has had about as much interest in scrutinizing the highly irregular actions of intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the Clinton and Russia probes as Gowdy’s Benghazi committee had in revisiting Republican ardor for Obama’s unprovoked war on Moammar Qaddafi. (That would be: roughly zero interest.) Rubio told ABC News that he has seen 'no evidence' that the FBI was gathering information about the Trump campaign. Rather, agents 'were investigating individuals with a history of links to Russia that were concerning.'....Gee, Senator, when you were carefully perusing the evidence of what the FBI was doing, did you ever sneak a peek at what the FBI said it was doing?....the bureau’s then-director [Comey] said about the Trump campaign : 'I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.' That is an unambiguous declaration that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign....Comey went to extraordinary lengths to announce that the FBI was not merely zeroing in on individuals of varying ranks in the campaign; the main question was whether the Trump campaign itself -- the entity -- had 'coordinated' in Russia’s espionage operation." • As for Representative Gowdy, McCarthy finishes him off summarily : "Gowdy’s fire truck pulled into Fox News Tuesday night for an interview by Martha MacCallum....the congressman is suddenly on a mission to protect the Justice Department and the FBI from further criticism. So, when Ms. MacCallum posed the question about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign, Gowdy deftly changed the subject : Rather than address the campaign, he repeatedly insisted that Donald Trump personally was never the 'target' of the FBI’s investigation. The only 'target,' Gowdy maintains, was Russia. This is a dodge on at least two levels....the Trump-Russia probe is a counterintelligence investigation. An accomplished prosecutor, Gowdy well knows that 'target' is a term of art in criminal investigations, denoting a suspect who is likely to be indicted. The term is inapposite to counterintelligence investigations, which are not about building criminal cases but about divining and thwarting the provocative schemes of hostile foreign powers. In that sense, and in no other, the foreign power at issue -- here, Russia -- is always the 'target' of a counterintelligence probe; but it is never a 'target' in the technical criminal-investigation sense in which Gowdy used the term...unless you think we are going to indict a country....his digression about ‘targets’ is gibberish....Whether Trump himself was apt to be indicted, and whether threats posed by Russia were the FBI’s focus, are beside the point; in a counterintelligence case, an indictment is never the objective, and a foreign power is always the focus. Second, if Gowdy has been paying attention, he must know that, precisely because the Trump campaign was under investigation, top FBI officials had qualms of conscience over Comey’s plan to give Trump a misleading assurance that he personally was not under investigation....Clearly, the Obama officials did not want Trump to know the full scope of their investigation of his campaign. But just as important, they wanted the investigation -- an 'insurance policy' that promised to hamstring Trump’s presidency -- to continue. So, how to accomplish these objectives? Plainly, the plan called for Comey to put the new President at ease by telling him he was not a suspect. This would not have been a credible assurance if Comey had informed Trump that his campaign had been under investigation for months, suspected of coordinating in Russia’s cyber-espionage operation. So, information would be withheld. The intelligence chiefs would tell Trump only about Russia’s espionage, not about the Trump campaign’s suspected 'coordination' with the Kremlin. Then, Comey would apprise Trump about only a sliver of the Steele Dossier -- just the lurid story about peeing prostitutes, not the Dossier’s principal allegations of a traitorous Trump-Russia conspiracy....Shortly before he met with Trump, Comey consulted his top FBI advisors about the plan to tell Trump he was not a suspect. There was an objection from one of Comey’s top advisers -- we don’t know which one. Comey recounted this disagreement for the Senate Intelligence Committee. One of the members of the leadership team had a view that, although it was technically true [that] we did not have a counterintelligence file case open on then-President-elect Trump...because we’re looking at the potential...coordination between the campaign and Russia, because it was...President-elect Trump’s campaign, this person’s view was, inevitably, [Trump’s] behavior, [Trump’s] conduct will fall within the scope of that work....The director was unambiguous : The FBI was investigating 'potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.'....the FBI did not regard Russia as the 'target;' to the contrary, Comey said the focus of the investigation was whether Donald Trump’s campaign had coordinated in Russia’s election interference. And perspicaciously, Comey’s unidentified advisor connected the dots: Because (a) the FBI’s investigation was about the campaign, and (b) the campaign was Trump’s campaign, it was necessarily true that (c) Trump’s own conduct was under FBI scrutiny." • McCarthy also discusses the Steele Russia Dossier and FISA Surveillance : "That brings us to a final point. In support of the neon-flashing fact that the Trump campaign was under investigation when the Obama administration ran an informant at it....Probes conducted by both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee have established that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the Steele Dossier to obtain FISA-court warrants against Carter Page. The Dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research project (a fact withheld from the FISA court), was essential to the required probable-cause showing; the FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, testified that without the Dossier there would have been no warrant. So, what did the Dossier say? The lion’s share of it -- the part Director Comey omitted from his briefing of Trump -- alleged that the Trump campaign was conspiring with the Kremlin to corrupt the election, including by hacking and publicizing Democratic-party emails. ....It is a major investigative step to seek surveillance warrants from the FISA court. Unlike using an informant, for which no court authorization is necessary, applications for FISA surveillance require approvals at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI. After going through that elaborate process, the Obama Justice Department and the FBI presented to the court the Dossier’s allegations that the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to undermine the 2016 election. If that was their position under oath before a secret United States court, why would anyone conceivably believe that it was not their position when they ran an informant at members of the campaign they were investigating?" • And, like Gatestone Institute's Christian Adams, McCarthy arrives at the same unavoidable conclusion : "To be sure, no sensible person argues that the FBI should refrain from investigating individuals suspected of acting as clandestine agents of a hostile foreign power. The question is : How should such an investigation proceed in a democratic republic whose norms forbid an incumbent administration, in the absence of strong evidence of egregious misconduct, from directing its counterintelligence and law-enforcement powers against its political opposition? That norm was flouted by the Justice Department and the FBI, under the direction of the Obama administration’s senior political leadership. Representative Gowdy, Senator Rubio, and General Clapper maintain that the Justice Department and the FBI were just doing what we should expect them to do, and that we should applaud them. But this claim is based on the easily refuted fiction that the Justice Department and FBI were not investigating the Trump campaign. The claim also ignores the stubborn fact that, if all the Obama administration had been trying to do was check out a few bad apples with suspicious Russia ties, this could easily have been done by alerting the Trump campaign and asking for its help. Instead, Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation." • • • DID THE FBI TAMPER WITH INVESTIGATION FIELD REPORTS? The Daily Caller's Chuck Ross reported last Wednesday that North Carolina Representative Mark Meadows claimed in a House hearing on Tuesday that : "there is 'growing evidence' that FBI officials altered documentation of witness interviews in the Hillary Clinton and Russia probes." Meadows made the revelation in a round of questioning with Horowitz, asking Horowitz to look into the "growing evidence that 302s were edited and changed...to either prosecute or not prosecute individuals. And that is very troubling.” Meadows was referring to forms that FBI agents use to summarize witness interviews. He told reporters after Tuesday’s hearing that he has seen evidence that 302s filled out during the Clinton and Russia investigations have been changed. He also said he has “more information” about the alleged alterations. Horowitz appeared to acknowledge that he is aware of allegations about edited 302s, telling Meadows : “If I could just mention, we have been getting those kind of referrals and as often happens when we issue reports like this we get other information coming to us, and we are intending to follow up on that.” • • • DEAR READERS, Patricia McCarthy, wrote an American Thinker article on June 22 that says : "We are in fact a divided nation, the mature and immature, the civil and uncivil, the decent and the indecent. We are divided between those who love this country and those who hate it. Our leftists are Marxist globalists who want to see America destroyed or at least transformed from the inside, as Khrushchev predicted fifty years ago that it would be. The Marxists have won in academe. They have won over the Democratic Party completely. Pelosi, Schumer, et al., are on board with flooding the US with illiterate migrants, numbers of them criminals, to satisfy their anti-American ideology. They and their agenda should be shunned by all Americans with a modicum of common sense. The left today is vicious beyond reason and dangerous. They are purposefully trying to incite violence against the President and his family. They are appealing to the craziest, most mentally deranged among us. They are hoping for an assassination. If it happens, as when Steve Scalise was so injured, they celebrate. It is who they are. Odious. They have descended into the abyss of revulsion from which they are not likely to recover any time soon. We need to fight back as conservatives have never before fought back. This left needs to be repudiated." • The evidence, the facts, are piling up that the goal of the Obama administration was to bring down first candidate and then President Trump. Obama's footsoldiers used every arrow in their legal and investigative quivers to hide this fact from Trump. They by turns lied and let slip some truths to Congress and the FISA court. They lied to Trump. They fed the media Fake news to advance their Destroy-Trump agenda. Before the mid-terms, these seditious Deep Staters must be indicted and made to face the Republic and its citizens under oath in a court of law -- in the nation that survives because it lives by the rule of law.