deep state

If Durham does “punt” until after the 2020 election, it could become more political still, pushing our society to the edge of civil war and beyond. Imagine this: Joe Biden wins the election and come January 2021, just before his inauguration, the Durham report comes out. Several major players in the aforementioned government agencies, household names at this point, are indicted. These indictments go all the way to the top but not quite, leaving Obama and Biden unscathed, at least technically. How does Mr. Durham expect the losers in the election, the tens of millions of Trump supporters, to react then?

Who are the people to be indicted for leaking the contents of the Flynn-Kislyak call all those years ago? Well, Richard Grenell, the national intelligence director, just supplied us with a list of likely culprits. They are people who submitted unmasking requests regarding the name of Mr. Flynn. It is not a long list, and it includes several very famous names, for instance: former UN Ambassador Samantha Power, former national intelligence director James Clapper, and former vice president Joe Biden. Yes, Joe Biden is on the list. Say it isn’t so, Joe. You were just getting your Basement Campaign underway.

Where were the opposing voices in the breathless CBS News “reporting” on the Russiagate hoax? Nowhere to be found of course, because the totally false Trump – Russian collusion was the narrative that Democrats and their Deep State allies wanted to establish as the “truth.” In our view busting that narrative was Catherine Herridge’s real sin in the eyes of her liberal media colleagues at CBS and elsewhere.

With Obamagate, there is no longer the reasonable expectation that the Deep State, or Washington elite Americans have left largely to their own devices to regulate, legislate, and deficit-finance our lives since the Great Depression, will continue as they have. The public is now acutely aware of a two-tiered justice system that allows the political class to ignore the laws it inflicts on regular people. And the market has been shaken out of its status quo — talk to any small or medium-sized business entrepreneur, and they’re reexamining everything they’re doing in recognition their prosperity is no longer assured.

From the earliest days, President Barack Obama has shown a curious — and unseemly — obsession with the case of Gen. Michael Flynn. The whole saga began six years ago when Mr. Obama fired the retired three-star general from his post as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Gen. Flynn’s firing raises a host of troubling new questions. Indeed, there is a reason why it is always the creeper hanging around all the suspicious fires who becomes the prime suspect. Or, as the say along the swampy environs of the Potomac, “It’s not the crime. It’s the coverup.” So, Barack Obama … what did you know and when did you know it?

While this might be the end of Flynn’s persecution, there is more to come.  John Durham, the federal prosecutor picked by Mr. Barr to lead an investigation into the actions by law enforcement and the intelligence community into Russian interference in American politics, has yet to release his findings, along with possible indictments. Iowa GOP Sen. Charles Grassley said on Fox News last week he expects Mr. Durham’s report in “two to three months.” One can only hope that this outrageous conspiracy will be fully exposed and that the perpetrators will be brought to justice, but the cynic in me is not betting on it.

Recently, the Intelligence Community made clear it will be a player in the 2020 presidential election. No one should be surprised. On Feb. 13, the House Intelligence Committee held a meeting at which intelligence officials briefed lawmakers on foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections. By several accounts, the officials told the committee that Russia is working to reelect President Trump. Later, just to make matters more difficult, there were leaks that Russia is also trying to help elect Bernie Sanders. The leak left many experts baffled, except to the extent that, with the Trump leak, it seemed to target the Intelligence Community's two least-favorite candidates. Trump was angry after the news broke.

As Attorney General William Barr looks into how it all started, some voices that were part of that frenzy are changing their tune about the value of investigations. They now express concern about investigations, concern that Barr is politicizing the Justice Department to go after perceived political enemies. An investigation lasting seemingly forever and putting one's family through hell? Imagine that! Coming from Andrew McCabe, the lack of self-awareness is so pronounced that it would be darkly funny, were not the events of the last three years so serious. More complaints are sure to come as Barr, and Barr's appointees, investigate the questionable acts of the investigators.

It would be nice to restore some faith in that lofty-sounding ideal chiseled into the pediment of the Supreme Court. I do believe that William Barr is endeavoring to recover the impartiality without which any Justice Department mutates into an injustice department. It was good news, for example, that the Justice Department announced Friday that it had engaged an outside prosecutor to review the government’s case against former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn. Flynn recently withdrew his guilty plea. It is anyone’s guess what Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney assigned with looking into Flynn’s case, will discover. I hope that he is exonerated and lavishly compensated.

Impeachment has been redefined as a mere vote of no confidence and will become a rank political ploy for years to come once an opposition party gains a majority in the House. It is taking on the flavor of a preemptory device, a vaccination, rather than a medicine, as if to prevent future hypothetical crimes in the absence of current impeachable offenses. The most baleful legacy of the current Trump hatred is a new model of out-of-power administrations that never quite leave. Instead, apparently from now on, the retired, the fired, the voted out, the emeriti, and the transitioned will become opposition activists who seek to destroy their successors whose record they cannot abide and whose agendas they deathly fear.

There’s nothing that says the Administration has to run out and obligate the funds Congress appropriates on the first day of the Fiscal Year. The Pentagon spends more than $2 billion every day, and plenty of Americans would like to see that number go down. To claim the President broke the law because the Pentagon couldn’t spend $35 million in 19 days is nothing but a political smear.

Trump's tweet artfully sums up the Trump era from the perspective of the president and his supporters. With a likeness to the Uncle Sam “I want you” poster, the disrupter-in-chief reaffirms in 14 words the belief of Trump Nation that the political establishment, the media, the permanent bureaucracy and yes, the deep state are trying to crush him and them. Trump’s oblique reference to a weaponized and powerful adversary is hardly ­unfounded, with a partisan, flimsy impeachment the latest example. The tweet’s siren call to believers is a shorthand way of saying that impeachment is just a continuation of the endless attacks against us. Schumer’s warning hit the bull’s-eye.

The Democrats, media, deep state, and Never Trumpers fomented this fiction to stymie the duly elected president of the United States. They’re still doing it. Never has a president had to endure such relentless harassment. A man of business, Trump came to the presidency as a political naif and has reaped the wrath of a government leviathan hell-bent on protecting its power and ill-gotten gain. The president isn’t naive any longer. President Trump wants an impeachment trial in the Senate. He wants blood. He wants to call every witness and reduce them to rubble. Whether that’s the best political strategy or not is questionable. But Trump’s instincts so far have rarely been wrong.

Turning the Hollywood stunt of having Leftwing actors read the Mueller Report on its head, our friends Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are producing a must listen series of podcasts featuring “Full Metal Jacket” star Adam Baldwin doing dramatic readings from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ report outlining the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

We urge CHQ readers and friends of civil liberties of whatever political stripe to call Senator Lindsey Graham, the toll-free Capitol Switchboard number (1-866-220-0044), tell him that you want him to undertake an investigation to establish who at the Obama White House was involved in Operation Crossfire Hurricane and what Obama knew and when did he know it.

What the IG report describes are the middle steps in the circular proof cycle created to justify the surveillance and investigation of the Trump campaign and set-up the Russian collusion narrative. But the report doesn’t examine the predicate steps that brought Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos into contact with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, so, since the IG failed to do so, we will connect all the dots in the circle.

It is easy for our legal and ethical custodians to hound unpopular politicians whom the media despises, and who incur strident political opposition. Investigators and inquisitors know that any dirt they can dig up will earn them praise. The reason we have auditors in the first place is for precisely the opposite purpose: to examine evidence fairly, even if the final conclusions are likely to exonerate someone deemed boorish and crude by most of federal officialdom. In other words, our investigatory agencies should function like the First Amendment, which primarily serves not to protect free speech that we all admire but to protect unpopular speech that most prefer not to hear.

We urge CHQ readers and friends to call their Representative and Senators (the toll-free Capitol Switchboard is 1-866-220-0044), tell your Representative and Senators that no provision of FISA should be renewed until the public has answers to the questions about how FISA was used to spy on Donald Trump and who in the Obama administration directed and implemented that anti-constitutional spying.

To Trump's critics, “coup” is no longer a dirty word trafficked in by right-wing conspiracists. Instead, it has been normalized. Efforts to oppose Trump are often self-described as “The Resistance,” a reference to the underground French fighters resisting the Nazis in World War II. Trump’s opponents often have praised the deep state precisely because unelected career officials are seen as the most effective way to sabotage and stymie his agenda. A “coup” is no longer proof of right-wing paranoia, but increasingly a part of the general progressive discourse of resistance to Trump. In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election.

If Durham chooses to bring charges against any official who launched the Trump probe, history suggests he is extremely likely to persuade a jury to convict the accused and sustain those convictions upon appeal. And if he does not bring charges, it is extremely unlikely that any other prosecutor could have succeeded; regardless of what the official did, the evidence would not be there to convict or sustain a conviction. John Durham’s career is full of big, high-stakes, politically charged cases, but this one is the biggest, highest-stakes, and most politically charged of all. Luckily, it seems like his whole life has prepared him for this moment.