Although if you watch CBS, NBC, MSNBC, or CNN you may know little about it, the FBI and Department of Justice are currently embroiled in a scandal that may rival Watergate.  It appears that members of the upper echelon of the FBI who hated President Trump and were firm Hillary Clinton supporters, abused their power in order to spy upon members of then candidate Donald Trump’s campaign team.  The ramifications of this story are immense and the threads are intricate and still being picked apart.

Last week, the House Intelligence Committee voted to release a memo (no Democrat voted for the release) summarizing the use by the FBI of a “dossier” that they knew had been prepared both with funds from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and with some information provided by then Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton associates, to obtain a warrant to spy on a member of their Republican opponent’s election team only a month before the 2016 election.  The memo, written by former prosecutor Trey Gowdy and known as the “Nunes Memo” after House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, (R-Calif.), was compiled from information the House Intel Committee acquired from their investigations and questioning of upper level FBI agents and others.  It shows that the FBI used the dossier as the basis for their FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant application, supporting it with a Yahoo News story that they knew was based on “dossier” information supplied to FBI asset and former British spy Christopher Steele.  Thus their proof that the dossier information was true came from the dossier itself!  They also knew that Steele had told Andrew McCabe that he hated Donald Trump and absolutely did not want to see him become president, and that some of the “information” supplied to Steele came from Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal, longtime Clinton associates. Yet they took this material that was in effect unverified information provided by and paid for by the Democratic candidate, to spy on the Republican candidate.

Democrats went ballistic at the release of the memo.  They first argued, as did the DOJ and the FBI, that the memo contained explicit information about FBI means of obtaining information which would impact national security if released to the public.  It did not.  Then they said that it was “a nothing burger.”  Unimportant.  Useless information.  Not the whole story.  Then Democratic Ranking Member on the House Intel Committee, Adam Schiff (D-Calif), declared that the Democrats would write their own memo, exposing the inaccuracies of the Nunes Memo.  When his memo was presented to the Committee, all ten pages of it, filled with the very explicit national security information that he had wrongly accused the Nunes Memo of containing, every single Republican voted with the Democrats to release it.  Got that?  No Democrat wanted the Nunes Memo released, but every Republican, secure in the truthfulness of the Nunes Memo, voted to release the Democratic response.  However, President Trump, who must sign off on its release, returned it to the Committee’s Democrats, telling them to fix it before he would allow its release.  Schiff had already gone on television to say that he hoped the President didn’t redact (black out) all the proof that the Nunes Memo was inaccurate.  Obviously, the Democrats included material they knew would have to be redacted so that when it was redacted, they could claim that the President was covering up the truth.  Instead of doing that, he told them to get rid of the national security issues and send it back to him cleaned up!

In support of the Nunes Memo, the offices of Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)  and Lindsay Graham (R- SC) released the (redacted) contents of a letter they had earlier sent to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, asking them to prosecute former British spy and dossier author, Christopher Steele. The facts presented in their letter to Wray and Rosenstein underline that:

  1. The FBI knew the dossier had been paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign
  2. Knew some of the information had gone to Steele from Clinton associates through the State Department
  3. Knew that the rest of the dossier information had come from Russian government sources (Russian collusion to interfere in the election???)
  4. Knew they (the FBI) had not been able to verify the claims in the dossier
  5. Mentioned in a footnote to the request for the warrant that some of the information might have a political background but did not specifically explain that the information was all bought and paid for by the DNC and the Clintons
  6. Used the Yahoo News article as support for the dossier, knowing that the news article also came from Steele
  7. Called Steele a “credible source” even though they had fired him for talking to the press when they had told him not to and he had assured them that he had not done so (lying to the FBI—a crime for which they did not arrest him).

Why this is important and why it is more troubling than Watergate ever was:

First, a FISA warrant must be renewed every 90 days, 120 days, or every year. This one was renewed four times, each time relying heavily on the dossier that the FBI knew was “opposition research” which should never be used for legal purposes since it is by definition biased.  (Opposition research is basically dirt which one side has dug up on the other.  It will contain rumors, innuendo, lies and from time to time, some truth, but generally the truthfulness of the research is of no interest to the party doing the research.  This is common political strategy used by both parties, unfortunately.)

Then, once approved, the warrant allows the FBI not only to wire-tap or electronically spy on the person mentioned in the warrant, but also on everyone he talks to and everyone that individual talks to. For example, Carter Page talks to Steve Bannon.  The FBI then monitors all of Bannon’s calls.  Steve Bannon talks to candidate Trump.  The FBI then monitors all of his calls.  Trump talks to his sons and his daughter and all of their phones are then monitored.  And there you have it.  Theoretically, the Obama administration and the FBI now know every plan, every strategy, every move by the Republican candidate for the presidency.

From emails between FBI agents Peter Stzrok and his lover, Lisa Page, we have a glimpse into just how involved the FBI and the Justice Department were in collusion to interfere in a democratic election.

  1. Stzrok and Page both worked on the Clinton email investigation and (Page only briefly) on the Mueller Trump-Russian probe. Their emails reveal their hatred of Trump and suggest a plan B, an “insurance policy” in case he should actually win.
  2. Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s wife ran an unsuccessful bid for a Virginia Senate seat with money from the Clinton camp. McCabe also met with Steele, and from their conversation knew of Steele’s extreme anti-Trump bias. Apparently McCabe also held a meeting in his office in which the “insurance policy” was discussed.
  3. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr met with British spy and dossier author, Christopher Steele, and at the same time Ohr’s wife was working for Fusion GPS who had hired Steele with DNC and Clinton money.
  4. Stzrok and Page discuss putting together “talking points” for President Obama because he “wanted to know everything” they were doing.
  5. James Comey, who, usurping the job of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, announced on television that there was insufficient proof to indict Hillary Clinton, was the Director of the FBI while all of this was going on and presumably would have known of the origins of the “dossier” since he later showed it to president-elect Trump. He then told a Senate committee that the information in the dossier was “salacious and unverified.”

It seems obvious from the information gathered by the House Intelligence Committee (summarized in the Nunes Memo) and the letter compiled by Senators Grassley and Graham and sent to FBI Director Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, that high-ranking members of Obama’s FBI, State Department, and Justice Department were complicit not only in spying on the Trump campaign during the election, but also in continuing that spying, through the renewals of the FISA warrant, on the Trump transition team after the election and leading up to the inauguration. The hint is also there that President Obama may have known what was going on.

One can only wonder at all the leaks to the press during the early days of the Trump administration.  How many of them came through those same FBI officials via the FISA warrants which gave them the ability to listen in on Republican conversations for nearly a year beginning in October of 2016.

In the Watergate Scandal, Republican operatives broke into the Democratic National Committee office to steal documents of Democratic strategic plans.  They were caught, and the attempt by President Richard Nixon to cover up his connection to the thieves brought down his presidency. Here not just Democratic operatives, but Democratic members of the FBI, Justice Department, State Department and perhaps even the President, used false information to get legal permission to spy for nearly a year on their Republican opponent and his nascent administration in an attempt to bring down his presidency and undo a fair election.  This is a grievous assault on our Constitution and on our way of life.  This, as one congressman said after reading the Nunes memo, is what you would expect to find in a banana republic or a communist government, not in the United States!  It is important that we as American citizens understand the danger of what has happened and push our congressmen to find the truth and punish the wrongdoers so that this can never happen again!  Otherwise, this government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” will cease to exist.