By Jon Dougherty
(TNS) Thanks to the weaponization of the intelligence community by successive presidents — Democrat and Republican — over the decades, it has become obvious there is no good reason for young American men and women to sacrifice their lives for the CIA, DIA, FBI, NSA, and the dozen-plus additional agencies that comprise the IC.
Not without some major reforms first and a helluva lot of indictments and convictions.
The two most recent and obvious examples of this are Michael Flynn and Carter Page. For their “crime” of siding with a presidential candidate — Donald Trump — who pledged to return power to the American people by draining a stinking, fetid DC swamp, righting wrong-headed trade deals, putting our country ahead of all others in the foreign policy realm, and ending endless wars — they have been destroyed.
Worse, they’ve had their lives disrupted by scumbags deep staters who are currently earning fat taxpayer-supported pensions and big bucks on cable ‘news’ networks as “consultants” and “experts,” or who are walking around free and clear to be hailed by a complicit “mainstream” media that served as a conduit for one lie after another about these gentlemen.
It’s worse than pathetic or disgusting. It’s outrageous.
The recently-released report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, as Rush Limbaugh noted Monday on his program, was more than just a documenting of ‘errors’ committed by James Comey’s FBI.
These were serious, serial, intentional violations of the law that stripped a man — Page — of his basic constitutional rights through a concerted, planned operation to prevent Trump from reaching the Oval Office, then undermine him after he won.
Page, as Limbaugh noted, isn’t some “cartoon,” he’s a real, live American citizen who deserves the protections of our founding document, as well as those contained in U.S. law.
And the IG concludes that it was either incompetence, which is highly unlikely ’cause it was four years. You don’t have a steady stream of this kind of incompetence from the premier law enforcement agency in the world, the FBI. He said it’s either incompetence or intentionality. And intentionality, for those of you in Rio Linda, it means they meant to do it, which means bias. The body of the report and the analysis clearly offers bias as one of the only two explanations for how all of this happened.
The FBI engaged in gross abuse of its power, engaged in deceit after deceit after deceit. The IG report documents countless instances in which the FBI, in order to convince the FISA court to allow it to spy on Carter Page, manipulated documents, concealed exculpatory evidence, meaning denied the court evidence that would show Carter Page wasn’t doing what they alleged, and they knowingly lied to the court. They presented outright lies to the FISA court.
Now, Carter Page is not just some cartoon character here. Carter Page is a human being, an American citizen. The entire library of his civil liberties were abused and exploited. He actually was, for all intents and purposes, an agent of the CIA. He had contacts in Russia. He was meeting with them and reporting regularly back to the CIA.
The FBI was going to the FISA court and claiming that he was a Russian agent, that he was spying for Trump, that he was an agent — he was a go-between — between Putin and Donald Trump. The CIA got hold of the FBI and said, “No, no, no. You’ve got this wrong. Carter Page is one of ours.” Even after they learned that, they went back three more times to renew the warrant to spy on Carter Page!
Then there is Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser:
Michael Flynn and his family were destroyed. Flynn was set up by Comey, and Comey has bragged about how he destroyed Flynn. He’s bragged about how the new Trump administration didn’t know how things operated yet, so it was easy to deceive Flynn.
It was easy to just send a couple of agents in to actually investigate Flynn while Flynn thought that it was a conversation between equals talking about his new job as national security adviser. They never told him he was being interviewed. They never formally went to the White House counsel’s office to seek an interview. They just said, “Hey, can we come by and talk? We have a couple people in the neighborhood. Can we come by and have a chat with you?” Flynn says, “Sure. I’d love to talk to you.”
They sent a couple of agents that prepared 302s, which is what you write up after a criminal investigation — and this barely scratches the surface of what they did.