The media have been saturated with coronavirus news for weeks now, with literally hundreds of stories each day about the pandemic. But while you’re quarantined and self-distancing yourself from the dreaded COVID-19 virus, you might not have noticed something big: the investigation into the Russian spygate fiasco is coming to a head.
As the old saying goes, the wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. Some time after our nation reopens for business in a few weeks, the wheels will turn when the Durham report on the Russian collusion case will be released and hit the front pages.
If recent revelations are any indication, it will be a blockbuster, potentially leading to indictments of former senior intelligence and justice officials.
By now, most of us know that top officials in the Justice Department, FBI and CIA pursued an investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign for alleged “collusion” with Russia to tilt the 2016 election in Donald Trump’s favor.
The main premise of that investigation proved to be false, as the subsequent Mueller report showed conclusively.
That’s bad enough. But new revelations show that not only did U.S. officials wrongly pursue the investigation and spy on the Trump campaign, they did so knowing that it was based on Russian disinformation.
And why did they do it? To aid the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, which financed the spurious anti-Trump “dossier” put together by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Damning Footnotes
As investigative reporter Sara Carter recently noted, “Newly declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December FBI report reveals that senior Obama officials, including members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, knew the dossier compiled by a former British spy during the 2016 election was Russian disinformation to target President Donald Trump.”
The FBI used the bogus evidence anyway to convince a FISA court to let the FBI spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Page resigned as a Trump adviser in September 2016. But by spying on him, the FBI opened a backdoor into Trump’s entire campaign.
Let the irony of that sink in. U.S. officials knowingly colluded with Russian intelligence using tainted evidence to prove that Trump colluded with the Russian government to weaken Clinton’s campaign.
If so, they were willingly duped by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.
In addition, the footnotes show that these same senior officials “were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment.”
Under the legal “fruit of a poisonous tree” doctrine, evidence obtained illegally cannot be used as a predicate for legal action. That means the whole Trump investigation, including the tapping of Trump campaign officials’ communications, was illegitimate if not downright illegal.
The upshot of all this is that former FBI chief James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA top spy John Brennan and an array of their underlings knew the information that came from the Steele dossier was tainted, but used it anyway.
Barr’s Shot Across The Bow
Speaking to Laura Ingraham earlier this week, U.S. Attorney General William Barr called the FBI-Clinton spying on Trump “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”
He promised that the current investigation of wrongdoing by U.S. Attorney John Durham would “bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses” in the Russia investigation, and that those who broke the law would be “prosecuted.”
This should include Clinton, who has become an increasingly unhinged and vocal critic of all things Trump. If there was indeed a Deep State conspiracy, wasn’t she at its very center?
In addition to resolving the Russia spygate mess, which Clinton helped set in motion, the Justice Department said it will not block depositions by former Secretary of State Clinton and her deputy Cheryl Mills, as recently ordered by a federal judge.
The depositions are in response to a Freedom Of Information Act suit brought by the legal watchdog group Judicial Watch over Clinton’s possibly illegal use of an unsecured private email server to conduct State Department business.
Stay tuned. The Russian collusion investigation, which was in fact a partisan witch hunt funded by public money, is coming to an end. And it may lead to one or more major former public officials being indicted and going to prison.
For a nation based on the idea of one standard of justice for all, this reckoning is long overdue.
— Written by I&I editorial board
source I&I
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