btrollinger@summitdaily.com
Oh, it’s a constitutional crisis, all right. And it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. Just not in the way Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi think.
The comic irony behind Congressional Democrats’ demand that the attorney general ignore regulations and violate laws to give them information to which they are not entitled without resort to a court order is that the legal impediment involved is entirely of their own doing: laws and regulations preventing such release were crafted in the Clinton administration, following Special Counsel Ken Starr’s public report on the Clinton family’s peccadilloes.
There is similar vicious foolishness in their criticism of the attorney general’s arrival in office. Of course Bill Barr is President Trump’s “hand-picked” AG. Do they think Obama picked Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch by lot?
But behind their attempts to smear Barr is something more sinister, something reeking of fear. They are afraid of what the attorney general will discover by directing Department of Justice investigators to uncover the origins of the “Trump-Russia collusion” lie. Their fear is justified, because it is becoming increasingly clear from what has surfaced to date from the few remaining investigative journalists that the 2016 election saw both conspiracy and fraud, but not on the part of the Trump campaign.
It has been evident for awhile that both the Department of Justice and at least part of the National Security apparatus was subverted by politics and used for the corrupt purpose of spying on American citizens including a presidential candidate. Whether authority for this deeply disturbing practice came from the heads of respective agencies — James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Loretta Lynch and John Brennan — or whether responsibility lands further up the food chain is now an open question. We know about the Lynch-Clinton tarmac meeting in Phoenix a week before Hillary’s so-called “interview” about her illegal private server while secretary of state, and about other bizarre lacunae in that investigation. Similarly, the false-flag operations to set up George Papadopoulos using FBI “investigator” Azra Turk and contractor Stephen Halpern, with our British MI-6 “cousins” providing Joseph Mifsud to bait, and Alexander Downer to close the trap — thereby providing false justification for surveillance on an American political party, is knowledge available to anyone with the curiosity to look.
It is further evident that Moscow had allies in America, just not necessarily Republicans. Specifically, it seems “Fusion GPS,” the character hit squad hired by the 2016 Clinton campaign, strongly suspected the “dossier” they got from fired FBI contractor Christopher Steele might have been Russian disinformation. But given its usefulness, they didn’t care.
The same organization was involved in the infamous June 9, 2016 “Trump Tower” meeting between members of the Trump campaign and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who got the meeting by claiming she knew people with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton — a lie. It is said that she met with Fusion GPS founder Glen Simpson both before and after the said meeting. It would doubtless be useful to discover what they discussed, provided either party could manage to be truthful.
Fusion GPS also had questionably close personal ties with the Department of Justice. Nellie Ohr, the wife of former DOJ number four Bruce Ohr and an occasional CIA contractor, was their employee and a Trump opposition researcher who met with Steele on at least two occasions. She is now the subject of a criminal referral. Ohr himself met Simpson following Clinton’s defeat, and with Steele. The latter meeting was instrumental in getting the Steele “dossier” into the FBI’s hands.
Then there’s the money Fusion GPS received from Moscow for its efforts to undo the Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on regimes in which those who annoy oligarchs end up dead — as did the law’s namesake, a Russian lawyer who stood up to one of Vlad the Terrible’s buddies. Not incidentally, the Trump administration is enforcing the act. Note that Fusion GPS is not registered as an agent of a foreign power, one of the crimes for which Paul Manafort and others were jailed; to anyone interested in “fairness,” this seems an oversight.
None of the above facts were secret. None was difficult to find. But they were ignored, as were many other corrupt and possibly criminal actions taken by Democrats in the waning days of the Obama Administration. That, and much else that was not criminal but was certainly ethically questionable, is what the Democrats are now straining to keep from the public with such effort as causes them to sweat blood. That is why they will move heaven and earth to destroy the character of the attorney general, by any means fair, foul or outright ludicrous.
Before the facts he uncovers destroys the tissue of lies upon which their coveted future is built.
Morgan Liddick writes a weekly column for the Summit Daily News.