Tick, Tick, Tick

Richard Fernandez recounts events in 2016 that led the Obama administration to learn that the Russians were hacking the DNC with the intent of roiling the election. Rather than confront the Russians, the Obama administration decided to do nothing, worrying that any overt action or accusation would serve to support candidate Donald Trump's claim at the time that the election was "rigged." This contention is supported by a report in the Obama-friendly New York Times:

The Obama administration feared that acknowledging Russian meddling in the 2016 election would reveal too much about intelligence gathering and be interpreted as “taking sides” in the race, the former secretary of homeland security said Wednesday. “One of the candidates, as you recall, was predicting that the election was going to be ‘rigged’ in some way,” said Jeh Johnson, the former secretary, referring to President Trump’s unsubstantiated accusation before Election Day. “We were concerned that by making the statement we might, in and of itself, be challenging the integrity of the election process itself.”

Fernandez comments:

They [the NYT] apparently saw Russian efforts as so ineffectual or indecisive they could afford to ignore them. Or perhaps they thought that Fusion GPS could pull off a Google [that Fusion GPS would make the accusation for the Obama administration]. No matter, Hillary Clinton was certainly going to win. "Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power hosted all of her fellow female ambassadors to the U.N. at her apartment on election night in 2016 for what she anticipated would be a celebratory evening watching Hillary Clinton win the presidency." The confidence in Hillary's victory was apparently shared at the FBI. In August 2016 FBI agent Peter Strzok the challenged his superior's assumption that Trump would surely lose.

The hysteria that followed Clinton's upset loss to Trump precipitated the fantasy claim by Democrats that Trump "colluded" with the Russians. That claim in turn has led to 15 months of investigations that have turned up no credible evidence but lots of political points that aid the Dems in their overt attempt to destroy Trump's presidency.

It is supremely ironic, therefore, that the Democrats' demand for "investigations" has lead to actual evidence—and lots of it—that indicates dishonesty and corruption within the Clinton campaign and inside senior levels of Obama's FBI and DoJ, not to mention creepy illusions in texts by senior FBI and DoJ officials to "an insurance policy" in the unlikely event of a Trump win. Even more important, it appears that senior levels of both FBI and DoJ used a dossier funded by the Clinton campaign as one of the key pieces of evidence that lead to surveillance of the Trump campaign by the feds. The Dems, in what now appears to be a state of panic, are in full attack mode, impugning not only a memo summarizing all of this [their alternative facts memo will be released later this week], but the integrity of the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that wrote it.

Today, a new release of texts indicates that the investigation is getting closer to Barack Obama himself. In a text between the now infamous Peter Strzok (FBI) and Lisa Page (DoJ), both avid Clinton supporters and Trump haters, we learn that "potus wants to know everything we're doing." Hmmm. Vague no doubt, but in the context of their efforts to discredit and surveil the Trump campaign, interesting nonetheless. Was Obama aware of the FBI-DoJ efforts to use the Fusion GPS dossier as evidence for a FISA warrant? And if he wasn't, who in authority approved that move? Given the political impact, it surely wasn't a low level functionary, as Obama dishonestly claimed after he earlier weaponized the IRS against his political opponents.

It's also worth noting Barack Obama's own words in April, 2016, "I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI, Not just in this case but in any case. Period. Full stop. Period. Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department because nobody is above the law." Based on hard evidence now known to the public, that was a lie.

Thomas Lifson comments:

Tick, tick, tick… we’re getting closer and closer to the “What did the president know and when did he know it?” moment in the biggest political scandal in American history. What looks like a sitting president authorizing the use of the vast spy apparatus of the federal government on the opposing party candidate for president would, if proven, be far bigger than Watergate – a mere burglary intended to spy on the opposition.

Of course, we don't yet know that to be true, but in the fevered throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome, it looks increasingly like the Dems may have unleashed information that they would much prefer had remained hidden from public view. Their trained hamsters in the media will work in overdrive to keep that information from being widely understood, but it's out there, and it isn't complementary to the Democrats themselves, to Obama, or to his would-be successor, Hillary Clinton.

Tick, Tick, Tick.