The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Friday, April 12, 2019

Barr None

Over the past two years, I have posted dozens of pieces on what I believe to be the most significant governmental scandal in my lifetime. Like other serious scandals in the past decade, it was born in the Obama administration, began as an attempt to defeat Donald Trump in his run for the presidency, and then morphed into an effort by senior people within the FBI, the intelligence community and the DoJ to conduct a "soft coup"—an attempt to delegitimize a duly elected president and remove him from office. All of this was precipitated by a phony dossier generated by the Clinton campaign and the DNC in collusion with a British ex-spy and ... wait for it ... the Russians!

The Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media were certain that none of this would surface (after all, Hillary Clinton was sure to win) and to some extent, that may be why Trump Derangement Syndrome is now so fierce. I believed that the Dems would prevail and that this epic scandal would be buried. I may have been wrong in that belief.

Enter Attorney General William Barr. To understand the danger he represents to the Democrats, consider the degree to which he has been vilified in the past two weeks. The Dems have put their smear machine into overdrive, frightened that Barr may actually conduct an in-depth investigation of the "spying" that was conducted on Trump's campaign and then, the "soft coup" (my tern, not Barr's) that occurred once Trump was elected. Unlike the collusion hoax, precipitated by the very same FBI, Intelligence and DoJ people who are now to be investigated, which was built on evidence-free innuendo, there is copious evidence, much in the perpetrators' own words, emails, and records that indicated something very bad did happen. The Dems are using thew tyerm "conspiracy" repeatedly over recent days, suggesting that this scandal is fantasy. There was a conspiracy, but it was perpetrated by Democrat partisans in government agencies that are supposed to be non-partisan. Barr seems willing to look hard at those things.

Kim Strassel, a journalist who has been tirelessly reporting on this story, writes:
The most inadvertently honest reaction to Attorney General William Barr’s congressional testimony this week came from former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Mr. Barr had bluntly called out the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016. Mr. Clapper said that was both “stunning and scary.” Indeed.

No doubt a lot of former Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign officials, opposition guns for hire, and media members are stunned and scared that the Justice Department finally has a leader willing to address the FBI’s behavior in 2016. They worked very hard to make sure such an accounting never happened. Only in that context can we understand the frantic new Democratic-media campaign to tar the attorney general.
Mr. Barr told the Senate Wednesday that one question he wants answered is why nobody at the FBI briefed the Trump campaign about concerns that low-level aides might have had inappropriate contacts with Russians. That’s “normally” what happens, Mr. Barr said, and the Trump campaign had two obvious people to brief—Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, both former federal prosecutors.

It wasn’t only the Trump campaign that the FBI kept in the dark. The bureau routinely briefs Congress on sensitive counterintelligence operations. Yet former Director James Comey admits he deliberately hid his work from both the House and the Senate. And the FBI kept information from yet another overseer, the judicial branch, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had paid for the dossier it presented as a basis for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a U.S. citizen.

Why the secrecy? Mr. Comey testified that the Trump probe was simply too sensitive for members of congressional intelligence committees to know about—an unbelievable statement given the heavy publicity he gave the investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s improper handling of classified information. Here’s a more plausible explanation: Mr. Comey and his crew have also testified that they were all convinced Mrs. Clinton would win the election. That would have meant that no politician other than the incoming Democratic president would have known the FBI had spied on the Trump team. Nor would the public. A Clinton presidency would have ensured no accountability.

Mr. Trump’s victory destroyed that scenario, and it became clear that the new Republican president would soon know that the former Democratic administration had surveilled his campaign on the basis of information from his rival. At that point two things happened. Neither was accidental, and both were aimed, again, at forestalling accountability.
After watching the Democrats' dishonest and vicious attempt to unseat Trump yield nothing, I must admit that it's satisfying (yet at the same time, sad) to see the tables turned. The sanctimonious "investigators" may now become the investigated. Their own past president, Barack Obama, and his administration, may be drawn into this web of deceit.

With the help of their trained hamsters in the media, the Dems are desperate to sully Barr's reputation and to characterize this as purely political. In a way, they're right about the political aspect of this. These past two years have seen purely political attempt to destroy Trump. The fundamental difference is that the Dem's attempt was based on innuendo and nothing else. Barr's investigation already has a body of facts and evidence that should cause the hairs on the back of Democrat necks to stand up straight.

The tables may be turning.