3/7/2017 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com
At
Mar-a-Lago this weekend President Donald Trump was filled "with fury"
says The Washington Post, "mad -- steaming, raging, mad."
Early
Saturday the fuming president exploded with this tweet: "Terrible! Just
found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the
victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
The
president has reason to be enraged. For what is afoot is a loose but broad
conspiracy to break and bring him down, abort his populist agenda, and overturn
the results of the 2016 election.
At its
heart is the "deep state" -- agents of the intel community, their
media collaborators, and their amen corner in a Democratic party whose control
of our permanent government is all but total.
At the
heart of the case against Trump is what appears to be a Big Lie.
It is that
Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta's email
account, then colluded with Trump's friends or associates to systematically
sabotage Hillary Clinton's campaign. Therefore, Trump stole the election and is
an illegitimate president. In this city, Trump is looked upon as a border-jumper,
an illegal alien.
Yet let us
consider the constituent components of the charge.
For months,
we have heard that U.S. intel agencies agree that the Russians hacked the DNC
and Clinton campaign, and gave the fruits of their cybertheft to WikiLeaks, because
Putin wanted Trump to win.
For months,
this storyline has been investigated by the FBI and the intelligence committees
of both houses of Congress.
Yet where
is the body of evidence that the Russians did this?
More
critically, where is the evidence Trump's people played an active role in the
operation? Why is it taking the FBI the better part of a year to come up with a
single indictment in this Trump-Putin plot?
Is this all
smoke and mirrors?
In late
February, The New York Times reported that Trump officials had been in regular
touch with Russian intelligence officers.
The smoking
gun had been found! Yet, almost immediately after that report, White House
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told Fox News "the top levels of the
intelligence community" had assured him that the allegations of campaign
contacts with Russia were "not only grossly overstated, but also
wrong."
If what
Reince says is true, the real crime here is U.S. security officials enlisting
their Fourth Estate collaborators, who enjoy First Amendment privileges against
having to testify under oath or being prosecuted, to undermine the elected
commander in chief.
Now we
expect Russia to seek to steal our secrets as we steal theirs. After all, our
NSA wiretapped Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Our
National Endowment for Democracy pushes "color revolutions" to bring
about regime change in the near abroad of Putin's Russian Federation.
Our NGOs
are being restricted, shut down, expelled from Russia, China, Israel and Egypt,
because they have been caught interfering in the internal affairs of those
countries. There is talk that Putin use the pilfered emails as payback for
Clinton's urging demonstrators to take to the streets of Moscow to protest a
narrow victory by his United Russia party in 2011.
As for the
alleged wiretapping of Trump Tower, President Obama has denied ordering any
such thing and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assures
us nothing of the sort was ever done.
Yet, there
are other reports that intelligence officials got a warrant to surveil Trump
campaign officials or the Trump Tower, and, though failing to succeed in the
FISA court that authorizes such surveillance in June, they did succeed in
October.
If true,
this is a far more explosive matter than whether a Trump aide may have told the
Russians, "You're doing a great job!" when WikiLeaks blew DNC
chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz out of her job for tilting the playing
field against Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
What needs
to be done now? The White House should tell the Justice Department to tell the
FBI to expedite its investigation and file a report on what was done by the
Russians. And if any Trump campaign official criminally colluded with the
Russians, send the recommendation to indict to Justice.
The acting
attorney general should instruct Director James Comey to run down, remove and
recommend for prosecution any FBI or intel agent who has leaked the fruits of
their investigation, or fake news, to the media. If Comey cannot find the source
of the leaks, or lies, coming out of this investigation, a housecleaning may be
needed at the bureau.
While
President Obama may not have ordered any surveillance of Trump or his advisors,
the real question is whether he or Attorney General Loretta Lynch were aware of
or approved of any surveillance of Trump and his staff during the campaign.
Russian
hacking of the DNC is a problem, not a scandal. The scandal is this: Who inside
the government of the United States is trying to discredit, damage or destroy
the President of the United States? For these are the real subversives.
No comments:
Post a Comment