One of the most fascinating things about the Russia Hoax has been the extent to which those with fancy titles and decades of Russia subject matter expertise fell for it, and became some of the most enthusiastic consumers of BS.
The media and government, similar to Covid-19, have pretended to fall for the Russia hoax, rather than actually fell for it, for the purpose of harming Trump. This may be true, but it is worrisome that they really were that weak in their critical thinking.
The chips are beginning to fall.
Reports that the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and other top Obama administration officials had been involved in the effort to “unmask” ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn — mounting evidence notes that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct regarding the opening the “collusion” investigation.
That investigation was based on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the Department of Justice withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s campaign.
We have proof that many of the relevant warrant applications were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn.
By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files.
His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.”
Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of Iran-deal opponents in Congress.
We know that Barack Obama was keenly interested in the Russian-collusion investigation’s progress.
In her very last hour in office, National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a self-preserving e-mail to herself, noting that she’d attended a meeting with the president, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI Director James Comey and Vice President Joe Biden in which Obama stressed that everything in the investigation should proceed “by the book.”
This all matters, because, Biden is the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. He’s running as the heir to Obama’s legacy, and he was at that meeting with Rice. He had denied even knowing anything about the FBI investigation into Flynn before being forced to correct himself after ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pointed out that he was mentioned in Rice’s e-mail. It’s completely legitimate to wonder what he knew about the investigation.
Likewise in 2016. As the FBI agents involved in the case noted, they wanted to have an “insurance policy” if the unthinkable happened. And indeed, the unthinkable did happen, and we’re still dealing with the fallout four years later. We don’t know where this scandal will end up, but it could be fun to watch.
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