Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy Page 15

  Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

  The whole house of cards should have collapsed the moment the FBI knew the Clinton campaign and the DNC had paid $12 million for their chief piece of evidence. To circumvent election laws, the campaign had paid a law firm, which had then paid a research firm, which had then paid a former British spy to get dirt on Donald Trump from Kremlin-connected Russians.

  The FBI had previously worked with that former British spy Christopher Steele. But when it came to the dossier, it not only ignored the political motivation behind his research, it paid him an additional $50,000 to continue. Not only was this dossier used to smear the president politically, it was used to create the special counsel, as the basis of congressional hearings and the reason for wall-to-wall anti-Trump media coverage. But worst of all, this known piece of political fiction was used as the excuse for further investigation, wiretaps, unmasking, and the FISA warrants in question.

  That makes whatever was developed because of the warrant classic “fruit of the poisonous tree,” meaning it is inadmissible in court. When police illegally conduct a search without a warrant, any evidenceis inadmissible in court.

  According to news breaking at the time of this writing, misleading the FISA Court and getting a warrant to spy on Carter Page wasn’t the most egregious act in furtherance of this conspiracy. Although the details are not all confirmed, my FBI sources are telling me there was indeed an FBI informant working inside the Trump campaign. They also say attorney general approval is required for this type of operation in a national campaign.

  That means either Loretta Lynch was directly involved, or the FBI went rogue spying on a presidential campaign. Either way, it’s one of the most egregious abuses of power in our lifetime if not American history. The president is calling it “bigger than Watergate.” The media writes it off as hyperbole, It isn’t.

  So was there a spy in the Trump campaign? Of course there was! Comey denies a spy was used, instead calling it a confidential human source. Clapper as much as said so on The View, suggesting that Trump should be happy they were spying! He then admits that unfortunately the confidential name of the informant is out—and that’s reported to be Stefan Halper. Comey follows suit, saying there was no spy—and the term they use is a confidential human source—so he doesn’t answer if there was a confidential human source.

  As Andrew McCarthy of National Review astutely observed about the investigations. The investigation of Hillary Clinton was a criminal investigation; the investigation of Trump’s campaign was a counterintelligence investigation.13 That’s an important distinction.

  They opened a counterintelligence investigation because there was no evidence of a crime by any Trump campaign official. Yet, even with all the additional powers a counterintelligence investigation gave them, including wiretaps, covert informants, and prosecutions of Trump campaign officials on unrelated charges in an effort to get them to testify against Trump, there is still nothing for Robert Mueller to bring into court.

  But the “Trump-Russia collusion” farce is never going to any court. First, there isn’t any law on the books making the supposed collusion illegal, unless you’re talking about anti-trust. Second, it never happened. From the very beginning, this has been a charade, a wag the dog, where the agency makes up a crime and accuses the other side of committing it, then calls in its friends to prosecute it. Meanwhile, said friends collect the cash flowing out of rotten deals made as part of creating the crime in the first place.

  It’s all smoke and mirrors to cripple the Trump presidency. It’s the claim payment for the FBI’s rotten “insurance policy.” If it couldn’t keep Donald Trump from becoming president, it was going to ensure he couldn’t get any of his agenda accomplished. It would paralyze his administration with its spurious investigation of a noncriminal act that had never happened in the first place. Trump and his administration would be so busy defending themselves that they wouldn’t be able to keep any of their campaign promises.

  That was the plan. It failed. A little over a year after Trump took office, unemployment is at historic lows, the economy is booming, and ISIS has been defeated. Yes, the president might have accomplished more if this antidemocratic conspiracy hadn’t fought him every step of the way. But at the end of the day, the president is advancing the agenda he was elected to advance, despite the best efforts of the Swamp to defeat him.

  Different Rules for Liberals

  One of the reasons this charade has been allowed to continue so long is the ingenious move Swamper Rod Rosenstein pulled off early in the scheme: getting Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation. I understand the motivation behind it: to remove any appearance that Sessions’s support of President Trump would influence his decisions, and that he might be compromised by Russians he met. It’s the same honorable intention that has motivated the president to allow this baseless investigation to continue as long as it has. Neither Eric Holder nor Loretta Lynch recused themselves, but the rules are different for Republicans.

  It’s time to stop giving dishonorable people the benefit of the doubt. Mueller, McCabe, Rosenstein, and their frenemies in the Democrat Party have no desire to get to the truth. They don’t care about protecting our republican institutions. They’re out to destroy them by taking down the duly elected president of the United States and overturning the decision of millions of voters who put him in the White House. Their agenda is to get Trump out, reverse his policies, and replace him with someone who will resume the failed Establishment policies so resoundingly rejected at the polls in 2016.

  The FBI director is not elected. He is appointed by the president, one of only two elected members of the executive branch, and reports directly to the attorney general, also appointed by the president. It’s time to stop playing nice with these miscreants. If Jeff Sessions won’t prosecute the conspirators, then the deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein needs to call for a special counsel. Since he won’t do that because he wrote the memo saying Comey should be fired, how can he run an investigation into the president for the firing of Comey, which he recommended? He should be a witness in the case. The only way out is for Sessions to be fired by the president for taking a job he knew ahead of time he couldn’t do. Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and, of course, their fellow Swamper Hillary Clinton should all be under investigation. And, since Rosenstein signed off on the FISA warrant application, he should be a defendant, too.

  Unlike Mueller’s current witch hunt, the facts already made public about these conspirators call for a serious grand jury investigation. I think you already know what my recommendation will be when the evidence is in and their guilt proven:

  Take ’em out in cuffs!

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Lying, Leaking, Liberal Swamp’s Secret Court

  Many Americans today may not realize this, but the FISA Court was created out of outrage over the intelligence community spying on US civilians. After Watergate, the Church Committee was formed in the Senate to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Internal Revenue Service1—in other words, to investigate all the same agencies Obama weaponized against conservatives—and determine how much evil they had been up to under Nixon.

  Yes, the Swamp existed back then, too, and it was just as out of control as it is now. I don’t begrudge the original intentions of the committee being honorable, but you just can’t ask big government to reform itself. That’s one of the reasons we elected Donald J. Trump. Somebody from the outside had to come in and take on the establishment. Reform is just another word for cover your ass.

  The Secret Rubber Stamp

  So, after a lot of grandstanding, bloviating, and camera mugging, what the Swamp really did was legalize domestic spying. It created a secret court where the FBI and other Deep Staters could bring evidence to a judge and get a rubber stamp to spy on whomever they wanted. If you think that’s an exaggeration, just look at the numbers. Between 1979 and 20
14, that star chamber reviewed more than thirty-five thousand warrant requests to engage in electronic surveillance.2 And do you know how many were denied? Twenty percent? Ten percent? Five percent?

  Twelve. Not 12 percent. Twelve total applications out of more than thirty-five thousand were denied. If that’s not a rubber-stamp court, what is? It makes you wonder: Is the FISA court really catching terrorists? Or simply invading the privacy of American citizens?

  Don’t forget who is writing this book. I was a prosecutor for most of my professional life. I also served on the bench as a judge. I’m not some law enforcement–hating hippie. Far from it; if anything, I’m inclined to be biased the other way.

  But I also respect and understand the reasons for the constitutional protections we have under the Bill of Rights to our Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment. The adversarial process I referred to earlier is intended to protect the innocent. The reason the Fourth Amendment was written was to prevent searches and seizures without probable cause.

  Why Is the FISA Court Secret?

  There is no reason the FISA Court needs to be secret. Of course, we must protect “national security” and “sources and methods” when appropriate. But a secret court is not necessary. We have just witnessed what happens when politics and Deep Staters use that court for their own benefit. The secrecy of the court cannot be used as an excuse by people trying to cover up their abuses. As a judge presiding over narcotics cases, if I had an undercover officer who was still on the street, I would order the courtroom closed to prevent disclosure of an undercover status and to make sure that the testimony was private. That way I could get to the bottom line and still protect the safety, security, and life, literally, of the undercover cop. But we didn’t have to set up a secret court system to do so, one that is unaccountable to the public and most of the public’s elected representatives.

  The same is true of the FISA Court. It could use the same methodology. But it doesn’t, because it is really a circumvention of public accountability whereby the same players keep supporting each other, get their warrants, and do whatever they want.

  Why did the FISA Court judge who was presented with the Steele dossier, simply accept it without establishing its reliability? There’s got to be a reliability test, a credibility test. When considering a warrant application, there is no defense attorney present to make that objection, which is why the judge must be especially attuned to it.

  The Fake News Media tell us the FBI is off the hook because it told the FISA Court judge the report was “politically motivated” and “paid for by a political entity.” Okay, who? Have you ever heard such question begging? How could any honest judge hear or read that and not ask the warrant applicant who the entity was? Who paid for the information to be gathered? What was the political motivation?

  Knowing now the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for the farcical hit piece, it’s hard not to conclude the court was engaging in willful ignorance when reviewing the warrant application. And don’t tell me the FBI was protecting “sources and methods” by withholding the identification of the parties involved.

  We now know that Strzok, McCabe, Comey, and Rosenstein were part of the application process. So why was there no more probing into the source of the dossier? Why didn’t the FISA judge inquire further regarding the dossier? And even after all the publicity about the dossier, why is the FISA judge who signed the warrant not demanding answers? Could the answer be in the text messages between Strzok and Lisa Page, where they discuss the need to connect with a federal judge under the cover setting of a dinner party? Isn’t it curious that US District Court and FISA Court Judge Rudy Contreras, who took Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, was recused almost immediately afterwards?

  Dinner and a Warrant

  I can’t read the mind of the judge who issued the Carter Page warrant, but I certainly can read Peter Strzok’s texts about his relationship with Judge Contreras. We found out in March that not only did Strzok and his mistress hate Donald Trump enough to want an “insurance policy” against his presidency, but Strzok knew Contreras was on the FISA Court and discussed setting up a meeting with him while still actively involved in the investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, six months before his fateful interview of Michael Flynn.3

  I point out that we found this out in March because those were texts that had previously been hidden from the congressional committees investigating the FBI’s activities. Here we have the life and career of a decorated general ruined for lying to the FBI about something that isn’t even a crime, while the agency he is convicted of lying to defies a congressional subpoena. The FBI redacted the text messages between Strzok and Lisa Page in which they discussed setting up a meeting with the judge, acknowledged the clear impropriety of such a meeting, and conspired to set up a dinner or cocktail party to deflect attention from the clear conflict of interest.

  Contreras was recused from the case within a few days after Flynn took his plea. Why? We don’t know. We’re not even sure, as of this writing, if he recused himself. There are too many questions surrounding what went on leading up to the surveillance orders that underpinned the special counsel’s investigation. And we may never get answers, not when it concerns the Swamp’s secret court.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Lying, Leaking, Liberal Witch Hunt

  President Trump has called Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt,” almost from its very first day. And, as on so many other issues, time has proved him right.

  Our ancestors used to hunt and burn “witches” for a variety of reasons. Some believed the victims, usually women, had occult powers they used to cast spells on their enemies and do evil upon the community. Others merely used the charge of witchcraft to settle scores or eliminate competitors.

  That the crime the witch hunt was investigating wasn’t even real didn’t help the victims. Once the hysteria started spreading, the mob would have its blood, regardless of the evidence. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect analogy for Mueller’s investigation.

  Fall Guy Flynn

  Perhaps the most tragic development in this witch hunt is the conviction of former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who lied to the FBI about a conversation he had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

  Why Flynn lied, only Flynn knows. Whether his answers even amount to lying to a federal agent may also have been a matter of debate before he took the plea. Flynn has been a government employee for virtually all his life and can’t afford the attorney fees Paul Manafort can. They may have advised him to just plead guilty and end it.

  If that’s true, it’s very sad. The double standard is so striking, when comparing Flynn’s case to Andrew McCabe’s. For McCabe, there are members of Congress saying, “Call me, Andy. I’ll put you on staff for a couple of days, so you can get your pension.” Andy McCabe gets the sympathy of the nation, while a guy who put his life on the line and fought for all of us gets a conviction. It’s crazy. And there are FBI agents who don’t think Flynn lied.

  Flynn may also have been trying to protect his son, Michael Flynn, Jr., who has also found himself in the crosshairs of the special counsel. Flynn Jr. worked for his dad’s consulting firm and the special counsel is interested in him for—you guessed it—not complying with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).1 Suddenly, this law that has produced a few dozen convictions in the entire eighty years of its existence figures prominently in the investigation of four different people associated with the Trump campaign or administration. Meanwhile, the rest of the lobbyist class in Washington effectively ignores it.

  Going after Flynn Jr. is just another standard prosecutorial tactic in trying to pressure a defendant to give up information on a person in the prosecutor’s crosshairs. Judge T. S. Ellis said as much in the Manafort case. “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. You really care about getting information that Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution
or impeachment or whatever,” the judge told federal prosecutor Michael Dreeben.2

  Prosecutors in federal cases are known for pitting brother against brother, father against son, family members against loved ones—it’s how they do their dance. It’s a very dirty dance.

  Up to that point in Mueller’s witch hunt, we’d had a nobody punk, George “Pipsqueak” Papadopoulos, drunk in a bar, talking out his backside, who was completely ignored by the Trump campaign and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about what he said in the bar. Then, we had Manafort, who is under investigation for activity regarding his consulting with foreign governments, but completely unrelated to his work with the Trump campaign. Finally, we have a war hero who was railroaded into a guilty plea for doing precisely what Andy McCabe did, the latter on a much larger and more sinister scale. And not even one of these three had pleaded to anything remotely related to colluding with the Russians to undermine the presidential election.

  The Thirteen Russians

  That’s when Rosenstein announced the indictment of thirteen Russians who allegedly tried to influence the election with phony Facebook ads and posts.3 And what does the indictment allege? That the Internet Research Agency used deceptive means to buy social media advertisements and eventually organize rallies in the United States that almost no one attended.

  The left-wing blog Moon of Alabama has long maintained4 the campaign was little more than a for-profit venture seeking to make money on “clickbait” media—provocative headlines that induce people to click on the link and thereby be exposed to advertising and other revenue-generating content—rather than a serious attempt to influence the election. Right-wing blogger and former director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Reagan administration, David Stockman, called it a “comic book indictment” that “nailed a great big nothingburger,”5 citing the ridiculous, broken English wording of many of the ads and the infinitesimally small number of people who attended the rallies.