Last year, when President Trump accused Barack Obama of having tapped his phones just prior to the election, the media dismissed it as the unsubstantiated raving of a loose-cannon politician. But now we know that the Obama-era government did that and more, with the revelation that the FBI had actually placed a spy inside the Trump campaign.
And Trump is now taking the offense, dubbing the affair “Spygate” and vowing to have the Department of Justice investigate the matter. So some Deep-staters may today be rather nervous. As Fox News reports:
President Trump blasted the “Criminal Deep State” early Wednesday, suggesting things have “turned around” in “SPYGATE,” following revelations of a reported FBI informant snooping on the Trump campaign.
“Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning.
Minutes later, the president added: “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!”
In fact, the cat is so far out of the bag that the only debate now is not whether the Deep State spied on Trump’s campaign, but what terminology should be used to describe this apparent trespass. As to this, former director of national intelligence James Clapper — who lied in testimony before Congress five years ago — appeared on the View yesterday and said he didn’t “particularly like” the term “spying,” but nonetheless used it to describe the targeting of the Trump campaign. Doing damage control and displaying steroid-engorged chutzpah, he said the spying’s purpose was to surveil the Russians and that the president “should be happy” it was done.
This excuse fails because if the Trump campaign were truly being treated as a possible victim of foreign intrusion, the logical response is to approach the candidate and say, “Look, Mr. Trump, we believe the Russians are targeting your campaign. May we embed someone in your group so that we can help you guard against being infiltrated?”
Regardless, when an intelligence agency secretly places an operative in your organization to gather information, it’s clear what it’s called: spying.
Commentator Doug Ross critiqued Clapper’s View appearance (video below) and, noting his strange facial contortions, theorized that they are “signs of anxiety, paranoia, and deception.”
Mr. Un-poker Face Clapper might have had reason to feel anxious, too. Calling him a “lying liar,” the Federalist points out that he apparently lied again on the View. He claimed that his assertion before Congress that the NSA wasn’t collecting data on millions of Americans was merely a “mistake” because he “was thinking about something else, another program.” Yet in his testimony five years ago, he wasn’t asked about a specific program, but if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans” (video below).
Perhaps Clapper will next expound upon what the definition of the word “is” is.
While addressing the abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by senior Obama administration officials, Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) said in January that the trespass was “worse than Watergate.” And the recent revelations vindicate this assessment. As American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson puts it referencing the name “Spygate,” “It’s a good title for what is going to be a long form reality television program (as well as a political scandal and constitutional crisis, among other far-reaching consequences). Despite the best efforts of the Trump-hating, Russia-Stormy Daniels-obsessed media to ignore it, the story is going to build into a major factor in the coming midterm elections and far beyond. It will be driven by forces beyond the control of the combined might of CNN, The New York Times, NBC, and the other grandees of the mainstream media.”
And the dam may be about to break. Lifson also writes that “there will be a cascade of evidence coming our way. The DOJ inspector general’s report is one source, and potential criminal referrals from that report could provide far more grist for the wheels of justice to grind. But the wheels of justice move slowly. Before that happens, there will be other drama playing out.” Moreover, Lifson then quotes Kerry Pickett of the Daily Caller, who wrote that she has been in touch with sources who tell her:
Many agents in the FBI want Congress to subpoena them so they can reveal problems caused by former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, three people in direct contact with active field agents tell TheDC.
“There are agents all over this country who love the bureau and are sickened by [James] Comey’s behavior and [Andrew] McCabe and [Eric] Holder and [Loretta] Lynch and the thugs like [John] Brennan — who despise the fact that the bureau was used as a tool of political intelligence by the Obama administration thugs,” former federal prosecutor Joe DiGenova told The Daily Caller Tuesday. “They are just waiting for a chance to come forward and testify.”
Then again, the Deep State is just that: deep. Challenging the DOJ “over extensive redactions made in files showing text messages between anti-Trump FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page,” as Fox News reports it, “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, drew particular attention to one text that suggested the Obama ‘White House is running this.’”
And this gets at the point. An astute observer could get the sense that the Deep State is trying to run out the clock. If the Democrats retake Congress and these investigations can be stalled till January, there could be an impeachment effort. If the swamp can stall them till January 2021, there may be a leftist in the White House. And then the Deep-staters will, again, escape justice.
Then we’ll be back to Obama-era standards and what can be called the “Sovietization” of government. As I wrote in March:
This brings us to this matter’s scariest aspect. I believe that the Obama administration was so brazen in its misuse of power and weaponization of government (don’t forget the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative groups) not just because leftists, being moral relativists/nihilists, are vice-ridden people who believe the ends justify the means. I suspect it’s also because they calculated that, with leftist governmental hegemony on the horizon, they’d never be held accountable.
Remember that the election of Donald Trump, a businessman and reality television star who’d never served in the military or held public office, was perhaps the greatest political upset in American history. Most “experts” thought it impossible. So the Left had every reason to believe that four years of Hillary Clinton further “transforming” our country would lead to another four years of Hillary. Note that this would have meant the increasingly accelerated importation of “undocumented Democrats” (left-leaning future voters, generally called immigrants or “refugees”; this had already reached a fever pitch under Obama) and the “Californification” of even more states. The Left already wholly controls the culture-shapers, the media, academia, and entertainment, and I suspect they believed the next eight years would see a tipping point that would also give them a death grip on the executive branch of government — the part of government that enforces the laws.
This would have made government lawless. As the French Revolution, the Soviets, the Maoists in China, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia proved, the only limit on leftist tyranny is leftist power.
So the question is: Can President Trump drain the swamp before the swamp swamps him? This remains to be seen.
Photo of President Trump: AP Images
