In totalitarian style, the notorious liar and Trump-persecutor Rep. Adam Schiff …

… secretly subpoenaed the phone records of a number of private citizens from telephone companies. He did not provide notice to these individuals in advance that their phone records were being sought. He did not subpoena the phone records directly from the citizens. Instead, he subpoenaed the phone companies for the records, preventing any opportunity for the private citizens to seek court review, as would happen in any other case in where the government is seeking this kind of information about any citizen.

Judicial Watch brought the case for the victims to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In response to a House attorney’s argument that the materials be kept secret to protect the privacy of the targets of the subpoenas, one of the appellate judges remarked:

Well, I do think it’s, if not ironic, noteworthy that one of the interests you’ve just put forward is the invasion of privacy when the whole claim of Judicial Watch is that this Committee invaded the privacy of private citizens in the first place.

“The Pelosi/Schiff House asserts it has an unlimited government surveillance power and an unlimited ability to invade the privacy of any American with zero accountability and transparency,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The courts should reject Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt cover-up of the unconstitutional subpoenas that abused the civil rights of then-President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, journalists and other American citizens.”

Among the other phone records subpoenaed were those of Congressman Devin Nunes, journalist John Solomon, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow, and attorney Victoria Toensing.

For some years a gang of traitors – affiliated with an inimical international movement – has been trying to overthrow the elected president of the United States.

One of the gang leaders is now running for the office of president himself.

Which is more necessary to the nation: that he be allowed to run and possibly become the head of the state which he tried to undermine, or that he be brought to trial?

David Horowitz writes at Front Page:

This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt. And we caught them. We caught them.  – President Trump.

Perhaps the most troubling – and dangerous – aspect of the current political conversation is the unwillingness of virtually every elected official and every media pundit to confront what “Obamagate” is obviously about, which is treason. Specifically, treason committed by the Obama White House in attempting to block and then overthrow the Trump presidency. Obamagate is about the failed attempt by President Obama and his appointees to use government intelligence agencies to spy on the Trump campaign and White House, to concoct a phony accusation of collusion with Russia against the president and then to obstruct his administration and overthrow him.

Rudy Giuliani, attorney to President Trump, was willing to call it treason:

They wanted to take out the lawfully elected President of the United States and they wanted to do it by lying, submitting false affidavits, using phony witnesses — in other words, they wanted to do it by illegal means . . . What is overthrowing government by illegal means? It’s a coup; treason.

This aggressive statement by the president’s lawyer is a sure guarantee that a reckoning is coming in the days ahead. But first there are the semantics. Responding to Giuliani’s accusation, law professor Jonathan Turley wrote: “No, James Comey Did Not Commit Treason.”  According to Turley: “Giuliani is engaging in the same blood sport of using the criminal code to paint critics as not just criminals, but traitors. …”

Technically, but in a very limited way, Turley is right. Treason is defined in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution in these words:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

There’s a reason the Founders designed so restrictive a definition of treason. They were all guilty of it for rebelling against their king. This led to Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip: “We must all hang together or we shall all hang separately.”

But this legal definition of the crime is only one aspect of the issue, and in the end it is the less important one for understanding the significance of what has happened. There is also the common usage of the words “treason” and “traitor”, which speak to the moral dimensions of the crime. It is these meanings that provide a proper guide to the seriousness and scope of what Obama, Biden, Comey, Brennan, Clapper and the others involved actually did.

This is the Merriam Webster definition of treason: “1: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign’s family. 2: the betrayal of a trust: treachery.”

“To overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance” –is a pretty precise definition of what Obamagate is about.

Although early on, the outlines of this conspiracy were clear to dogged investigators like Congressman Devin Nunes, they have remained obscure to anti-Trump partisans. This is due to the protective wall created for the conspirators by Obama appointees at the Department of Justice, unprincipled Democrats on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and a corrupt news media that has redefined its mission to be that of a propaganda squad for the conspiracy itself. Consequently, it has taken nearly four years to recover the documentary evidence that might persuade an honest critic of the Trump administration of the crime the anti-Trump camp has committed.

Two recent actions have served to demolish the plotters’ protective wall and bring the true dimensions of Obamagate to light. The first was Trump’s appointment of Rick Grenell as acting Director of National Intelligence. Until then the transcripts of the impeachment hearings had been closed to the public by the Intel Committee chairman, Adam Schiff. This allowed Schiff to leak testimony damaging to the president and suppress testimony exonerating him. The full testimonies by high-ranking foreign policy officials had remained under Schiff’s lock and key for over a year.  Grenell told Schiff that he would unlock the testimonies if Schiff didn’t, which is how they came to light.

What the newly released testimonies showed was that one Obama appointee after another when questioned by Republicans on the committee had said they had no evidence whatsoever that there was any collusion between Trump or the Trump team and the Russians. In other words, from the very beginning of the plot against Trump, the conspirators including President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and the heads of the intelligence agencies knew that the charge of collusion – of treason – which they had concocted to destroy Trump was fraudulent. Despite this, they went ahead with the $35 million Mueller investigation that tied Trump’s hands in dealing with the Russians and spread endless false rumors about his allegiances, and in the end found no evidence to support the character assassinations the investigation spawned.

The second revelation was the result of an FBI declassification of hitherto hidden documents describing a White House meeting on January 5, 2017 – two weeks before the inauguration of the new president. The meeting was attended by the outgoing president and vice president, the heads of the intelligence agencies, the acting Attorney General and Obama’s outgoing National Security adviser Susan Rice. The subjects of the meeting were the targeting of General Michael Flynn – Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser – and the infamous Steele dossier which the Hillary campaign and the DNC had paid a former British spy to compile with information from the Russian secret police. The dossier was designed to discredit Trump and set up the Russia-collusion narrative. The targeting of Flynn involved unmasking an innocuous conversation with the Russian Ambassador which was then used to smear Flynn and get him fired. Shortly after the meeting the fact that Flynn was under investigation was leaked to the Washington Post – a felony punishable by 10 years in jail. This leak opened a floodgate of public accusations – backed by no evidence – that Trump and everyone close to him were agents of the Russians.

The secret war the Obama White House declared on Trump before he was even elected, was a war on America.

Several years prior to the 2016 election, Obama had begun using the intelligence agencies to spy on his Republican opponents. This was a direct attack on the most fundamental institution of our democracy – elections. It was a much more destructive interference in the electoral process than anything attempted by the Russians. The subsequent cynical attempts to frame Trump as a traitor and then to impeach him for concocted offenses is without precedent.

Because they were attacks on our democracy itself, Obamagate is the worst political crime committed against our country in its entire history.

Horowitz concludes by saying that “the culprits involved need to be exposed and prosecuted“.

Implied is the optimistic theory that if these traitors are punished to the fullest extent of the law, the nation will be spared such treasonous acts in the future.

It might be so. The chance is better than probable.

“People should be going to jail for this stuff,” the president said.

But what is not probable is that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be prosecuted.

Attorney General William Barr has already announced that they would not even be investigated. “Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.” he said.

His reason? Joe Biden (senile though he is), looks to be the Democrats’ candidate for the presidency and –

Mr. Barr said it was important the American public would be able to vote in November for a presidential candidate “based on a robust debate of policy issues”.

Although he also reiterated that “Mr. Trump was the victim of a years long ‘utterly false Russian collusion narrative’ and that standards at the Justice Department were abused to reach a particular result”, and declared, “We can’t allow this to ever happen again,” nevertheless in his opinion the process of democracy transcends the requirement of justice.

We cannot allow this process to be hijacked by efforts to drum up criminal investigations of either candidate. I am committed that this election will be conducted without this kind of interference.

But does the process of democracy transcend the requirement of justice?

Was it not the very process of democracy that was subverted by the actions of the traitors – their attempts, which the Attorney General acknowledges, to overturn the result of an election?

If justice cannot reach them, what will that process ever be worth again?

… to obstruct the will of the people.

That was a message sent by a lying British spy to the US State Department, the FBI, and Obama’s Department of Justice.

The State Department is notoriously the region of the US government swamp most thickly populated by its dirtiest denizens. They work devotedly and tirelessly in their dark reptilian ways to turn America into a Third World country. Lately they have been obediently assisted by members of their species that have slithered their way into the FBI.

No subversive activity however slimy, secretive and socialist found to be going on in either agency should be surprising. But it can still be shocking.

John Solomon, the excellent investigative journalist who has discovered and revealed so much about the Great Steele Dossier Hoax To Destroy Donald Trump, writes at The Hill:

If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI’s secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.

And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.

Steele’s client “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8”, the date of the 2016 election, Kavalec wrote in a typed summary of her meeting with Steele and Tatyana Duran, a colleague from Steele’s Orbis Security firm. The memos were unearthed a few days ago through open-records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United.

Kavalec’s notes do not appear to have been provided to the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe, according to former Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). “They tried to hide a lot of documents from us during our investigation, and it usually turns out there’s a reason for it,” Nunes told me. Senate and House Judiciary investigators told me they did not know about them, even though they investigated Steele’s behavior in 2017-18.

One member of Congress transmitted the memos this week to the Department of Justice’s inspector general, fearing its investigation of FISA abuses may not have had access to them.

Nonetheless, the FBI is doing its best to keep much of Kavalec’s information secret by retroactively claiming it is classified, even though it was originally marked unclassified in 2016. 

The apparent effort to hide Kavalec’s notes from her contact with Steele has persisted for some time.

State officials acknowledged a year ago they received a copy of the Steele dossier in July 2016, and got a more detailed briefing in October 2016 and referred the information to the FBI.

But what was discussed was not revealed. Sources told me more than a year ago that Kavalec had the most important (and memorialized) interaction with Steele before the FISA warrant was issued, but FBI and State officials refused to discuss it, or even confirm it.

The encounter, and Kavalec’s memos, were forced into public view through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation by Citizens United. Yet, all but a few lines have been redacted after the fact. …

The mere three sentences that the FBI allowed State to release unredacted, show that Kavalec sent an email two days after her encounter with Steele, alerting others.

“You may already have this information but wanted to pass it on just in case,” Kavalec wrote in the lone sentence the FBI and State released from that email. The names of the recipients, the subject line and the attachments are blacked out. …

The three sentences visible in her memo show that U.S. officials had good reason to suspect Steele’s client and motive in alleging Trump-Russia collusion because they were election-related and facilitated by the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS founder, Glenn Simpson.

A certain institution – identified for good reason by John Solomon as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) – approached Steele’s organization Orbis …

‘… based on the recommendation of Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch [of Fusion GPS]  …  and is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” Kavalec wrote. “Orbis undertook the investigation in June of 2016.” …

The FBI under Director Christopher Wray classified the document as “secret” just a few days ago. To add injury to insult, the FBI added this hopeful note: “Declassify on 12/31/2041.” That would be 25 years after the 2016 election.

Despite the heavy redactions, Kavalec’s notes have momentous consequence.

For the first time, we have written proof the U.S. government knew well before the FBI secured the FISA warrant that Steele had a political motive and Election Day deadline to make his dossier public.

And we know that information was transmitted before the Carter Page FISA warrant to one or more people whose job is so sensitive that their identity had to be protected. That means there is little chance the FBI didn’t know about Steele’s political client, or the Election Day deadline, before requesting the FISA warrant.

Documents and testimony from Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, show he told the FBI in August 2016 that Steele was “desperate” to defeat Trump and his work had something to do with Clinton’s campaign.

Kavalec’s notes make clear … the election was Steele’s deadline to smear Trump.

There is little chance the FBI didn’t know that Steele, then a bureau informant, had broken protocol and gone to the State Department in an effort to make the Trump dirt public.

That makes the FBI’s failure to disclose to the FISA judges the information about Steele’s political bias and motive all the more stunning. And it makes the agents’ use of his unverified dossier to support the warrant all the more shameful.

Kavalec’s notes shed light on another mystery from the text messages between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which first revealed the politically-biased nature of the Trump collusion probe.

Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the case, and Page, a lawyer working for the FBI deputy director, repeatedly messaged each other in October 2016 about efforts to pressure and speed the review of the FISA warrant.

For instance, on Oct. 11, 2016, Strzok texted Page that he was “fighting with Stu for this FISA,” an apparent reference to then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stu Evans in DOJ’s national security division.

A few days later, on Oct. 14, Strzok emailed Page he needed some “hurry the F up pressure” to get the FISA approved.

If the evidence is good and the FISA request solid, why did the FBI need to apply pressure?

The real reason may be the FBI was trying to keep a lid on the political origins, motives and Election Day deadline of its star informant Steele.

And that would be the ultimate abuse of the FBI’s FISA powers.

We know what impatience feels like all too well as we wait for the Great Steele Dossier Hoaxsters to be brought to justice.

Now there’s a real need to hurry up and find the whole truth.

We fear that if it does not happen soon it will not happen at all.

This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump. 

So Hillary Clinton and her political servants planned and orchestrated a crime against Donald Trump. That is now an established fact.

A large team of minions was willing to do her bidding.

Why? Did they really actually like her? That’s hard to believe.

Did they think she would make a good president? That’s even harder to believe.

Was it the Cause?

If so, what is the Cause? How do they define it?

The following, and the quotation at the top, come from The Hill, by John Solomon:

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm.

That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump and Moscow were colluding to hijack the presidential election.

The dossier, though mostly unverified, was then used by the FBI as the main evidence seeking a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in the final days of the campaign.

The revelation was confirmed both in contemporaneous evidence and testimony secured by a joint investigation by Republicans on the House Judiciary and Government Oversight committees …

It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. …

Baker was interviewed by lawmakers behind closed doors on Wednesday [yesterday, October 3, 2018].  Sources declined to divulge much about his testimony, other than to say it confirmed other evidence about the contact between the Perkins Coie law firm and the FBI.

The sources said Baker identified lawyer Michael Sussman, a former DOJ lawyer, as the Perkins Coie attorney who reached out to him and said the firm gave him documents and a thumb drive related to Russian interference in the election, hacking and possible Trump connections.

Information gathered separately by another congressional committee indicate the contact occurred in September, the month before the FISA warrant was approved. …

The sources also said Baker’s interview broke new ground both about the FBI’s use of news media in 2016 and 2017 to further the Trump case and about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s conversations in spring 2017 regarding possible use of a body wire to record Trump.

“The interview was one of the most productive we had and it opened up many new investigative leads,” one source said.

Another said Baker could not answer some questions about FBI media contacts, citing an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department inspector general into alleged illegal leaks, during and after the election, about the Trump collusion probe and other matters.

These revelations illustrate anew how much the FBI and Justice Department have withheld from the public about their collaboration and collusion with clearly partisan elements of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, Fusion and Steele, that were trying to defeat Trump.

The growing body of evidence that the FBI used mostly politically-motivated, unverified intelligence from an opponent to justify spying on the GOP nominee’s campaign — just weeks before Election Day — has prompted a growing number of Republicans to ask President Trump to declassify the rest of the FBI’s main documents in the Russia collusion case.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), veteran investigator Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and many others have urged the president to act on declassification even as FBI and Justice Department have tried to persuade the president to keep documents secret.

Ryan has said he believes the declassification will uncover potential FBI abuses of the FISA process. Jordan said he believes there is strong evidence the bureau misled the FISA court. Nunes has said the FBI intentionally hid exculpatory evidence from the judges.

And Meadows told The Hill’s new morning television show, Rising, on Wednesday that there is evidence the FBI had sources secretly record members of the Trump campaign.

If all  or even just some of the guilty men and women were to be brought to trial, we might hear why they considered criminal action was justified.

Will they be charged, tried, and if found guilty, punished?

Will we be treated to the deeply gratifying sight of Hillary Clinton herself on trial, and even more delightful, Hillary Clinton in prison?

… Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee colluded with Russian “novelists” (fake news disseminators), who were accessed through a “freaky Brit spook”, in conspiracy with top law-enforcement officials in the intelligence services and Obama’s Department of Justice. 

John Nolte writes at Breitbart:

Here are 16 things the media do not want you to know about the Nunes memo:

1. The so-called Russian Dossier, the creation of Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, is a political document — namely, opposition research, created for the Democrat National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
2. Using what it knew was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, in October of 2016, the FBI and DOJ obtained a FISA warrant from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to install a wiretap to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent — the Trump campaign, specifically Carter Page. This spying would last for a year.
3. It should be noted that the FISA court was set up to stop foreign terrorists. The fact that the FBI and DOJ would use this court to not only wiretap an American but to wiretap a presidential campaign defies  belief. Why Obama’s FBI and DOJ used this court as opposed to a normal court is obvious. As you will see below, a normal court probably would have denied the wiretap.
4. Worse still, in the summer of 2016, Obama’s DOJ had already opened a counter-intelligence investigation into the Trump campaign. The fact that nothing from that months-old partisan investigation was used to obtain the Page wiretap is revealing.
5. According to the Nunes memo, an “essential” part of the FISA wiretap application was the Steele dossier, which again is a partisan political document created for the Clinton campaign.
6. So essential was this partisan dossier, Andrew McCabe, the disgraced former-Deputy Director of the FBI, admitted in December that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought” without the dossier.
7. Not only did the FBI knowingly use a document from a partisan campaign to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the competing campaign, the FBI knew the dossier was mostly “salacious and unverified”. We know this because disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey told us so in June of 2017.
8. According to the Nunes memo, “Steele told [former FBI official Bruce] Ohr, he ‘was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.’”
9. Ohr, who was part of the FBI’s anti-Trump Russian investigation, was not only friendly with Steele, Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele at Fusion GPS doing opposition research (the dossier) against Trump for the Clinton campaign.
10. Despite a) knowing the dossier was opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign b) knowing the dossier was “salacious and unverified” c) knowing Steele was desperate to destroy Trump d) the breathtaking conflict of interest in having an investigator’s own wife working on the dossier, the FBI still went to the FISA court to obtain permission to spy on Hillary Clinton’s opponent.
11. In order to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, all of the conflicts of interest above were withheld from the FISA court — an indefensible (and possibly illegal) lie of omission.
12. Even worse, in order to legitimize a warrant request based on a piece of partisan opposition research they knew was “salacious and unverified,” the FBI and DOJ used a media report to bolster the findings in the phony dossier.* The FBI and DOJ told the court that the media report was independent verification of the dossier. But this was not true, and, according to the Nunes memo, the FBI and DOJ knew this was not true. The truth is that the phony dossier was the source of this media report.
13. Also hidden from the FISA court was the fact that the FBI obtained Steele as a source but had to fire him in October of 2016 when, in a bid to use his phony dossier to derail the Trump campaign, he leaked his information to the far-left Mother Jones.
14. Although the FBI and DOJ were willing participants in pushing a “salacious and unverified” narrative against a presidential candidate (primarily through media leaks), this was all hidden from congressional investigators. To begin with, for months, while under oath, Comey said he did not know where the dossier came from — meaning from the Clinton campaign. The Wall Street Journal explains:

We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congress about Mr. Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth. Nor did the FBI tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr. Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion.

– And whose areas of expertise include cybersecurity and the Russian language. (Is she a Russian agent?)

1. All of this dishonesty occurred under Comey, the man our media now hold up as a living saint, a man so desperate to destroy Trump, he not only oversaw those committing the above abuses, he leaked classified information to the news media in order to see a Special Prosecutor appointed against Trump, which his pal, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, immediately did.

And finally…

16. Much of the “salacious and unverified” material in the dossier came from the Russians. In other words, those disgusting dossier lies about Trump’s personal behavior came from Russian operatives. So there is no question that it was the Clinton campaign, Democrats, Steele, the FBI, and DOJ who colluded with the Russians to rig a presidential election.

Yes, there was collusion with the Russians, and those in our government currently investigating Trump in the hopes of overturning a presidential election are the colluders.

 

*As Mark Steyn puts it: “They did, however, argue that the dossier had been independently ‘corroborated’ by a September 2016 story in Yahoo News – even though that Yahoo story came from the same guy who authored the dossier: in effect, the Government got its surveillance warrant by arguing that its fake-news dossier from Christopher Steele had been independently corroborated by a fake-news story from Christopher Steele.  … The two choices here: either ‘the world’s premier law enforcement agency’ was manipulated by one freaky Brit spook, or ‘the world’s premier law enforcement agency’ conspired with the freaky Brit spook to manipulate the judge.”

The Left has only one value: power. It does not value honesty, honor, probity, or truth itself.

During the disastrous government of the leftist Barack Obama, every government agency was corrupted, including – dangerously – the US intelligence services.

All  the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten the reputations of Susan Rice, James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper. In fact, Islamic Arabia was one of the sources of the noxious moral filth they rolled in.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Rarely has an intelligence apparatus engaged in systematic lying — and chronic deceit about its lying — both during and even after its tenure. Yet the Obama Administration’s four top security and intelligence officials time and again engaged in untruth, as if peddling lies was part of their job descriptions.

So far none have been held accountable.

What the heck is Attorney-General Jeff Sessions doing? We conservatives who are not handicapped by the stricture of Christian forgiveness want revenge on the Obama leftist crooks. We looked to President Trump’s Department of Justice to deliver it to us. But we are not getting it.

Those exemptions are likely because, in hubristic fashion, all four assumed their service to progressive noble agendas would justify any odious means felt necessary to achieve them.

In part their liberal credentials were seen as guarantees that the media either would ignore or excuse their dissimulation. And in part, untruth was innate to them as lifelong and now seasoned Washington bureaucrats. Their reasons to be in Washington were largely a quest for media exposure, government sinecures, revolving door profiteering, and maintaining a host of subordinate toadies at their service. A harsh assessment, perhaps — but lying to the American people earns them such disdain.

Susan Rice’s lies:

Former Obama United Nations ambassador and National Security Advisor Susan Rice was rarely credible in any of her major public statements. Her dissimulation bordered on the pathological. Indeed, it went beyond even the demands put upon her for partisan spinning.

On five occasions, Rice lied to the media that the murder of Americans in Benghazi, Libya by al-Qaida affiliated-terrorists was a result of spontaneous rioting — in response to an obscure, rogue, and right-wing Coptic filmmaker. She later attributed such dissimulation to a lack of information, when we now know that the truth of Benghazi — and the larger landscape of events that ensured something like a Benghazi — were only too well known. The video was a canard.

Rice assured the nation that the AWOL and traitorous Bowe Bergdahl was a hostage taken during combat and had served nobly (“with honor and distinction”). In fact, the renegade Bergdahl likely was exchanged for terrorist prisoners for two reasons: one, to diminish the number of terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as promised by Obama during his campaign, and two, to highlight the humanitarian skills of Barack Obama in bringing home an American “hero”,  especially defined as one who was so loudly aware of his own country’s foibles.

Rice also assured the nation that her administration, through its diplomatic brilliance, had eliminated Bashar Assad’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. “We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical-weapons stockpile,” she lied. That supposed coup was worth the price of inviting in the Russians to the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus.In fact, almost immediately after entering office, President Trump was forced to bomb Assad’s WMD depots to prevent Syria’s air force from dropping more nerve gas on civilians. 

Once House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) announced that key administration officials illegally might have unmasked and leaked the names of U.S. citizens on government intercepts connected to the Trump campaign and transition team, Rice issued a blanket denial (“I know nothing about this”). That assertion predictably was untrue, as Rice herself was forced to concede when she altered narratives to later justify rather than deny her role in such improper leaking.

Rice assured the nation there were no hidden side-deals in the Iran Deal, such as a prisoner-swap concession. “And we were very specific about the need not to link their fate to that of the negotiations, because we had no idea for certain whether negotiations would succeed or fail. We didn’t want to give the Iranians a bargaining chip to use against us in the negotiations,” she fibbed. In response, Americans knew almost immediately by her disavowals that there were quid pro quo hostage-prisoner trades that put the United States at a disadvantage.

Rice displayed an eerie habit of broadcasting her lies by preemptive denial that she was about to lie. In her case, the privileged Rice sometimes fell back on the boilerplate victimhood defense of racism and sexism. More likely, as with many Obama officials, she felt certain she could deceive with impunity out of contempt for the American non-elite and, like her associate Ben Rhodes, with full confidence in the obsequiousness and incompetence of the “know-nothing” media.

James Comey’s lies:

Former FBI Director James Comey long ago lost his carefully crafted Boy Scout image of a truth-teller, buffeted in a sea of Washington deception. Like Rice, when Comey signals he cannot lie or that others are lying, we know that his own duplicity is forthcoming. The list of his untruths and unprofessionalism is growing, as continuous disclosures cannot be synced with either his congressional testimony or his public statements.

Comey did not interview Hillary Clinton in his supposedly exhaustive investigation of her alleged crimes before he cleared her of any wrongdoing.

Comey did know of an FBI communications trail surrounding the stealthy June 2016 meeting of Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton on a Phoenix tarmac.

Comey did accede to Lynch’s cover-up by altering the official nomenclature of the investigation to an innocuous “matter.”

Comey misled about the actual contents of Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s email communications; the versions that he gave at various times and in different venues cannot be reconciled.

In his habitual lies of omission, Comey made no effort to correct a false public impression that he had helped foster and yet knew was a lie—namely that the FBI was investigating Trump on charges of Russian collusion at the very time he was assuring the president of just the opposite.

Comey was not fully candid about the full extent of his selective note-taking of a confidential conversation with the president; his use of government time and resources in preparing his carefully crafted notes; and his deliberately leaking his notes to the press in violation both of FBI protocols and likely the law as well.

Comey had obfuscated or masked the FBI’s role in the acquisition and dissemination of the infamous Steele-Fusion fake dossier. He was likely less than honest as well about his full knowledge of Obama administration reverse targeting, unmasking, and leaking related to U.S. citizens — both before and after the election.

Whereas Rice lied to cover up Obama Administration incompetence and to advance left-wing agendas that otherwise without deception would be unpalatable to most Americans, Comey dissembled to retain his job and his image of being a sensitive moral soul.

Comey’s self-inflicted tragedy was that he never quite knew whether Obama trusted him to keep out of Hillary Clinton’s scandals and would reward him accordingly; whether Hillary Clinton would implode amid provable felonies or would survive to become president and conduct the necessary retaliations; or whether Trump could be cajoled by Comey’s charm — or might implode and be removed, or settle down and become a powerful president worth serving.

Rather than telling the truth and thereby gaining a reputation even among his enemies as transparent and honest, Comey simply told the perceived stronger party of the day what it wished to hear in hopes of careerist gratitude to come.

John Brennan’s lies:

Similar was the serial lying of CIA Director John Brennan, before, during, and after his CIA tenure. Brennan had a weird habit of becoming outraged at any who quite accurately alleged that he was mendacious, such as when he deceived the Senate Intelligence Committee officials that he had never unlawfully surveilled the computers of particular U.S. senators and their staffs (e.g., “beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do”).

Brennan also misled Congress when he assured that U.S. drone strikes had not killed a single civilian — a preposterous claim that was widely and immediately recognized as deceptive before he was forced to backtrack and admit his untruth.

When the careerist George W. Bush-appointee Brennan sought to recalibrate for the incoming progressive Obama Administration, he ritually denounced what he had previously asserted under Bush.

Bush’s former National Counterterrorism Center Director Brennan almost immediately disowned his prior loud support for enhanced interrogation techniques once he saw a chance for continued employment with Obama.

Brennan also told a series of whoppers to establish his new politically correct bona fides, among them that jihad was “a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community”.  Tell that to the incinerated victims of self-proclaimed jihadist Mohammed Atta or those beheaded by ISIS.

In his third incarnation, as a post-election stalwart opponent to Donald Trump, the partisan former “nonpartisan” intelligence chief Brennan has publicly denied that U.S. intelligence agencies ever improperly surveilled and unmasked the identities of Trump campaign and transition officials.

Even on his last day of office, Brennan was still busy reviewing intelligence surveillance of U.S. citizens and later deceiving Congress about it.

His part in preparing the Benghazi talking points, and in the creation of the Russian collusion mythos, are still not known fully. Nor understood is his apparent background role in the rather strange and abrupt post-election resignation of his immediate predecessor David Petraeus.

James Clapper’s lies:

It is hard to mention Brennan without bookending the similar careerist trajectory of Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.

Indeed, it is uncanny how Clapper emulated the Brennan model: the former Bush appointee reinventing himself as an Obama partisan after assuring the country that Saddam Hussein’s WMD depots were transferred to Syria; lying about the rise of ISIS and pressuring others in military intelligence to mimic his pre-planned deceptions; not being forthcoming about surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition; becoming a loud and partisan accuser of Trump’s supposed mendacities on cable television, while finding himself increasingly exposed at the center of the growing unmasking scandal.

If Brennan lied about surveilling U.S. senators and the drone program, Clapper, in turn, lied to Congress about the National Security Agency’s illegal monitoring of U.S. citizens.

If Brennan assured Americans that jihadism was not a violent effort to spread radical Islam, Clapper topped that by assuring Congress that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular”.

Rice is bad, but Comey, Brennan and Clapper are worse:

The deceptions of Comey, Brennan, and Clapper are perhaps far more disturbing than the partisan untruths of Susan Rice, a chronic political appointee who calibrated her national security fictions with Obama’s efforts to ensure reelection and later a presidential legacy.

But what extenuating excuse do the supposedly nonpartisan trio of intelligence and investigative directors offer?

They would like us to believe that only their nonpartisanship ensured subsequent tenures with the Obama Administration. In fact, their willingness to reinvent themselves and deceive were precisely why Obama retained and promoted them as sufficiently malleable and useful careerists—and why their post-government careers are today characteristically partisan and deceptive. …

Government bipartisan intelligence service … was supposed to be an atoll of professionalism and honesty in a sea of political narrative fiction.

In truth, Obama used Rice as a political hatchet-woman masquerading as an elite thinker and strategist. Clapper, Brennan, and Comey were partisan careerists playacting as disinterested public servants sworn to put our security above politics.

Instead, they said what was necessary for their own agendas and so naturally too often what they peddled was simply untrue. And it is now not surprising that all three ended up orphaned and discredited — once their obsequious utility to their masters was exhausted.

The FBI under Obama had the duty to investigate the criminal activities of Hillary Clinton and give the evidence against her to the Department of Justice so that she would be prosecuted. Instead the FBI under James Comey exonerated her.

For that, James Comey himself needs to be investigated, and the evidence against him given to President Trump’s Department of Justice so that he will be prosecuted.

But will he be investigated? Will he be prosecuted?

Are any efforts being made by the Trump administration to dispel the stench of corruption?

Will Susan Rice ever have to answer for her offenses? Or John Brennan? Or James Clapper? To name just a few of the many Obama toadies who broke the law and lied to the American people.

If not now, when?