From the Strzok/Page texts: ‘The White House is running this’

It’s been my contention for some time that the FBI’s 2016 involvement in both the Hillary e-mail investigation and the Trump/Russia investigation were essentially political operations directed by the Obama White House. I’ve argued that this represents a scandal worse than Watergate because we’re basically talking about the Obama Administration abusing federal law enforcement to achieve the same goals as the Watergate burglars sought by bugging the Democratic National Committee headquarters back in 1972. Nixon’s people used two-bit criminals. Obama used the FBI. Obama’s offense is worse because he took what is supposed to be a non-political agency dedicated to the law and used it as a tool to let one candidate get away with a felony, while wiretapping and infiltrating the other under the thinly veiled guise of a legitimate criminal investigation.

Yet most of the coverage of this story, even in conservative media, has not focused on one element of the story that strikes me as increasingly obvious: All of the redactions, stonewalling and excuse-making are for the purpose of doing one thing: Protecting Barack Obama by hiding the fact that he was driving this whole thing. Today, newly reviewed texts between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page more starkly point us in that direction:

On the afternoon of August 5, Strzok and Page engaged in a tense conversation which involved an imminent meeting with “agency people” — an apparent reference to the CIA. Strzok suggested that, for the new case, they should conduct Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning meetings “with [REDACTED]” just “like we did with mye” — Mid Year Exam, the Clinton probe. Finally, after some back-and-forth over who should be invited to a major meeting about the new case, a meeting was held. In the aftermath, at about 4:30 p.m., Strzok and Page had the following exchange: Strzok: And hi. Went well, best we could have expected. Other than [REDACTED] quote: “the White House is running this.” My answer, “well, maybe for you they are.” And of course, I was planning on telling this guy, thanks for coming, we’ve got an hour, but with Bill [Priestap] there, I’ve got no control…. Page: Yeah, whatever (re the WH comment). We’ve got the emails that say otherwise. It would be interesting to know what is in the emails that apparently clarify how the Obama administration divided responsibility for running the Trump-Russia investigation. Just like it would be interesting to know what is behind all the many redactions in these texts about how and why the Trump-Russia investigation got started.

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Do note that Strzok and Page are furiously pushing back on the idea that the White House is running the investigation, but that’s immaterial. What we clearly see here is that there’s a power struggle for who is going to be in control of it, and there’s at least someone – because of the redactions, we don’t yet know who – who is trying to assert to Strzok that the White House is in the driver’s seat. You can argue if you want that Page’s response casts doubt on my premise. But if you really think about it, you have to know that’s disingenuous. With a standard criminal investigation undertaken by the FBI, there would be little to no involvement from the White House or from any other political entity. There may be cases that the White House would take an interest in and want to be briefed on, but everyone would understand that professional investigators would take the lead – if it’s really a matter of law and not politics. The fact that they’re even having this conversation means, at the very least, someone in the Obama White House wants to be in charge of this, and the only conceivable reason for that is that the investigation is driven by politics and not by a legitimate question of law. We’ve learned in recent days that the FBI likely planted a mole within the Trump campaign. There’s much speculation about the name of this individual, and while we’ve seen it, we won’t repeat it here until it’s confirmed. But this begs another question, doesn’t it? If the Obama White House was directing the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign for political reasons, and the FBI tapped a mole to infiltrate the Trump campaign, was the mole’s purpose to gather evidence for a criminal case or to relay campaign secrets that could then be shared with Hillary’s campaign? In other words, did Obama direct the FBI to initiate a sham criminal investigation that included the infiltration of the Trump campaign, with the real purpose being to report back intelligence to the Clinton campaign? Because if he did, that’s an abuse of the FBI that’s more serious than what the Nixon campaign did when it broke into the Watergate and planted those listening devices. And if that is what happened, then we know who Rod Rosenstein is trying to protect with his foot-dragging and stonewalling. He’s trying to protect Barack Obama. The presumption of the Obama White House was clearly that Hillary would win and none of this would ever see the light of day. When Trump shocked everyone by winning, all of this was suddenly at risk of exposure, and everything that’s happened since then has been for the purpose of covering it up. By the way, what was the real purpose of that tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch? No one believes they were talking about grandchildren. Was Lynch there to brief Clinton on what the FBI’s mole had learned about the Trump campaign? Or about the FBI’s larger effort to sabotage Trump on Hillary’s behalf under the guise of a legitimate investigation? The only way to know for sure is for the DOJ to give Devin Nunes all the documents he’s subpoenaed, in unredacted form. And that, I suspect, is precisely why Rosenstein is doing everything he can to avoid turning them over. If he does, the man who gets exposed is none other than Barack Obama himself.