The Left's Memo Hysteria

Democrats and other left-wingers melted down in unison over the weekend after the release of a congressional memo asserting that Obama-era officials relied on the discredited Trump-Russia dossier to obtain court-ordered foreign-intelligence wiretaps against U.S. citizens in a bid to reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election. The extended freakout came after the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence publicly unveiled a newly declassified four-page report detailing intelligence surveillance abuses perpetrated by the Obama administration during the past election cycle. As expected, the document confirmed more or less all the terrible things we've been hearing about the disgraced Federal Bureau of Investigation and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Justice.

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When governmental transparency exposes Republican wrongdoing, it is noble, patriotic, and just. When it exposes Democrat wrongdoing, it is terrorism and treason.

One of the more outrageous examples of hyperbole came from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who absurdly claimed "the release of this memo is really reminiscent of the darkest days of the McCarthy era.” As left-wingers see things, when governmental transparency exposes Republican wrongdoing, it is noble, patriotic, and just. When it exposes Democrat wrongdoing, it is terrorism and treason. The memo itself is devastating. It shows how corrupt the swamp-dwellers in the nation's capital are. No wonder Democrats shrieked so loudly in protest of the memo's release: it indicts them. (Full memo here.) The Left tried to use the power of government to rig a presidential election, and then when that failed, to frame Donald Trump for an offense he did not commit – “collusion” – that isn’t even actually a crime. As expected, the memo provides evidence that during the 2016 election cycle top officials in the Obama administration abused their authority to obtain surveillance warrants against members of President Trump’s election campaign from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The memo makes clear that DoJ and FBI officials relied on the ridiculous "piss-gate" dossier filled with Kremlin-supplied misinformation about President Trump's virtually nonexistent ties to Russia to obtain surveillance warrants from the secret court.

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The dossier by rent-a-spook Christopher Steele

The dossier by rent-a-spook Christopher Steele, whom the memo reveals as a frothing-at-the-mouth Trump-hater, was a Democrat work product. Steele was paid $160,000 by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign via the Perkins Coie law firm and Fusion GPS. Obama administration officials knew this and committed a fraud on the court by withholding the information. In fact, the administration, that is, the FBI, “had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information," according to the memo. The Obama administration compounded the fraud on the court by presenting a Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, the journalist who had the sex scandal story involving President Bill Clinton and intern Monica Lewinsky but suppressed it, as supposed corroboration for the dossier, knowing that the article didn't contain actual reporting and was a mere regurgitation of the dossier’s major points. The memo states, "This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News." Of course, information about the leaking was conveniently left out of court documents. On (at least) four occasions the Obama administration committed a grotesque abuse of process, the memo suggests, by failing to disclose the origins of the dossier in applications for surveillance of Carter Page, an American citizen and obscure Trump campaign volunteer. Democrats now dispute what the secret court was told about the provenance of the dossier, but once again, they’re probably lying. Russia supposedly tried and failed repeatedly to recruit Page as a spy, but despite this big nothing-burger of a data point, the corrupt leadership of the DoJ and FBI wouldn't drop Page as a target because he was part of the Trump campaign. He was too valuable to them as a means of undermining Trump. The Steele dossier was the sine qua non of the strategy. Without it, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would not have granted a warrant against Page. The dossier's centrality to the plot is not a figment of Republicans' imagination.

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A parade of Democrat lawmakers flew at warp speed to TV stations

As the memo states, "Deputy Director [Andrew] McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information." Everything Trump-haters said about the memo last week before it was released turned out to be lies and what they said after it was made public amounted to legalistic parsing, distortions, and misdirection. Democrats, in particular, pushed the panic button. They claimed the memo would undermine national security and was loaded with "classified information" that if made public would expose “our spying methods," by which “[t]hey meant Obama’s spying methods,” Daniel Greenfield writes. The memo, he adds, “reveals a treasonous effort by the Democrats to use our intelligence agencies to rig an election and overturn the will of the voters.” A parade of Democrat lawmakers flew at warp speed to TV stations to get the word out that the memo release, an act of government transparency, was actually part of a dastardly plot to somehow undermine the democratic process. The ranking member on the HPSCI, the ubiquitous boob tube presence known as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said at least twice on the weekend that the memo’s release could lead to another Oklahoma City bombing. “Sources will dry up,” Schiff said on MSNBC. “If you have a neighbor next door who's buying a lot of fertilizer and it seems odd to you because they don't have a yard, are you going to think twice before calling the FBI?” Sen. Mark Warner (D- Va.), ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said releasing the memo was "reckless and demonstrates an astonishing disregard for the truth."

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Both lied their faces off, feigning ignorance of the strict rules governing the declassification process

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) claimed before the release that if the memo was made public, the FBI and DoJ “will refuse to share information with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees." Of course, if they did so, the two organizations’ funding could be cut off by Congress in order to compel cooperation. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) emoted that releasing the memo was "treasonous" and might be "revealing sources and methods" and even "endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community." On Sunday TV shows, two of Obama’s CIA directors denounced Republicans for releasing the memo. Both lied their faces off, feigning ignorance of the strict rules governing the declassification process. Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman from California who was also one of President Clinton’s White House chiefs of staff, said it was “irresponsible” to put the memo out there “without looking at the entire [warrant] application, without talking to the judges who actually make these decisions.” On Thursday, the Communist-friendly public figure said President Trump may be creating a "constitutional crisis" by declassifying the document over the objections of the FBI and the Department of Justice. Former Obama CIA Director John Brennan, who has admitted voting for a Communist Party presidential candidate at the height of the Cold War, attacked Nunes saying the HPSCI chairman “abused the office” by not letting Democrats on the committee release their rebuttal document.

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That Devin Nunes and Republicans denied the ability of the minority, the Democratic members of that committee, to put out its report is just appalling. I think it, it really underscores just how partisan Mr. Nunes has been. He has abused the office of the chairmanship of HPSCI. And I don't say that lightly.

Brennan also hit Nunes for not releasing the classified documents on which the memo is based. "We don't have access to the underlying information of the Nunes memo which really, you know, clearly indicates that he was being exceptionally partisan in this." The problem with the objections offered by the two men is that they are nonsensical. It is true that Chairman Nunes did not read the documents upon which his committee’s memo was based, but there are good reasons for that. Congressional Republicans struggled mightily to extract documentation from the Justice Department for about the last 12 months. In the end, Nunes had to threaten officials with contempt citations to get the DoJ to act. The agreement the committee made with the DoJ stipulated that only one person would be given access to the classified material. HPSCI member Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was given the task by Nunes based on his experience as a federal prosecutor, Nunes told The Hill newspaper. After viewing the documents, Gowdy briefed the committee members on what he read. Nunes and his committee members still don’t have continuing access to the classified documents. Senior Democrat Adam Schiff has known this all along but he keeps playing dumb whenever he goes in front of a TV camera. Other left-wingers waved the bloody shirt. As American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson reports, ad executive and MSNBC pundit Donny Deutsch, who calls Republicans “cockroaches,” became so unhinged at the release of the memo that he urged violent revolution. “Our democracy is under siege,” he said. “People need to start taking to the street. This is a dictator ... this is frightening stuff ... we need a revolution at this point.” When Tucker Carlson grilled Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) on TV, the wily lawmaker insulted Carlson and accused him of being a Putin stooge. "You're peddling a narrative that undermines the rule of law,” Swalwell said. Former CIA counterintelligence agent, Phil Mudd, openly threatened President Trump, boasting that the unelected intelligence community would prevail over the nation’s duly elected Chief Executive.

These people have been driven mad by their hatred of Trump and they don’t mind turning America into a banana republic in order to drive him from power

The workforce is going to look and this and say, this is an attack on our ability to conduct an investigation with integrity… The FBI people, I’m going to tell you, “are ticked” and they’re going to be saying, I guarantee you, “You think you can push this off this?”… You better think again, Mr. President. You’ve been around for 13 months. We’ve been around since 1908. I know how this game is going to be played. We’re going to win.

Of Deutsch, Swalwell, and Mudd, Lifson concluded:

I think that these three prominent people make it quite clear that they are happy to change the nature of our regime from a constitutional republic to something else – a revolutionary government, perhaps with guillotines or gulags – or a government run by and for the secret police bureaucrats.

But it’s not just the Left. Plenty of Republicans suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome have been wildly lashing out, indignantly claiming those who want to get to the bottom of the present controversy aren’t good Americans. Some are useful idiots for the Left; others know exactly what they’re doing. According to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), those Americans now demanding accountability from the FBI and Department of Justice for conspiring to subvert the democratic process are themselves the real enemy. "The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests — no party's, no president's, only [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's," McCain said. Former communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Amanda Carpenter, whose deep personal animus toward Trump drove her during the campaign to compile an enemies list consisting of those who merely endorsed Trump’s candidacy, shot her fellow Republicans in the back. Carpenter wrote a shameful, profoundly dishonest op-ed for Politico titled, “I’m a Republican. Why is my party gaslighting America?” Pooh-poohing the overwhelming evidence that the Trump-the-Russian-puppet narrative is fabricated nonsense and that senior staff at the Obama-era FBI and Justice Department conspired to alter the outcome of the election, Carpenter tries to paint truth-seeking patriots as conspiracy-obsessed kooks. “Prompted by Trump, his allies on Capitol Hill and in the Trump-affirming media universe, millions of Americans have been led to brainstorm all the various ways faceless bureaucrats embedded in the government could be working to undermine Trump.” Slimy, demonstrably corrupt bureaucrats like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, and Robert Mueller are faceless? Carpenter treats Comey and McCabe, in particular, as innocent victims of what she calls Trump’s “shameless bullying, rumor mongering and conspiracy peddling.” And what “Trump-affirming media” could Carpenter be talking about? The mainstream media that initially gave Trump 5 percent positive coverage and uses dubious anonymous sources daily now to smear the president with made-up palace intrigues? Even conservative talk radio and conservative publications like National Review, Weekly Standard, and Washington Examiner are filled with NeverTrumpers. Talk about gaslighting. To people like Carpenter and her left-wing comrades the real offense that President Trump and Chairman Nunes are guilty of is daring to fight back against the Left and the Deep State and the ongoing witch hunt. These people have been driven mad by their hatred of Trump and they don’t mind turning America into a banana republic in order to drive him from power.

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