The Deep State spying scandal rolls on, with more details coming out daily. Here’s a few of the most shocking developments so far:
- There was a second “dirty dossier” authored by the worst sleazebag in the Clinton camp, sent directly to the US State Department and from there via a convoluted route to the FBI. The dossier is said to be even sleazier than the Christopher Steele one. This was what went into the application to the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign.
- Michael Isikoff, former journalist, now just a receptacle for Deep State propaganda, was working with the DNC against Trump: his Yahoo piece was cited by the Obama administration in their application to spy on the Trump campaign.
- The Senate Judiciary Committee has issued a criminal referral to the Justice Department against “former” MI6 agent Christopher Steele for lying to the Committee under oath.:
“It appears the FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing presidential candidate. It did so based on Mr. Steele’s personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information. But there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility.”
- The Grassley-Grahama (Judiciary Committee) memo corroborates and expands on the Nunes memo, showing that the FBI lied to the FISA court, fed false information to the court, and exposes Rep. Adam Schiff as a serial liar.
- Found among the FBI coup plotters’ text messages: we must prepare talking points for then FBI-Director James Comey because President Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.” So the criminality goes straight up to the White House.
What’s interesting, in a disgusting way, is the reaction of the “left” and some “libertarians” to this truly scary development – the use of the Surveillance State to spy on and frame up political opponents. Listen to this podcast conducted by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, who openly disdains the idea that anything untoward or illegal was going on with this kind of surveillance: he is joined by Julian Sanchez, the Cato Institute’s “privacy” expert, who openly justifies the surveillance of “suspicious” Carter Page and tells us that there was basically nothing wrong with the Obama administration spying on the Trump campaign.
It’s left to Peter van Buren, a former State Department official, to ask both of these jerks: Isn’t there something unprecedented and wrong about the involvement of the FBI/CIA/NSA in a presidential election campaign? Of course, he doesn’t get an answer to his question from either of these two jokers, although Sanchez is implicitly endorsing such interference in his later comments on Page.
By the way, when I brought up these points to Scahill, he accused me of being – wait for it! – a “racist” (!). Yes, really: see here.
These people are so tiresome, and so obviously deluded, that answering them is really beside the point. We’ll slide into tyranny with them standing on the sidelines, proclaiming their own virtue, and sucking up to @pierre Omidyar – the rabidly anti-Trump anti-Russian warmonger who finances The Intercept – until the cows come home.
It’s depressing to contemplate, but I am heartened by the work being done by Peter van Buren, whose common sense commentary and objective view of the surveillance scandal mirrors my own: he, too, sees that this isn’t about Trump. It’s about the future of our republic. It’s about not ceding power to a gaggle of unelected bureaucrats. It’s about preserving what’s left of our constitutional liberties. The Omidyars and the Kochs don’t get that: neither do their servants. Where is the American Civil Liberties Union on this issue? We haven’t heard a peep out of them.
During World War II, the ACLU and the “liberals” were all in favor of government repression: the internment of Japanese-Americans, the “Sedition Trial of 1944,” the groupthink and the censorship – it was all part of the “progressive” agenda. So don’t expect any help or encouragement from what passes for the “left” these days: they’re the enemy. We’re in this fight alone. And the stakes are high. The question is: will the US become just another shithole, with a secret police and a national security bureaucracy that holds the real power, with the ability to veto the democratic choices of the electorate?
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).
You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.
