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The ancient Chinese curse–“may you live in interesting times”–is a curse for the ages.  It is evergreen, and we surely live in interesting times.  One might profitably think the impeachment farce–the coup–begun even before Donald Trump took the oath of office a planned, even desperate, distraction.  However, its power to distract is weakening, as we learn, little by little, more of the truth.  Gropin’ Joe Biden said D/S/Cs believe in truth over fact, revealing the vacuity and infinitely flexible morality of such people.  But now, we find what truly scares them: when fact and truth are one in the same.  Michael Goodwin provides both at The New York Post:

It’s now official: Russia, Russia, Russia really was fake news from the start. There was no factual basis for the FBI to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign.

That means there was no need for the appointment of a special counsel and that Robert Mueller should have stayed in retirement. It means the two years of rumors and accusations and the giant cloud of suspicions over the White House produced by Mueller’s headhunters were unfair and unjustified.

It also means J. Edgar Hoover can finally rest in peace. James Comey is now revealed to be the dirtiest cop ever to run the FBI.

Those are the most important takeaways from Monday’s remarkable events. In the span of a few hours, the talking points that Democrats, much of the media and government insiders used to try to defeat Trump in 2016 and then upend his presidency were exposed as false and sinister distortions.

We have learned that not only was there no cause for an investigation of Donald Trump and his campaign, the highest levels of the FBI and DOJ well knew it, and if the lust, bias and hatred-drenched e-mails of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page may be credited, so did Barack Obama and his cronies.  This understanding explains much.  We have also learned that even when the dullest of them–most–could no longer for a moment believe they had legitimate cause to further the coup, when any pretense at justice, protecting the Constitution and the nation had dissolved, they became more fanatic.  AG William Barr is making that plain:

Barr was especially direct, saying that ‘the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.’ He also charged that ‘FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source.’

Rather than protecting us, these vermin have been destroying us.  Scott Johnson at Powerline adds additional puzzle pieces:

In lieu of a MMPI on Comey, Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn provides this bullet-pointed inventory:

* Even though Christopher Steele’s dossier was full of material Mr. Comey himself characterized as ‘salacious and unverified,’ it played a ‘central and essential role’ in the bureau’s decision to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Ultimately, it was virtually all they had, and they knew it to be a lie from the beginning.  They knew it was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and Steele’s primary source for the dossier told them Steele lied about what he told Steele, and the information in the dossier was entirely unreliable, bar room banter.

* The FBI failed to inform Justice of ‘significant information that was available’ but ‘was inconsistent with, or undercut,’ claims in the FISA applications that Mr. Page was ‘an agent of a foreign power.’

Page, in fact, was working for the CIA, defending America, but that didn’t fit the anti-Trump, Deep State defending narrative, so an FBI attorney lied about even that.

* The FBI ignored various warnings about Mr. Steele’s political bias, and it took him at his word when he falsely told agents he wasn’t the source for a Yahoo News article the FBI would cite in its application to the court.

They knew he was lying.  They had cut him off for talking to the media.  They knew he was the Yahoo source, but all was swept aside in the pursuit of Trump, the pursuit of privilege and power.

* Overall, the report identifies ‘at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications’—for which investigators received no ‘satisfactory answers.’

Translation: FBI agents, DOJ lawyers and others were lying to cover up their crimes, and there are far, far more than 17.

* The FBI also didn’t inform the FISA court that Mr. Page had served as a Central Intelligence Agency source and received a ‘positive assessment’ for candor from the agency.

* Mr. Comey pushed to include Mr. Steele’s dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment even though the CIA ‘expressed concern about the lack of vetting.’

* An FBI lawyer altered an email he’d received confirming Mr. Page had been a CIA source. After he changed it to read ‘not a source,’ the email was then used to help renew the FISA warrant on Mr. Page.

This is not the most egregious wrongdoing, but it’s perhaps the most easily understood by the layman.  I’ll explain shortly.

McGurn adds:

Mr. Horowitz lays the blame at the top: ‘We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny. We believe this circumstance reflects a failure not just by those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the [investigation’s] chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed.’

Don’t Mr. Horowitz and his vaunted investigators understand that was the point?  The people on those “hand-picked investigative teams” were there because they could be relied upon to violate their oaths, to serve the Deep State rather than the Constitution, and to do whatever was necessary to ensure no one could ever shake their grip on power.  They didn’t make mistakes; they knew exactly what they were doing.  They knew they were breaking the law, but they believed when Hillary Clinton was elected, their crimes would never come to light.  In fact, they’d be rewarded and become even more important guardians of a transformed America.

Mr. Comey’s memoir, ‘A Higher Loyalty,’ relates how as FBI director he kept on his desk a copy of the October 1963 memo from J. Edgar Hoover asking for permission to wiretap Martin Luther King. He claims he did so to help ensure the bureau would never forget how a ‘legitimate counterintelligence mission . . . morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack.’

Mr. Horowitz’s findings about what was done under Mr. Comey’s leadership suggest there’s still a need for such a reminder. But maybe it should be a copy of the FISA applications for Carter Page the FBI sent to the court with false, misleading and incomplete information—and Mr. Comey’s signature.

We are learning too just how wise President Trump was, what a service he did to American Constitutionalism, in firing James Comey.  Consider too these tweets from the invaluable Kim Strassel:

 

Consider too this from the equally invaluable Andrew McCarthy at The New York Post:

Here is what you need to understand the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings on Monday: According to Democrats, any investigation of possible Democratic corruption, or of Democratic collusion with foreign officials to interfere in our elections, is itself impeachable interference in our elections.

By the Democrats lights, it makes no difference whether Trump was asking for an investigation out of good-faith reasons. If Trump was asking for investigative assistance, you are to believe it can only be because he wanted foreign governments to meddle in our elections — it cannot be that there was something that cried out to be investigated.

That’s nonsense. For starters, Trump didn’t ask Ukraine for a ‘favor’ and then cut right to the Bidens, as Democrats claim. Trump’s first ask was for help on Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

It’s a fact that Ukrainian officials did collude with Democrats in 2016. A Ukrainian court has so concluded. There is reason to believe that the Obama administration’s enforcement agencies leaned on their Ukrainian counterparts to investigate Paul Manafort, who served for a time as the Trump campaign’s chairman.

Ukrainian officials were in consultation with a Democratic political operative and Fusion GPS, the research firm that concocted the discredited Steele dossier at the Democratic National Committee’s and Clinton’s behest. Ukrainians were also complicit in the leaking of information that forced Manafort’s ouster from the Trump campaign.

By all means, gentle readers, take the links herein.  There is much more to be discovered there.  One more link before I provide analysis, this from Fox News:

Former Whitewater Independent Counsel Robert Ray said he was ‘aghast to learn how little involved the [Obama administration] attorney general and the deputy attorney general of the United States’ were in the FBI investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. [skip]

‘Which is why I say,’ concluded Ray, ‘I do not understand for the life of me — whatever the department’s existing procedures were — something as sensitive as this should have warranted the personal direct involvement and supervision of the attorney general, the deputy attorney general of the United States and that did not happen here.

Ray, like so many others including Horowitz, has been fooled.  The highest reaches of the DOJ and FBI were involved.  Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates and others approved the FISA warrant applications.  They were all in the loop, and Yates continued the resistance after the election and was justly fired for thinking herself outside the law.

Analysis:  There will be much more in the future, I’m sure, but for now, I’ll focus primarily on the warrant process.  Understanding that explains much.

The media doesn’t understand the process, or are pretending they don’t.  What Strzok and various FBI attorneys wrote were not warrants, but warrant applications.  Applications are documents wherein the applicant swears under penalty of perjury that they are not only telling the truth, but are providing all relevant, exculpatory facts–the whole truth.  Actually, honest police officers do not write warrant applications if the exculpatory facts render their assertions false.  An obvious example would be when an officer wants to search someone’s home, computers, etc. for evidence of a crime, but knows the information on which they are basing their application is false, which was the case here.

We’re not talking about honest mistakes in an application.  If there are such mistakes, honest officers promptly inform the involved judge as soon as they become aware of them.  Usually, such errors are inadvertent and do not affect the legitimacy of a warrant, though sometimes they invalidate it.

In any law enforcement agency, warrant applications are subject to many levels of review.  They are reviewed by the officer’s first line supervisor, by their division or section commander, by the prosecutors involved, by their supervisors, and finally, by the judges involved.  In the case of the FISA warrants, there should have been much greater scrutiny of any application as FISA warrants edge closer than most, to the line of impermissible violations of individual rights.  In fact, the FBI employee lawyers to review such applications, providing an extra layer of review–if they’re doing their jobs honestly.

In these multiple–four–FISA applications, there are two very disturbing factors:  the fruits of the surveillance were non-existent–they weren’t discovering any crimes–and they had exculpatory information that rendered the entire enterprise illegal, yet continued to lie, over and over again, in repeated application renewals.

The highest levels of the FBI and DOJ violated internal and legal safeguards because they weren’t enforcing the law.  They were in a political crusade to deny the White House to Donald Trump, and when that–to their horror–failed, to depose him lest their sedition and other crimes be exposed.

How was it that these experienced agents and lawyers ignored procedure and the law, not once, but time and time again?  How could all of these supervisors at the highest levels of the FBI and DOJ fail to detect and stop false, deceptive warrant applications relating to a very specific and sensitive statute and procedure?  Were all of them merely incompetent?  All of them?

Police officers that lie to the courts–which includes not telling the whole truth–that commit perjury in testimony or in warrant applications render themselves useless.  Their credibility is shot, and they are, justly and necessarily, fired.  In many cases, they are, and must be, prosecuted.  If they are not, public faith in law enforcement is diminished, perhaps destroyed.

IG Horowitz engages in Comeyesque obfuscation.  He tells us of innumerable crimes by the FBI and DOJ, but then exonerates them of political bias.  To be completely fair, one might believe that Horowitz is playing it straight.  The people he was investigating for political bias sais they were unbiased, and he found no one that would say otherwise, so he’s just reporting what they said–or wouldn’t say.  If true, he is ignoring the obvious, inescapable conclusion: this was–and is–a politically motivated coup attempt, an attack on American constitutionalism and the rule of law.

We are told by Adam Schiff, Al Green and others, that impeachment is legitimately preemptive.  No treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors are necessary.  A president may be impeached based on what the Congress conjures he might have been thinking in the past and on what he might intend in the future.  We are told by Schiff that President Trump, with the collusion of the Russians, interfered in the 2016 election–a grotesque lie–and that if he is not impeached, he’ll do the same in 2020.  Rep. Green tells us Trump must be impeached or he’ll win the 2020 election.  Green also tells us D/S/Cs can impeach Trump over and over and over again, and he is not the only one that intends to do just that.  This is as close to truth and fact as we are ever likely to see from D/S/Cs.

We’re not dealing with honest public servants who made some regrettable errors such that only better procedures are required in the future.  We’re dealing with a knowing and malicious coup, with people who knowingly violated procedure and law for blatantly political purposes.  No law, no procedure can survive against law enforcement officers and lawyers who think their desired end justifies any means.

I am hopeful that when US Attorney Durham’s report is ready, we’ll see multiple indictments, and thereafter, more when rats start deserting the sinking political ship.  Or perhaps we’ll see yet again that the Deep State protects its own, and that no meaningful change can ever occur.  If the former happens, America may have a future.  If the latter…

Take this link to my favorite Bookworm’s take on these issues.