6/1/2020 Exposing the hoax

Exposing the hoax

by Andrew C. McCarthy | May 28, 2020 11:00 PM

No need to build to a crescendo — let’s just say it: The Trump-Russia investigation was a
politically driven fraud from beginning to end. It was opened on false pretenses, sustained
by investigative abuses, and will undoubtedly end in recriminatory angst, which is what
happens when the kind of accountability the victims demand does not, indeed cannot,
come to pass.

Worst of all is the damage wrought, though even that isn’t fully understood. Obama
administration of cials exploited the awesome national security powers that we trust our
government to use for counterintelligence operations that safeguard America from
jihadists and other foreign hostiles. Because of the abuse, and the growing awareness that
few of the abusers will be held to meaningful account, those powers have lost the solid
constituency they had maintained in Congress for nearly two decades. Thus, this episode
will prove to be a catastrophe for American national security.

Last August, I released Ball of Collusion. As a former longtime federal law enforcement
of cial who is proud of that service, I had come reluctantly to the realization that the
Trump-Russia escapade was less an investigation than a political narrative — hence the
book’s subtitle, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. In fact, it would be
more accurate to say I had been dragged to it, kicking and screaming. In the early days,
friends of mine, both pro-Trump and Trump-skeptic, asked me if it was possible that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice had brought an
uncorroborated screed of innuendo (under the guise of campaign opposition research) to
the secret federal tribunal that issues foreign-intelligence surveillance warrants, in order to
monitor the Trump campaign. Con dently, I assured them that that was inconceivable.

Turns out, by trusting that such a thing could never happen, I was the guy wearing the
tinfoil hat.

Still, until recently, it was perilous to draw anything but tentative conclusions. There was no
doubting that irregularities riddled the Trump-Russia inquiry through the tumultuous
months of the 2016 election campaign. Yet, law enforcement and intelligence agencies
stonewall because it works. Despite the fact that the executive branch had been under
President Trump’s control, at least nominally, since 2017, the Justice Department, the FBI,
and the rest of the 17-agency sprawl known as the U.S. “intelligence community” are
notoriously adept at closing ranks and closing the information spigot good and tight, but
for the occasional, strategic leak. They are hardwired to claim that disclosures of
information involving misfeasance and worse would do irreparable harm to national
security.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exposing-the-hoax 1/6
6/1/2020 Exposing the hoax

The Trump-Russia inquiry was ingeniously designed. If the president demanded that his
subordinates unveil the intelligence les that would reveal the prior administration’s
political spying, he stood to be accused of obstructing investigators and seeking to distract
the country from his own alleged criminality.

On that score, an underappreciated aspect of the saga is that Trump came to of ce as a

novice. His unhinged Twitter outbursts obscure an abiding uncertainty about the extent of
the president’s power to direct the intelligence bureaucracy. A more seasoned Beltway
hand would have known what he could safely order reluctant bureaucrats and Obama
holdovers to produce for him or disclose to the public. Trump, however, was at sea. That is
why it was so vital for his antagonists to sideline Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, Trump
loyalists with deep experience in intelligence and law enforcement, who could have put a
stop to the farce if they’d remained, respectively, national security adviser and attorney
general.

Due to the stonewalling, only recently has the paper trail nally begun to catch up to —
and, inevitably, verify, and then some — the worst suspicions of “Trump collusion with
Russia” naysayers.

We have known for over a year of the special counsel’s nding that there was no evidence
of espionage conspiracy, no criminal pact of any kind, between Trump’s campaign and the
Kremlin. In fact, long before its nal report, the Mueller inquiry’s bottom line was already
inescapable from the indictments led by its team of activist Democratic prosecutors.
None of them charged Trump associates with any kind of Russian “collusion” (a weasel
word invoked to obfuscate the lack of conspiracy).

Since then, the oodgates have begun to open. Justice Department inspector general
reports have illuminated shocking FBI misconduct in submissions to the FISA court. There
were serial misrepresentations about the strength of evidence; at-out lies about the
veracity of the seminal informant, former British intelligence of cer Christopher Steele; and
overarching claims that, consistent with Justice Department policy and FISA court rules,
each factual assertion in the four warrant submissions against former Trump campaign
adviser Carter Page was “veri ed,” when, in fact, virtually nothing of consequence had been
corroborated.

This inspector general report readily complemented the one completed two years earlier, in
connection with the Hillary Clinton emails escapade, which documented rampant anti-
Trump bias among key investigators assigned to the Clinton and Trump inquiries — as well
as the unusually deep involvement in both cases of the bureau’s highest echelon, then-
Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Also falling into place
was another inspector general report, centering on McCabe. He had rst orchestrated a
leak of investigative information involving a dispute between the FBI and the Obama
Justice Department over scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation; then, he made repeated
misrepresentations to investigators, including under oath.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exposing-the-hoax 2/6
6/1/2020 Exposing the hoax

Irate, the FISA court forced the Justice Department to conduct a more sweeping internal
inquiry. The results have been stunning. While the Trump-Russia investigation stands out
for its politicization of surveillance authority, it turns out not to be an outlier in terms of the
FBI’s derelictions of investigative duty. In a high percentage of cases, the bureau’s “veri ed”
submissions are never veri ed, in spite of curative procedures adopted in the 9/11 era, as
well as required sign-offs by top FBI and DOJ of cials. In short, the FBI and Justice
Department have been exploiting the convenience that, contrary to what happens in
criminal cases, classi ed counterintelligence inquiries have no discovery, no defense
lawyers, and no one checking the investigators’ work. Rather, there are sloppy
representations, made to a judicial monitor that is neither institutionally competent nor
practically equipped to investigate the submissions.

Meanwhile, there was the collapse of Robert Mueller’s ill-conceived prosecution of Russian
shell companies said to have been instrumental in the “troll-farm” conspiracy. That, we’d
been assured, was the social media campaign that, along with hacking, was the one-two
punch by which the Putin regime attacked our election.

Mueller’s two Russia indictments, of the troll-farmers and hackers, were always better
understood as press releases than criminal prosecutions because everyone knew no
Russian would ever be extradited to face the music. But Mueller botched the narrative
exercise by charging businesses, evidently not foreseeing that they bore no risks of
imprisonment or (as Moscow-based shells) ruinous nes. They retained experienced
counsel, who showed up in court, demanded to be given all the discovery, and vowed to
take the matter to trial. Ultimately, after rst grudgingly conceding that they could not
connect the social media ads to the Russian government (though an oligarch said to be
close to Vladimir Putin was complicit), prosecutors dismissed the case rather than chance
an embarrassing rout at trial. In the run-up, their theory of prosecution was shown to be
untenable, and the social media ads themselves were ludicrous — childish, mostly legal
under campaign rules, and costing just pennies (the defense claimed the few arguably
actionable ones amounted to about $5,000 in expenditures). The suggestion that the troll-
farm operation had any effect on the multibillion-dollar ocean of U.S. campaign spending
was laughable.

Hacking has taken a hit, too. That is largely because Trump nally dispatched a pit bull to
take on the intelligence community. The president eased out acting National Intelligence
Director Joseph Maguire, installing in the post Richard Grenell, his hard-charging
ambassador to Germany.

Grenell staged a showdown to force Trump nemesis Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence
Committee chairman, to disclose hearing testimony from dozens of witnesses that had
been kept under wraps for over a year. Among the most startling revelations was the
testimony of Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike. That is the private cybersecurity rm
retained by Democrats to conduct forensic analysis on the party’s servers, whose hacking
by Moscow is the collusion narrative’s ne plus ultra. The Obama Justice Department and
the FBI could have compelled production of the servers to conduct their own examination.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exposing-the-hoax 3/6
6/1/2020 Exposing the hoax

Instead, they delegated to the private rm with deep Democratic ties, notwithstanding the
latter’s motive to blame Russia and, derivatively, Trump’s campaign. No wonder Schiff did
not want the testimony to see the light of day: Henry admitted — under oath, more than
two years ago — that CrowdStrike has no solid evidence that Russian government-directed
hackers stole the emails.

More brazen still were the admissions by of cial after of cial that they had no proof of any
Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia. Publicly, former CIA Director John Brennan
intimated that Trump was guilty of treason; former Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper suggested he was a Putin asset; McCabe bragged of opening a criminal
investigation against the president (for obstruction) after Comey’s ring. But in quiet
hearing rooms, under oath, they had nothing. No evidence of conspiracy. The pundits knew
that. Schiff and the Democrats who choreographed their testimony knew it. They went on
for years, though, encouraging the public and foreign governments to believe the
president of the United States could possibly be a Kremlin mole. So did Comey, in bracing
public testimony in March 2017, by which time it was already patent that there was no case
against Trump and his campaign.

Finally, there is the Flynn prosecution.

Since entering of ce in 2019, Attorney General William Barr has become increasingly
troubled by the Trump-Russia investigation, which he describes, without exaggeration, as
“one of the greatest travesties of American history.” Besides assigning Connecticut U.S.
Attorney John Durham to conduct what is a criminal investigation of the inquiry, Barr has
also taken to assigning other experienced federal prosecutors from outside Washington to
examine the resulting prosecutions. Thus was Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for St. Louis,
given the ticket to scrutinize the Flynn case. His ndings, accompanied by the rollout of
previously redacted documents, resulted in the DOJ’s decision to dismiss the case,
regardless of Flynn’s guilty plea to a false-statements charge (apparently elicited under the
threat that Mueller’s team might otherwise indict his son on a dubious charge of failing to
register as a foreign agent, due to work Flynn’s private intelligence rm did for Turkey).

In a nutshell, in July 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn on

the baseless theory that he might be a clandestine agent of Russia. Not surprisingly, they
were poised to close the case in late December, when Flynn engaged in perfectly
appropriate, if ill-fated, communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Though
Flynn had done nothing wrong, the bureau used the contacts as a pretext to continue the
investigation.

Though it had a predicate for neither a counterintelligence nor a criminal investigation, the
FBI conducted an ambush interview of Flynn at the White House — Comey has bragged
about violating protocol, which would have called for approvals from the attorney general
and the White House counsel. The session was an obvious perjury trap. In blatant violation
of FBI procedures, the bureau edited the interview notes (the “302 report”) for weeks — a
complication necessitated by the facts that, while the agents did not believe Flynn had lied
to them, the point of the exercise was to lay the groundwork to get him removed as
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exposing-the-hoax 4/6
6/1/2020 Exposing the hoax

national security adviser. That plan worked when Trump red Flynn (for allegedly
misleading Vice President Mike Pence about whether he had spoken to Kislyak about
Obama-imposed sanctions against Russia). The bureau seemed to drop the matter, but it
was revived months later by Mueller’s prosecutors, who were obviously hoping to build an
obstruction case against Trump, and to squeeze Flynn into cooperating. The newly
disclosed documents demonstrate that the prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence,
made misrepresentations to the defense about the genesis of the 302 report, and withheld
from the court their agreement not to indict Flynn’s son if he agreed to plead guilty.

Concurrently, Grenell forced the disclosure of documents showing that Flynn’s identity had
been “unmasked” an astounding 53 times by 39 different Obama of cials in just the few
weeks between Trump’s election and his inauguration. (“Unmasking” is the revealing in
intelligence reporting of the identities of Americans incidentally intercepted in foreign
intelligence monitoring; they are supposed to be concealed, and their revelation facilitates
classi ed leaks.) Ironically, the one time Flynn was not unmasked appears to have been in
connection with his Kislyak call in late December. There, the FBI, then consulting directly
with the Obama White House, opted not to “mask” him at all, despite FISA procedures
calling for doing so. The call was leaked to the Washington Post.

That’s an appropriate note on which to bring us back to the crescendo. Given the brass
knuckles Barack Obama’s investigators used on Trump and company, the president’s
supporters are unsurprisingly baying for blood. In law enforcement, and especially in
foreign counterintelligence, investigative judgments are based on broad discretion, not
bright-line rules. It is a far easier thing to spot the abuse of that discretion, especially when
all judgments cut in the same politicized direction, than to t it into an offense of the penal
code. Durham is conducting a serious criminal investigation, and we could see some
prosecutions, particularly of of cials who can be shown to have actionably lied or
obstructed justice. But those dreaming of the big indictment of Obama and his top
minions will be sorely disappointed.

There are two lessons to be drawn from all this.

First, Barr could not be more right that the malfeasance in our government today is the
politicization of law enforcement and intelligence. The only way to x that is to stop doing
it. That cannot be accomplished by bringing what many would see as the most politicized
prosecution of all time. The imperative to get the Justice Department and the FBI out of
our politics discourages the ling of charges that would be portrayed as banana-republic
stuff. Yet, even if Barr succeeds in this noble quest, there is no assurance that a future
administration would not turn the clock back.

Second, when wayward of cials are not called to account, the powers they have abused
become the target of public and congressional ire. The problem is that the powers are
essential. Without properly directed foreign counterintelligence, supplemented by
legitimate law enforcement, the United States cannot be protected from those who would
do her harm.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exposing-the-hoax 5/6
6/1/2020 Exposing the hoax

The Trump-Russia farce has destroyed the bipartisan consensus on counterterrorism, and
on the need for aggressive policing against cyberintrusions and other provocations by
America’s enemies. There is an implicit understanding: The public endows its national
security of cials with sweeping secret authorities, and those of cials solemnly commit that
these authorities will only be used to thwart our enemies, not to spy on Americans or
undermine the political process.

That understanding has been fractured. In counterintelligence, government operatives

have to be able to look us in the eye and say, “You can trust us.” Americans no longer do.
The sentiment is justi ed. That will not make our consequent vulnerability any less perilous.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S.

attorney in New York, is a senior fellow at the
National Review Institute, a contributing editor at
National Review , and a Fox News contributor.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exposing-the-hoax 6/6