John Brennan

Cockburn has awakened from his Russiagate slumber with the news that the Trump administration is seeking to file charges against former FBI director James Comey in federal court within the next few days. The statute of limitations on Comey’s September 30, 2020 testimony about ties between Russia and Trump’s second campaign for president is about to expire, meaning we’re set to re-litigate the Mueller Report. While we’re at it, why not take a look at Solyndra, yellowcake uranium, Whitewater, Iran-Contra, Watergate and Credit Mobilier?   Russiagate is a bit more current, though, and Trump is flinging his prosecutors all over the room.

Tulsi Gabbard's declassification of documents that support the view that the intelligence community engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to target the incoming president with false or dubious claims is truly explosive – unless you deliberately choose to ignore it. Surprise, surprise – the same people who helped manufacture and propagate these claims in the first place are sticking to their guns, with the normal veterans of the CNN octobox.

Yesterday, I wrote about the revelations with which Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, electrified the world.  We had all grown up chewing on the Russia Collusion Delusion, and most of us were happy to have that political enormity pass through the usual emunctory processes and be deposited in some far off midden or compost heap.   But Tulsi showed that, however expert we thought ourselves about the subject, that great precautionary motto – "things are always worse than they seem”– was pertinent even here.

“Who will guard the guardians?” That question, posed two millennia ago by the Roman poet, Juvenal, is just as relevant today. It recurs every time we learn of a new political scandal – or suspect one is being hidden from us.

It is said that the adage “he who hesitates is lost” is an adaptation of a line from Joseph Addison’s 1712 play Cato. I do not believe that Donald Trump is a student of the co-founder of The Spectator, but he has clearly absorbed that nugget of practical wisdom. Within hours of taking office on Monday, Trump issued some 200 executive orders and proclamations affecting the government’s conduct on everything from immigration to DEI, from energy policy to the 1,500 people incarcerated in Washington jails because they joined in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.   It is one thing to issue orders and proclamations. It is another thing to see them carried out successfully.

Well, well, well. That is to say, I told you so. Finally, at last, it was about time, scary-looking special counsel John Durham has delivered his report on the stinking, corrupt, lying, no-good partisan machine that is the FBI and the Department of Justice. Just as I and the rest of the non-Hillary commentariat told you, what he showed was that the Deep State’s investigation into possible collusion (remember that once-ubiquitous word?) between Donald Trump and the Russkies was a partisan witch hunt fabricated by Team Hillary.  The report is full of the antiseptic bureaucratese that specialists recommend to their insomniac patients. The FBI “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law,” yada, yada, yada.

Hard as the programmers try and tell us there is only one story at a time — Ukraine for now — or that a trite phrase like “but her emails” dismisses one of the most important political events of our time, something sinister happened in the United States which demands our attention. If we remain distracted, it will happen again in 2024. We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today's Part I will show that Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Donald Trump. Part II to follow will show that the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy. In the mainstream media vernacular, we are bearing witness.

Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review Online a couple of days ago, was certainly correct that it would have been outrageous and irresponsible to have suggested, at that early juncture of this still-unfolding episode, that the pipe ‘bombs’ were hoaxes devised by leftist activists to make it appear that nebulous right wing activists are targeting famous critics of Donald Trump, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, all the way down the food chain to Senator ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Mad Maxine Waters. But the fact that McCarthy’s column is titled ‘Why No One Trusts the Media’ tells you that his prudent restraint is redolent of that device rhetoricians denominate apophasis or praeteritio.