Posted by: Dr Churchill | June 1, 2018

SpyGate (Chapter Five)

SpyGate 

This book details the evidence and the reasons behind the recent failed Coup D’Etat against the American Democracy.

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“This is the most important existential threat that our country has faced since the inception of this Republic” —Dr Churchill

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This Book was written by Dr Pano Churchill 

Copyright 2018

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Chapter Five

The Main Question

 

Did the Obama administration spy on the Trump campaign?

It is hard to imagine a more stupid question than this:

Of course it did.

Do you remember Trump telling you this back in 2016 and 2017?

Of course you do.

But you laughed it off then…

Bet you are not laughing so much now…

With McCarthyism being the flavor of the past couple of years of the Mueller investigation, supported by CNN and MSNBC, and the Deep State marionettes of the Mass Media, using little mouthy people like Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper — the queer duet of derision, fake news, and hate speech against the President elected by the American people — who can blame you if you are whipped to a froth with cries of Russia-Russia-Russia, after listening to them for a while, each and every night sprouting hate during the evening newshour.

By now, you know viscerally, that widespread spying, and Gestapo tactics, were widely used against Conservatives during the Obama administration — I sense that you might still want to argue the point…

So let’s imagine for a moment, what the professors, pundits, and the poiticos would have said, had the Bush administration run an informant against three Obama 2008 campaign officials, including the campaign co-chairman.

Any hair-splitting about whether that technically constituted “spying” would be met by ostracism from polite society.

There is, in addition, more evidence — at least, more publicly verified evidence from none other than Clapper himself — that Stefan Halper was a spy for the FBI, NSA, CIA, and who knows whom else.

That is far more damning than anything we could have imagined about what Carter Page, Papadopoulos, Manafort, or General Flynn might have done for Russia.

This is not a small point, because it has been credibly reported that Stefan Halper, a longtime stool pigeon for the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and maybe for the British intelligence services as well, was tasked by the FBI in the Trump-Russia investigation to make contact with, to get information from, and to entrap at least three Trump campaign officials. Halper was such an idiot, that he even sought a high level position in the Trump campaign from co-chairman Sam Clovis.

Poor Carter Page, on the other hand, was the “unwarranted” target of four FISA court surveillance warrants, which enabled the Justice Department and FBI to monitor him for a year, starting at the height of the 2016 campaign. But the real reason they picked on him, was because they wanted to hear and unmask the Trumpster and his sayings as he and his colleagues spoke with Carter Page, and thus getting a FISA wiretap on Carter, allowed them to hear the whole of the campaign.

To obtain such a warrant under FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978), the FBI and Justice Department must convince a judge that there is probable cause to believe the target is an agent of a foreign power — in Page’s case, of Russia. As we’ve previously outlined (here, last section), because Page is an American citizen, the Obama administration had to have told the court that he was either: (a) “knowingly engage[d] in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for or on behalf of [Russia], which activities involve[d] or may [have] involve[d]” federal crimes; or (b) “knowingly engaged in any other clandestine intelligence activities for or on behalf of [Russia], that were undertaken “pursuant to the direction of an intelligence service or network of [Russia],” and that “involve[d] or [were] about to involve” federal crimes.

(See Section 1801(b)(2) of Title 50, U.S. Code. I am assuming it was not alleged that Page was knowingly engaged in sabotage, international terrorism, or the use of false identities, the alternative statutory grounds for claiming that a U.S. citizen is acting as an agent of a foreign power.)

Assuming the Obama administration told the FISA court that Page was a clandestine agent of Russia, I’d make two observations: First, the only publicly known allegations that Page was engaged in such clandestine activities come from the salacious Steele dossier, (Hillary Clinton’s opposition research against Trump) and appear to be unverified.

Second, Page has never been charged with a crime, which would be odd if the FBI had been able to verify its FISA application claims — posited four times over a year of surveillance — that he was engaged in activities that appeared to be federal crimes. (We have not been permitted to see the FISA applications; I am assuming here that the Justice Department would not seek a FISA warrant, and the court would not grant one, unless the application addressed FISA’s requirements for showing an American to be an agent of a foreign power.)

To put the matter more succinctly: We know why it is claimed that Halper was a spy; we still do not know why it was claimed that Page was a spy.

To repeat previously covered ground, we know that Russian spies tried to recruit Page in 2013. Yet, it appears that he cooperated with the FBI and Justice Department in the prosecution of the spies. (The Justice Department used his information in the arrest complaint — here, pp. 12-13, paras. 32-33, referring to Page as “Male-1”.) The Russian spies, moreover, expressed contempt for Page, referring to him as “an idiot” in a monitored conversation. This would not seem to be a promising jumping-off point for any future recruitment efforts.

The Constitutional Norm Against Political Spying in Elections is unassailable, and yet the Obama/Clinton cabal, broke that camel’s back too…

I want to be clear: I am not offended by the word spy, but I am offended by the use of spies against a Presidential candidate in the midst of a race, when all you are doing is trying to prop up a lame horse of your own to walk it across the finish line and win the race…

If the FBI’s and by extension Stefan Halper’s mission was righteous, the Justice Department and the FBI, should be proud that he was a spy. And they would not go to great lengths to minimize Stefan Halper, and call him a lowly and simple minded informant listening and carrying mere words, back to his handlers. And if on behalf of Russia, Page conducted clandestine anti-American activities that constituted felony violations of American law, I would enthusiastically support labeling him a spy and prosecuting him to the full extent of the law. Further, I’d want any official who knew about and supported such traitorous activities to be removed from office and prosecuted, as well…

But there are two things that don’t compute here and we need to bear them in mind, and that brings us to the first question:
1) Can the question of what amounts to vast & egregious misconduct of the Obama White House administration be answered in the context of Russia-Russia hoax, as a Trojan Horse against Trump to begin the Witch Hunt?

While the law liberally permits criminal investigators and intelligence officers to use informants, there are situations in which spying is resisted.

Among the most important are those involving our politics, particularly elections.

We have an important norm in this country against political spying.

That is part of the unwritten Constitution and it is indeed a matter of tradition.

It is a matter of the robustness of our Republic.

It is a matter of our democratic institutions.

It is a matter of our constitutional principles.

And it is a vastly important reminder of modern history’s Watergate chapter that brought our Republic to it’s knees.

The incumbent administration must not use its awesome counterintelligence, counterespionage, and law-enforcement powers against its political opposition.

Never, ever, ever.

Especially they should never do that, absent compelling evidence of seriously egregious misconduct.

So far, apologists for the Trump-Russia investigation have posited only reasonable suspicions of Russia sympathies, harbored by a handful of Trump campaign figures and implied by some of Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Reasonable suspicions are not trifles, but neither are they in the same ballpark as egregious misconduct.

The Context of American Policy on Post-Soviet Russia is always prone to MacCarthyism.

And that brings us to the second and perhaps the most important question:

2) The question of what amounts to egregious misconduct in the context of Russia cannot be answered in a Trump vacuum. It must be informed by history.

I did not support the Trump’s blandishments toward Putin’s Russia, which I have never regarded as anything but a murderous regime hostile to the United States. This is not a new position for me — I argued it throughout the Bush and Obama presidencies, well before Trump came along.

That said, the opposition of people like me to the lunacy of deeming Russia a “strategic partner” has not had much impact on U.S. policy. In the three decades from perestroika through Putin, from George H. W. Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech through Barack Obama’s hot-mic promise of “more flexibility” on the Kremlin’s agenda of hamstringing America, to Obama & Hillary Clinton’s sale of American Uranium to the Kremlin — the U.S. government has regarded the regime in Moscow through rose-colored glasses, as a democratically inclined, capitalism-friendly reformer, and even as a potential ally that any day now, will ask to join NATO too.

The unsustainability of the Communist system, under the pressure of Reagan’s military build-up and support of anti-Communist movements, made the Evil Empire’s disintegration inevitable. Gifted a historic opportunity to dance on the grave of Soviet tyranny, our government’s bipartisan foreign-policy establishment punted. Rather than call the culprits to account and make an enduring record of the hundreds of millions killed and enslaved, successive administrations embraced and propped up Moscow as a force for global stability. You want to tell me about Paul Manafort’s collaboration with Kremlin-backed Ukrainian thugs? How about George H. W. Bush trying to persuade Kiev not to break away from Moscow, after which Clinton, Bush-43, and Obama enticed Ukraine to give up its means of self-defense (nukes) on the false promise that we would protect them from Russian aggression — a promise premised on the pie-in-the-sky theory that there would be no Russian aggression?

In just the decade before Trump’s 2016 campaign, as the Putin regime menaced former Soviet satellites, the Bush administration negotiated and submitted to Congress the daft U.S.-Russia civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, endorsing the export to Moscow of technology, material, equipment, and components for nuclear research and nuclear power production. Russia’s invasion of Georgia — including the still-ongoing occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — made congressional approval of this embarrassing pact politically impossible for a time. Yet it was revived soon enough in the Obama “reset” of relations with Moscow steered by then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Clinton promised an era of cooperation in counterterrorism and non-proliferation while Putin went merrily along backing nuclear-energy development and advanced military capabilities in Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism. Obama, of course, made nary a peep since he needed Moscow’s help to pull off the ludicrous Iran nuclear deal. As the Putin thug-ocracy and kleptocracy, rattled its saber, Obama ushered its entry into the World Trade Organization and pushed through the wayward “New START” treaty.

In the 2012 campaign, when Mitt Romney portrayed Russia as our principal geopolitical foe, Obama and Democrats mocked him. In the 2016 campaign, Trump’s Russia rhetoric was an echo — in Trumpian bluntness — of the Democrats’ position. Alas, they had nominated the candidate most ill-suited to exploit the Putin appeasement flavor of the Trump bid.

Mrs Clinton, as we’ve observed, was neck-deep in the Obama administration’s Uranium One scandal, as was Obama, and even Mueller, unsurprisingly…

Do you recall the $145 million that poured into the Clinton Foundation?

Do you remember the half-million-dollar pay day a Kremlin connected bank ponied up for a short Bill Clinton speech?

By the way, that was about five times more money than Russia paid for those 2016 ads on Facebook, and more than ten times what the Kremlin’s propaganda arm, RT, paid for a 2015 speech by eventual Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn.

Does anyone recall the Clintons’ meetings in Russia with Putin and Medvedev while the U.S. government was mulling approval of Russia’s acquisition — through its energy giant, Rosatom — of one-fifth of America’s uranium stock?

Did you know that that was in addition to more copious uranium reserves that Russia already had acquired in Kazakhstan?

Did you ever hear about the debacle of how the Obama Justice Department’s refused to bring a prosecutable felony case against Rosatom’s American affiliate (Tenam USA) while the Uranium One deal was under consideration even though there was plenty of robust evidence to prosecute and get them all indicted?

And did you hear the one about the same Department’s quiet resolution of the case on a sweetheart plea years later, after Putin’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Eastern Ukraine (despite Obama’s plea for flexibility) had left Obama’s “reset” policy in shambles.

Choosing Political Spying Over Other Alternatives is pure and unadulterated evil.

We could go on, and on, and on…

Screen Shot 2018-05-30 at 6.22.47 PM

The point, however, is that after 30 years of embracing and empowering Moscow, it is not credible — particularly for an administration that was among the worst offenders — to say, “We had to use spies and FISA surveillance against the Trump campaign due to suspicion that Trump might embrace and empower Moscow.”

Of course, there were also Russia hawks among Trump’s supporters, and it is not surprising that Trump has been far tougher on the Kremlin than Obama was — a low bar, to be sure.

Yet, all that could not have been known back in the spring of 2016, when it appears that suspicions about Trump’s campaign advisers Carter Page, and Paul Manafort, prompted Obama national-security officials to begin investigating Obama’s (and Clinton’s) political opponent Mr Trump.

The Obama administration ought to have been more measured.

If its concerns were based in good faith rather than political opposition and opportunism, it could have dispatched the FBI to interview Page, whom FBI agents had interviewed several times since 2013, and apparently interviewed again in March 2016.

And they could have also interviewed Paul Manafort, who, along with his partner, Richard Gates, was speaking with the Justice Department in 2016 about their work for the Kremlin’s favored Ukrainian political party, which at times was the one supported by the Obama / Clinton administration as well.

Go figure that one out….

Yours,
Dr Churchill

PS:

And indeed, if the Obama administration was made up of honorable folks, and if the Loretta Lunch DoJ and their FBI Law Enforcement people, and the Comey, Clapper, Brennan cabal were even a little bit honest — they could have given responsible Trump campaign officials a defensive briefing to alert them about their concerns, and to request their input…

Yet they didn’t.

Because they were not about to do that, and expose their “hand” since their only interest was to entrap, and not to enlighten, protect, or even liberate, an American candidate for US President, from potential Russian interference…

So instead, the Obama administration decided to use its counterintelligence powers to entrap Trump, and plant embedded spies on the Trump campaign, using at least one covert informant, and possibly many more, vast electronic monitoring of all communications, and many other intelligence-gathering tactics, that have yet to come to light.

The Obama White House ignored the unwritten constitutional norm against deploying such KGB-STASI-NAZI-GESTAPO tactics against political opponents, and especially against Electoral Candidates, and went ahead to launch a deep state colonoscopy-type probe with entrapment and spying, all based on the mere speculation about the Trump campaign’s perceived and imagined Russia sympathies.

Speculation by a government, an administration, and a Democratic-party nominee with their own abysmal histories of Russia contacts and Russia sympathies, does not make for anything but a terrible spy novel, and an over-exaggeration that evolved into a Witch Hunt.

A witch hunt that is not based on any evidence of a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy, but on their mere wish to help their own lame horse candidate not only to finish the race, but to cut the tape and win through hook & crook.

Except the pony they banked on — couldn’t even walk, or take a few incline steps, let alone trot to a respectable photo-finish…


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