Victor Davis Hanson:
“…When a party, an ideological movement, and an entire political agenda is based on hatred, people and policies become warped. The left-wing loathing of Trump has now tainted almost every Democrat’s agenda and unhinged most of the party’s major players…
…Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report proved a compendium of FBI lying, fraud, and vendetta. There is not a single prominent figure in Horowitz’s lengthy report who has not left a written or video trail of anti-Trump bias (James Comey, Peter Strozk, the Ohrs, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith) or has had some sort of questionable financial relationship with the Clintons or their affiliates (Alexander Downer, Andrew McCabe).
Meanwhile, the progressive presidential field is in a sort of collective meltdown, as candidates begin recalibrating and trading accusations as they fear their own early anti-Trump agendas have little public support…
…the common denominator in all these catastrophes is an existential hatred of Donald Trump—his person, his family, his successes, his agenda, and his supporters. The two writs for impeachment are simply: 1) We loathe Trump 2) He will sabotage our agenda if we don’t impeach and remove him…
…Horowitz’s report on FISA abuse, neatly summarized in Appendix 1 with the FBI response in Appendix 2, is a litany of FBI deceit. The bureau’s lawyers and agents altered documents, withheld and misrepresented evidence before a FISA court, peddled an unverified opposition research dossier among government and the media, sought to deprive Carter Page of his constitutional rights, and engaged in character assassination of his person—and we have not yet heard from federal prosecutors investigating these and other misbehaviors.
The Horowitz report is simply the endnote to three years of rank criminality that have led to the firings, retirements, reassignments, and demotions of most of the FBI’s top Washington echelon: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, William Priestap, James Rybicki, James Baker, along with Josh Campbell, James Turgal, Greg Bower, Michael Steinbach, John Giacalone, and Kevin Clinesmith. Comey, McCabe, and Clinesmith were criminally referred to the Justice Department by various inspector general reports, respectively for leaking, deceiving federal investigators, and altering a document presented to a FISA court.
Page and Strzok were both fired from the Mueller investigation. Their texts—including, one assumes, an entire corpus of exchanges that remains missing and was apparently destroyed by FBI employees—are a repository of conflicts of interest, unprofessionalism, and unadulterated hatred of Trump and his supporters. Clinesmith, who likely committed a felony by doctoring an email submitted to a FISA court, openly cheered on “le (sic) resistance.”…
…Comey likely would have been guilty of a felony for leaking such secret government documents had not a team of FBI cronies, including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, retroactively classified his leaked presidential memos as “confidential” rather than feloniously “secret.”
The FBI deliberately leaked false information to Yahoo News apparently to rush the dossier’s lies into the public domain before the 2016 election. The FBI used at least four undercover sources who were recording conversations with unsuspecting targets. It edited or ignored exonerating written memos about FBI questioning of suspects like Michael Flynn. James Comey confessed that his certainty that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election had massaged the way he conducted his exoneration of the Clinton email scandal. Thanks to the FBI, the reputation of the FISA court has been stained to the point that some in Congress are calling for its suspension.
A suddenly amnesiac Comey on over 245 occasions under oath said he could not recall or did not know when asked direct questions by House members. He lied about not knowing that the dossier was unverified. He lied when he said there was other key evidence presented to a FISA court beside the dossier. He lied when he said the FBI had followed procedures in applying for FISA writs to surveil Carter Page…
…If Adam Schiff were a private citizen, he likely would have been indicted by now, too. He serially lied throughout the Mueller investigation by falsely announcing impending bombshells and indictments, based on his supposed exclusive knowledge of damning classified information.
Schiff hijacked the impeachment inquiry and rigged the rules of examination by holding hearings in secrecy in the House basement, characterized by threats to Republican colleagues not to leak incriminating cross-examinations of witnesses, even as initial exculpatory statements were leaked to the press.
Schiff lied when he read into the congressional record a “version” of the transcript of the Trump Ukrainian phone call that was full of errors and fantasies. When caught in his deceit, he pleaded it was a “parody.”
Schiff lied about the circumstances of the so-called whistleblower. Schiff never called him as a witness as promised. He lied about the whistleblower’s relationship with his own staff. He lied about the timeline, contacts, and trajectory of the whistleblower’s journey from his own office to the filing of a complaint with the inspector general. And he probably lied about his own supposed ignorance of the whistleblower’s identity—evident when he stopped congressional questioning of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman on grounds that it would expose the whistleblower’s identity.
Schiff’s minority House Intelligence Committee final report was full of untruths. The Horowitz report exposed them by demonstrating that Schiff lied when he wrote that the Steele dossier was not central to requests to a FISA court, that the dossier was verified, that the FBI did not omit key information to the court, and that Carter Page’s testimonies were not misrepresented by the FBI.
Schiff may be the first known congressional representative to use his office to subpoena the phone records of his own colleagues, of journalists, and of a president’s personal attorney, and then to selectively publicize names from his huge trove of metadata in an attempt to embarrass his political enemies…
…The Democratic field’s reason to be is now the hatred of Trump. The Democratic debates so far have been characterized by two themes: 1) no candidate shall appear to the left of any other candidate 2) no candidate shall be outdone by any other in expressing hatred of Trump.
Such antipathies have translated into the most far-left Democratic agendas in modern memory: Medicare for all, health care for illegal aliens, the Green New Deal, open borders, a wealth tax, a 70-90 percent top income tax rate, slavery reparations, free college tuition, and late-term abortions if not permissible infanticide. None of these issues warrants 51 percent public support; all are the wages of Trump hatred.
Nihilism is the theme: abolish ICE! Abolish student debt! Abolish the Electoral College! Abolish border security! Abolish the idea of Medicare for seniors! These are the highbrow versions of left-wing street nihilism from toppling statues to wiping out murals and the names of buildings and streets.
The antipathy to Trump has unhinged the candidates themselves to the point that so-called prior moderate candidates (such as Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Corey Booker, Kamala Harris) either sought to shed their prior records and careers or went full socialist as in the case of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren…”
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