GEORGE PARRY:
“…Coming from Barr, a most measured and serious man, this explosive testimony portends a bleak future for all those FBI, Department of Justice, and intelligence community operatives who used their official positions and enormous — bordering on limitless — governmental powers to undermine the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and, failing that, to undo the results of the 2016 election. So it is that Barr’s description of the possibility of such political surveillance as a “big deal” is understatement of the first order. As “big deals” go, the stakes couldn’t be any higher.
On cue, the Democrats and their wholly owned mainstream media subsidiary have tried to dull the impact of Barr’s testimony. One bedraggled party flak claimed on network television that, since Barr merely thought spying had occurred, he had not confirmed that it had really, truly and actually happened. And, resorting to the left’s default position on all things Trump, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin has called for Barr’s impeachment. These unhinged responses to Barr’s testimony are similar to the type of desperate, fantasy-based gibberish you might expect from a barricaded man facing imminent death at the hands of a SWAT team. Clearly the left knows that, with Barr running the show, trouble is on the way.
Although Barr tried to avoid making any definitive statements about the ultimate outcome of the current and future investigations, he did let slip certain tidbits that should cause many sleepless nights throughout what we in the Justice Department used to call the Seat of Government. In that regard, Barr effectively stated that the investigation would be to determine whether the Obama administration had engaged in electronic surveillance of the opposing political party’s presidential campaign and candidate without a proper legal basis.
When Barr questioned whether the spying on the Trump campaign was “adequately predicated,” he was obviously talking about the unverified and salacious Steele dossier that was used to obtain FISA warrants to intercept the communications of Trump campaign associate Carter Page. Such an investigation will necessarily encompass the genesis of the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign’s bought-and-paid-for opposition research that constitutes the basis of the dossier, and its knowing, dishonest, and illegal use by James Comey’s FBI and Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice to deceive the FISA court into authorizing the electronic surveillance of Page and by extension all of the persons in or out of the Trump campaign with whom he communicated.
As we now know, in sworn testimony given in the United Kingdom, not even Christopher Steele would vouch for the dossier’s accuracy. And equally damaging, in testimony before Congress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page stated that, contrary to standard FBI procedure in counterintelligence operations, the Trump campaign, purportedly the target of Russian infiltration, had not been warned of the Kremlin’s nefarious efforts because the FBI did not deem the Steele dossier reliable enough to compel such a warning.
Page’s testimony sets up an irresistible line of inquiry. If the dossier was not reliable enough to justify a warning to Trump’s campaign about the Kremlin’s plot, how could it even remotely serve as the basis for obtaining FISA warrants to spy on the campaign? By her benighted testimony, Page has framed the issue nicely and invited a full vetting of who, what, where, when, why, and how the dossier was used to dupe the FISA court.
Barr also made clear that, beyond the FBI and Justice Department, the investigation will also be looking at “intelligence agencies.” This makes sense given that low level Trump campaign associates such as George Papadopoulos and Sam Clovis were approached by foreign operatives with CIA ties in an effort to plant the seeds of the Trump-Russia collusion illusion. As for the FBI, Barr made clear that, while he does not think that there is an “endemic” problem at that agency, he thinks that “there was probably a failure among a group of leaders there, at the upper echelon.”
No kidding.
And, of course, any investigation into the spying must logically and inexorably lead to the clandestine state-sponsored plot to unwind the 2016 election and remove President Trump from office. In short, the subject matter of any proper investigation will necessarily encompass the first attempted coup d’état in our nation’s history.
So here we are. After suffering through Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ comatose stewardship of the Justice Department, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s underhanded machinations, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s protracted rear guard action to protect the anti-Trump deep state conspirators, the day of reckoning is at hand. Attorney General Barr’s testimony portends a long overdue cleansing of the government temple the likes of which has never before happened in this country. This will be history in the making…”
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