John Yoo: This was supposed to be a red line our FBI, CIA were never supposed to cross after Watergate
Former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo argues on ‘Your World’ that the Durham report shows that the federal government used its ‘awesome’ powers of investigation to ‘interfere in a presidential election.’
The FBI was instrumental in perpetrating the Russia hoax. The bureau never had any plausible evidence or verified intelligence when it wrongfully launched a dilating and damaging investigation of Donald Trump. Nothing was ever vetted or corroborated. Indeed, the FBI knew it was a pernicious lie from the outset. That is the conclusion to be drawn from Special Counsel John Durham's final report released to the public on Monday.
For those of us who have long maintained that the FBI willingly weaponized its authority for purely political purposes, the report comes as no surprise. Under the leadership of nefarious figures like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok, the agency manipulated facts and contorted the law to frame an innocent person for unidentified crimes that he did not commit.
The FBI discovered almost immediately in the summer of 2016 that the claims of Trump-Russia collusion had been manufactured by Hillary Clinton and her confederates. The damning fiction constituted what is surely the dirtiest trick in American politics, and it triggered the greatest mass delusion in history.
The mainstream media, riven with bias, became witting accessories to the lie and effectively convicted Trump in the court of public opinion without a whiff of supportable evidence. The New York Times and The Washington Post even won coveted Pulitzer Prizes for getting the story fundamentally wrong. The sad coda is that none of the people involved will ever be held accountable in a court of law.
Durham confirms previously known evidence of how the FBI debunked the dossier that Clinton’s campaign and Democrats secretly bankrolled. Instead of exposing the truth, they exploited the collusion canard as a pretense to prevent Trump from being elected. When that plan failed, the FBI doubled down and sought to portray him as an illegitimate president by accelerating its probe and leaking deceptions to the gullible media that happily accepted them as gospel. Comey’s scheme to trigger the appointment of his friend as special counsel was another devious maneuver by an unscrupulous man. The goal was to destroy Trump’s presidency.
All of this has been readily apparent for years. It is a testament to the FBI’s skill at concealing its own corruption that it took until now for more of the ugly truth to emerge in Durham’s report.
In my 2018 book, "The Russia Hoax," I wrote, "The FBI had no legal basis to initiate its investigation. Facts were invented or exaggerated. Laws were perverted or ignored. The law enforcers became the law breakers." The Durham report reinforces these facts by stating that "the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law."
Armed with immense power, Comey and others at the FBI became the law unto themselves. Their desired end would justify any malevolent means. The bureau appropriated the phony dossier and used it as a pretext for spying on a Trump campaign associate, Carter Page.
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In four successive warrant applications, the FBI lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). They represented that the dossier was credible when it knew the document was not. They vouched for its author, Christopher Steele’s, credibility without revealing that he had been fired as an informant for lying. The judges on the FISC trusted that Comey, McCabe and others were telling the truth. In fact, they were deceived.
Durham’s report shines a bright light on the dual system of justice that has infected the FBI and Justice Department for far too long. The bureau never opened an investigation of Hillary Clinton when it learned that her campaign was peddling lies to the government in order to influence the 2016 election. The genesis of the Russia hoax was a clever subterfuge to divert attention from her own email scandal that Comey shuttered without authority despite volumes of incriminating evidence.
WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 17: (NY & NJ NEWSPAPERS OUT) Special Counsel John Durham, who then-United States Attorney General William Barr appointed in 2019 after the release of the Mueller report to probe the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, arrives for his trial at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on May 17, 2022 in Washington, DC. ((Photo by Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images))
In addition to skewering the arrogant and sanctimonious Comey, the report exposes McCabe and Strzok as malign actors who abused their positions of power within the FBI. After they were fired, all three men penned books to profit from their wrongful actions. McCabe and Strzok are frequent commentators on CNN and MSNBC, along with two others who falsely accused Trump of being a Russian agent, ex-CIA chief John Brennan and former DNI, James Clapper. No one should believe anything they have to say.
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In the wake of the Durham report, the FBI responded by claiming that it has already implemented corrective actions to prevent such an abuse from happening ever again. That is a self-serving statement belied by recent evidence that the FBI tampered with the more recent presidential election by pressuring social media companies into censoring and suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story to unduly influence the outcome in favor of Joe Biden. Moreover, whistleblowers alleged that both the bureau and the DOJ are running a protection racket to cover up Biden family influence peddling schemes.
There is sufficient evidence to believe that those in power are still determined to subvert our system of justice and undermine the democratic process. John Durham has managed to remind us that trust in government has been squandered.