Heads of intel agencies have given us good reasons not to trust them

Victor Davis Hanson:

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Most recently, it was disclosed, two years after the fact — and despite the FBI’s kicking-and-screaming refusal to release subpoenaed documents — that the FBI did, as alleged, offer to pay Christopher Steele to dig for dirt on the Trump campaign.

The FBI also knew that Steele was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign to find dirt on Donald Trump. We now also know that the FBI used at least one informant to spy on members of the Trump campaign. In other words, the FBI joined forces with one political campaign to thwart the efforts of the opposing campaign. Has that happened before in American history?

Pause for a minute and examine the recent history of the FBI leadership. The fired former director James Comey likely lied frequently to congressional committees when he claimed that the Steele dossier was not really a primary source for the FISA court writ against Carter Page.

Comey did write an FBI summary about the Clinton email scandal, exonerating Clinton, before he interviewed Hillary Clinton and many of the major figures in that scandal. Comey leaked at least one likely classified document, written on FBI equipment on FBI time, in a successful gambit to get a special counsel appointed, which turned out to be his friend Robert Mueller.

Comey misled a FISA judge by not fully disclosing the full origins of the Steele dossier as a product of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He also deceived a president by briefing him of selected bits of the dossier’s contents, but not informing the president that the source of most of that information was paid by the Clinton campaign.

Comey further misled the president by assuring him that he was not a subject of an FBI investigation while he repeatedly suggested to the media that Trump, in fact, was a subject.

In addition, Comey must have known that DOJ official Bruce Ohr — even after the election — served as a likely conduit to the FBI for info passed to Ohr by then-fired FBI informant Christopher Steele.

In other words, during the Trump presidency, one of his own top officials at the DOJ was secretly working with the FBI to undermine the Trump presidency.

Andrew McCabe, Comey’s deputy, was fired for misleading or lying to federal investigators. He oversaw the email investigation of Clinton, only months after Clinton’s associated PACs had provided most of the funds for the political campaign of McCabe’s wife.

Other FBI operatives, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, were fired from the Mueller investigation for unethical and unprofessional behavior — as well as for rampant bias shown against the target of their own investigations.

... James Baker, Peter Kazdik, Michael Kortan, David Laufman, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, James Rybicki, Peter Strzok, and Sally Yates — have now mysteriously either resigned, retired, been reassigned, or been fired for allegedly unethical or perhaps even illegal behavior. And we still do not know the full extent of the FBI’s use of spies implanted in the Trump campaign

Currently, congressional committees are likely to reinvestigate former CIA director John Brennan for serial false testimonies. Brennan has already lied under oath to Congress about the drone program, CIA monitoring of Senate staff computers, and his own role in seeding the Steele dossier to a senator and to DOJ and FBI officials. The CIA under Brennan apparently was knee-deep in efforts to push the FBI to monitor the Trump campaign, despite the fact that domestic surveillance is beyond the CIA’s legal mandate.
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They have given the President and much of the public good reason not to trust them.  Rather than being honest with teh President they instead attempted to entrap him.  They deserve to be fired and replaced with someone who is willing to speak candidly with the President.  If they are wondering why he does not trust them, they should look in the mirror and review their own conduct.