More questions need answering about the FBI abuse by the Obama administration, FBI and DOJ

Julie Kelly:

In a fair world—one with responsible media organizations that didn’t act as propagandists for the Democratic Party—the news that a secret government court admitted it authorized unlawful warrants to spy on an innocent American based on his political activity would be front-page news.

The January 7 order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court revealing that at least two of the four warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page were “not valid”—meaning they were illegally obtained—would be on a nonstop loop at CNN and would dominate the news and opinion pages of the Washington Post.

But alas, the average CNN viewer or Post reader will be hard-pressed to find coverage of such a shocking disclosure; after all, how could either outlet report that bombshell when two signers of the garbage applications—former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe—now work as paid contributors to those same news organizations?

Just as the Russia collusion hoax was designed to obfuscate the real scandal—that Barack Obama’s Justice Department targeted Donald Trump before and after the 2016 presidential election—Ukrainegate, so to speak, is now intended to do the work the Mueller investigation failed to do.

It’s not a coincidence, after all, that the allegedly impeachable July 25 phone call between Trump and the president of Ukraine occurred one day after Robert Mueller’s disastrous testimony on Capitol Hill. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and his fellow coup plotters wasted no time in concocting the follow-up to the failed collusion ruse in an attempt to take down President Trump.

That’s why it’s necessary for Trump’s legal team to use this opportunity to remind Americans repeatedly how the former president, not the current one, abused his power in order to interfere in an election; and when that plot failed, the former president, not the current one, continued to abuse his power to sabotage the administration of a political foe he loathes to this day.

In his remarks from the Senate floor on Saturday, attorney Jay Sekulow read aloud portions of the newly declassified order as well as the FISA court’s “scathing” response to the December 2019 report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which detailed how Barack Obama’s FBI under the leadership of James Comey systematically misled the secret court.

“This order responds to reports that personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation provided false information to the National Security Division of the Department of Justice, and withheld material information from NSD which was detrimental to the FBI’s case, in connection with four applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,” Sekulow said. “When FBI personnel mislead NSD in the ways described above, they equally mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

Sekulow would be wise to keep this up and for reasons aside from the need to reiterate the corruption and criminality of the Obama Justice Department: The top lawyer at the National Security Division when all four FISA warrants on Page were processed was Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general who pushed the “whistleblower” complaint at the heart of the current impeachment effort.

As I’ve previously reported, Atkinson is the one figure tied to the Russian collusion hoax, the FISA abuse scandal and and so-called Ukrainegate. Although Atkinson testified behind closed doors last year during the House’s impeachment inquiry, Schiff won’t release the inspector general’s transcript to the public.

Atkinson’s conduct has been criticized by Republicans in the House and Senate; following Atkinson’s closed door Senate testimony last October, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sent him a letter demanding responses to questions that the Senate-confirmed bureaucrat had refused to answer. (Despite repeated requests over the past several weeks, Cotton’s office refuses to tell me whether Atkinson replied to his letter.)
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Atkinson seems to be a key player in both of the government coup attempts against the President.  He is someone who needs to be questioned about his role and why he went along with these coup attempts.  It is also more than passing strange that Schiff will not release the transcript of his testimony to the intelligence committee when he started pushing the latest impeachment attempt.