Obama's corrupt efforts to exonerate Hillary Clinton's crimes and push false charges against Trump

Andrew McCarthy:

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The blunt fact is that the officials best informed about Russia’s provocation fully understood that it was par for a course played many times over. In the greater scheme of things, it was trivial – as campaign spending and messaging, it was a drop in the ocean. And Democrats, who had spent the entire campaign insisting that Hillary Clinton’s own emails were immaterial to voters, were in no position to claim that the exposure of forgettable emails written by nondescript Democrats was even relevant, much less decisive.

No one – not Obama, not Clinton, not Putin, and probably not Trump himself – believed Trump was going to win the election. Because Clinton was the certain victor, Democrats made a calculated decision that nothing said or done would even hint that her coronation reflected anything other than the will of the people. Since Russia’s shenanigans had no effect on the election, there would be no retaliation. No escalation would prevent the new Clinton administration from persisting in the Obama legacy of risibly weak responses to Russian aggression. No action would be taken that might inhibit Clinton from entering deals with Putin – maybe more nuclear arms treaties like Obama’s New Start debacle, the kind that get progressives swooning while Moscow builds up its arsenal (and we cut ours).

Once Clinton lost, however, all bets were off. Now, in a mere ten weeks, President Trump would take charge of the government’s intelligence agencies and files.

What did that mean? In just ten weeks, the new president would be positioned to discover that the Obama administration had exploited its foreign counterintelligence powers to spy on the opposition party’s presidential campaign. Donald Trump would learn of the embarrassment, now being kept under wraps, that rampant abuses of surveillance authorities during Obama’s tenure, and energetic efforts to conceal them, had prompted the FISC, during a secret October 2016 hearing, to scald the intelligence agencies’ “institutional lack of candor.”

It would become apparent to Trump that the Obama administration had been telling the FISC that his campaign was traitorously complicit in Russia’s hacking of Democratic email accounts. Trump would be poised to find out that the FBI, in coordination with the CIA, the State Department, and friendly foreign governments, had for months been running informants at Trump campaign advisers, aggressively asking them loaded questions designed implicate the campaign in Russia’s hacking operations. He would hear of the “unmasking” of Trump associates in intelligence reporting so that Obama officials, such as Rice and Brennan, could monitor them. It would become clear to Trump that these steps were taken in stealth, withheld even from the Gang of Eight that was created precisely to prevent such audacious executive action in the absence of high-level congressional oversight.

Most significantly, Trump would grasp that he, as the Republican nominee and now the president, was the target of the investigation. Not the campaign; Trump himself.

It would inevitably dawn on the new president that, had he not been the target, Obama national-security officials would have given him or one of his surrogates with strong national security credentials (Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Jeff Sessions, etc.) a defensive briefing to warn that the campaign might be infiltrated by agents of Russia. As Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch later admitted to congressional investigators, giving such a briefing “is not an uncommon thing to do ... in intelligence matters.” But instead, Obama officials made a conscious decision to use against their political opposition the counterintelligence powers entrusted in them for the protection of national security against foreign threats. That is, although Obama officials fully realized that providing a defensive debriefing to the campaign would be the standard practice to address concerns about some campaign participants (such as Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and George Papadopoulos), they rejected that option and made a willful decision to investigate the campaign as a corrupt enterprise. Donald Trump’s corrupt enterprise.

Given the scandalous modern American legacy of domestic political spying, the Obama administration had to know this was an extremely controversial choice to make. The choice made perfect sense, though, if it was the candidate himself, not just sundry campaign hangers-on, whom intelligence agents suspected of being a foreign agent. What defensive brief could possibly eradicate a rival foreign power’s infiltration of the Trump campaign if the Obama administration had made up its mind that Trump himself was the problem? The Trump campaign wasn’t going to remove Trump.

Donald Trump is nothing if not shrewd. He would realize all of this. Furthermore, Trump would know that Obama’s Justice Department and the FBI largely based their suspicions – suspicions they took to a secret federal court – on unverified, multiple-hearsay rumor-mongering generated by the Clinton campaign. Simultaneously, it would be clear to Trump, these same officials were burying a criminal case against Clinton, one supported by such daunting evidence of guilt that the plain language of criminal statutes had to be distorted to avoid enforcing them.

Ten weeks. That is when Trump would inherit the keys to the intelligence kingdom. President Obama and his top advisers thus had a stark choice.
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... instead of a political liability, the investigation would be a political weapon – an insurance policy.

Through a campaign of government action and stealthy intelligence leaks, the public could be convinced that there truly was a sinister Trump–Russia conspiracy. The media could be depended on to play along. As the investigation of the Trump campaign was gradually revealed, the public might be increasingly convinced that Obama officials had simply done what duty demanded. The president and his minions could use their waning days of control over the levers of power to cement the Trump – Russia collusion narrative into conventional wisdom. If done methodically enough, the new president and his staff, Washington novices, might even be intimidated into allowing the investigation to continue – for fear of being seen as obstructing it.
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Just as in the Clinton’s email scandal, the key decision – this time to project a case against Trump rather than bury a case against Clinton – traces directly back to President Obama.

The Russian collusion hoax was an elaborate coverup of the abuse of power by the Obama administration and the FBI, DOJ and intelligence agencies.  It also led to the major media in the US colluding with these corrupt officials to push a false narrative against the President.  That same media had to pivot from that calumny after the Mueller report and is now pushing false allegations of racism against the President.