The Democrat/FBI coup attempt should not be forgiven

Roger Kimball:

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Many commentators, myself included, have described the whole “Donald-Trump-was-a-Russian-Asset” caper as the biggest political scandal in U.S. history. We were ridiculed or condemned by the Left and the NeverTrump fraternity alleged to be on the Right for saying that, but time has proven us right. We were right, too, that this scandal was less a “hoax,” as it was sometimes called, than an attempted, if slow-motion, coup. It was an attempted coup because it aimed to disrupt the peaceful transition of presidential power from one administration, and one party, to another.

That sounds pretty dramatic, I know—aren’t “coups” things that happen in South American banana republics, not the United States? But as I wrote in May 2019,

“coup”
accurately expresses the deliberate effort by actors in the Obama Administration, including by President Obama himself, to assure Hillary Clinton’s victory by destroying the reputation of Donald Trump. “Most Presidents leave office,” the commentator L. J. Keith recently wrote, “and essentially step back from public life. Not Barack Obama. Shellshocked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, Obama, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Clinton set in motion a series of events that will forever tar his presidency, and decimate the concept of a peaceful transition of power.”

I returned to Keith’s point last September, noting that “the Obama administration’s actions threatened not just Trump and his presidency, but the very processes and protocols by which the peaceful transition of power has been effected in the United States.”

This troubling truth is Spalding’s theme, and he brings together the threads of the argument in masterly fashion.

As the cocoon of deep-state lies surrounding Michael Flynn has unravelled, we can see the extent to which he stands at the very origin of the attempted coup against Donald Trump. The Russian-born historian Svetlana Lokhova, a British citizen who met Flynn at a conference dinner in 2014, was smeared by the Obama operative Stefan Halper as Flynn’s mistress who was taking orders from the Kremlin. It was a complete and vicious fabrication, every piece of it, as Lokhova shows in her new book Spygate Exposed. Lokhova, in fact, was the only relevant Russian in the whole “Russian collusion” fantasy, and it turns out that she was totally innocent of the accusations made against her, just as was Flynn.

But while the case of Michael Flynn stands at the beginning of the multi-pronged attack against Trump and his administration, the effort by the FBI to frame Flynn is only one piece in a much more complex puzzle.

As Spalding observes, what happened to Michael Flynn was part of a much bigger initiative, namely a “systematic campaign to undermine an incoming presidential administration through politicized investigations.” And this, Spalding notes, is not just “another political scandal, but threatens a true constitutional crisis.”

Flynn’s treatment by the Obama administration’s FBI and DOJ seems to be a case study in how administrative elites, charged with executing the law, undermined the very rule of law. Our country was founded on fundamental republican principles: equal rights, individual liberty, and the consent of the governed. These sacred rights are secured, protected, and perpetuated by our civilization’s greatest political achievement: the constitutional rule of law. And while often taken for granted, the peaceful and unobstructed transition of power from one presidential administration to the next, frequently from the control of one political party to its political opposition, is the crown jewel of the American constitutional system.

Nota bene “the peaceful and unobstructed transition of power from one presidential administration to the next. . . is the crown jewel of the American constitutional system.”

“Is” or “was”?

Spalding rehearses the course of events surrounding Flynn, from the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation on the basis of no legitimate predicate (the pretext was a congeries of sordid rumors assembled by an anti-Trump Brit named Christopher Steele and commissioned and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign) to the deliberate entrapment of Flynn by the FBI in January 2017.

As Spalding notes, each of the moves against Flynn is disturbing in its own right. But taken together, they reveal a “pattern of politicizing the legal process to subvert the outcome of our electoral system.”
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There is more.

If this had been done to a Democrat like Obama, the media would be up in arms, but in this case, they were an integral part of the coup plot.  They were responsible for publically demonizing Trump and Flynn and pushing the Russian collusion hoax.  Not one of them, to my knowledge, has even apologized for their part in the coup attempt.

Durham is likely to get indictments against some of the coup plotters.  I think that Obama and Biden should be added to the grand jury targets because it looks like they were the leaders of the plot.  The intelligence agencies are unlikely to have acted the way they did without the direction of the President.  It also seems clear now that the FBI was responding to Obama's directions by pursuing Flynn even though it was obvious the allegations were bogus.  If that was the case and Flynn pursues his legal remedies for malicious prosecution Obama is likely to be a defendant.