Obama’s political police

In the beginning there was a clandestine ‘surveillance’ and ‘unmasking’ program by operatives in the Obama executive branch, targeting figures in some way related to President-Elect Trump during his 75-day transition period. But on January 5, 2017 the outgoing Obama administration took a fateful step.

Obama convened a meeting in the Oval Office; present were his VP, the Deputy AG, his National Security Adviser, the heads of the FBI and CIA and perhaps one or two others. A decision was taken to open a counter-terrorism investigation. The target: the incoming president, Trump. The FBI chief, Comey, was dispatched the next day to brief Trump about an ongoing investigation, but hide from him that he was the target. In fact, Comey actually told him he was not a target. Straight out of the Mack Sennett playbook. We know what followed over the next three and a half years.

Then, on May 7, 2020, three ‘bombshells’ burst at once:

1. The prosecution moved to have Gen. Flynn’s guilty plea tossed.
2. Pressure from Ambassador Richard Grenell forced Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s chair, to release more than 50 transcripts of testimony. Schiff had claimed these showed ‘direct evidence’ of Trump/Russia collusion. These turned out to show no such evidence at all.
3. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Kelly v. US that an Obama Justice Department case was nothing more than weaponizing a political potshot against a potential Republican cabinet member, Chris Christie.

All of the above supply evidence of unlawful political police-work in the targeting and intended ousting of Trump.

Winston Churchill once noted that socialist regimes or despots can only retain power if they suppress dissent or even crush discontent by using a political police. Consider the OGPU and then the KGB of the Soviets, or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, or the odious apparatus of the Nazi Gestapo. The dazzling array of Obama’s subordinates in the executive branch, agencies and bureaucracies,  and his allies in Congress and the media, not forgetting ‘cleanup man’ Mueller amounts in functional terms to an odious apparatus, a political police in America.

Why was it necessary to compose a lawless brigade of leakers, liars and lawyers? To suppress the many strands of corrupt practice and lawless interference in the 2016 election, all of which are now being carefully unpacked by attorney general Barr. Contrast the careful Barr with the Mack Sennett-like comedian Comey. He supplanted Loretta Lynch of ‘tarmac’ recusal in order to suppress the real story of the Steele dossier — only to be confused by a real police force, the NYPD, finding Anthony Weiner’s laptop. So Comey did his ‘pie in the face’ Buster Keaton reprise: preparing to be fired, Comey manipulated the appointment of special counsel Mueller.

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Mueller immediately understood that the counter-terrorism operation initiated in January 2017 was a hoax, and that the ‘surveillance’ preceding it was possibly illegal if leaked. But Mueller was less a prosecutor of Trump than a ‘cleaner’ of a crime-scene peppered with the footprints, bloodstains and other evidence left behind by the likes of Strzok, Page, and co. Mueller’s fictitious mantle of righteousness, bestowed upon him by the media, cowed Republicans into letting him clump around in clown shoes for two years — giving time to flip the House to Pelosi.

Once in office, William Barr sent Mueller packing. That worthy left town with a nine-minute press conference. Speaker Pelosi responded by unleashing polished button-man Adam Schiff and ‘street enforcer’ Jerrold Nadler to seamlessly replace the departed Mueller. But Mueller had gone a bridge too far by needlessly indicting general Flynn, who had already been fired and was no longer an obstacle in the pathway to Trump. While the media gratuitously rumored Mueller as a righteous war hero, Flynn was the real thing. So was his new and formidable lawyer, who picked apart the Mueller prosecution’s misconduct.

Books will be written about the Mueller blunder. This chapter, as a student of tyrants once said, puts us at ‘the end of the beginning’.