Editorial: Upsetting a coup

Before Friday, the news, or the liberal narrative, was releasing a four-page memorandum containing classified information written by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence would shatter America’s national security — and no member of the public should ever be allowed to read it.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., a former White House ethics lawyer, told MSNBC that if the memo was released, the FBI and Department of Justice “will refuse to share information with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said releasing the memo would be treasonous and might be “revealing sources and methods” and even “endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community.”

Those were all lies.

On Friday, when President Donald Trump declassified the memo and released it, the liberal narrative changed to it reveals nothing of importance and so no one should even bother reading it.

The lies change, said Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, “but suppressing the memo remains the goal.”

Why did the FBI and the Justice Department and their liberal leftist allies in Congress, along with the Democrat Media Industrial Complex, lie about it and pressure Mr. Trump not to release it?

Because it reveals, said The Wall Street Journal, “disturbing facts about how the FBI and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) appear to have been used to influence the 2016 election and its aftermath.”

It also reveals, said Mr. Greenfield, “a treasonous effort by the Democrats to use our intelligence agencies to manipulate an election and overturn the will of the voters.”

The memo says the FBI used a dossier, political opposition research sourced by paid Russian agents and compiled by British intelligence agent Christopher Steele who was adamantly opposed to Mr. Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid Mr. Steele over $160,000, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS. This was not divulged to the FISC, which was illegal, when the FBI and the Department of Justice applied to get a secret court warrant to spy on Carter Page, a volunteer adviser to the Trump campaign. Nor was it divulged, says the memo, “that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.”

In June 2016, at the direction of then President Obama, the National Security Agency asked the FISC, under jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to let it spy on Mr. Trump’s campaign. The request was denied. On Oct. 21, 2016, the request was made again, specifically for Mr. Page, and it was granted.

Signing the FISC applications, which had to be renewed every 90 days, were former FBI director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then Acting Deputy Attorney General and now FBI General Counsel Dana Boente, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Before and after he was terminated as a source, says the memo — because he disclosed his relationship with the FBI to the media — Mr. Steele maintained contact with the DOJ via then Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, whose wife was working for Fusion GPS to dig up opposition research on Mr. Trump. Obviously Mr. Ohr assumed that his and his wife’s involvement in the Steele dossier would pay career dividends once Mrs. Clinton was elected.

Because then NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers didn’t want to participate in surveillance, Obama officials asked the British Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) to do it. That way they could circumvent the legal prohibition of American intelligence agencies spying on its own citizens.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former officials in the Obama administration, asked Mr. Obama to fire Mr. Rogers. Fearing a backlash, he didn’t do it. Then on Nov. 18, 2016, after the election, and without telling his superiors, Mr. Rogers met President-elect Trump in Trump Tower. Messrs. Carter and Clapper again said Mr. Rogers should be fired. Instead, Mr. Trump accepted their resignations.

By politicizing and subverting the FBI and the DOJ to an extent that had never happened before, and to his own uses, Mr. Obama illegally wiretapped and illegally surveilled Mr. Trump and his campaign, which was an abuse of power.

Just before leaving office in January 2017, Mr. Obama expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share intelligence with 16 other intelligence agencies, making the leaking of information very likely. None of the collected information had anything to do with any alleged ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, which was a ruse to divert attention. Collecting all the information was done to never let the Trump administration get off the ground, and bring it down if it did.

The Clintons, evil incarnate, who knew what Mr. Obama was doing because Mrs. Clinton had been given a pass by the FBI over her criminal activity, had no boundaries, no honor and no moral compass. Had she won, as everyone including the fakestream media, their rigged polls and myopic worldview predicted, all the intelligence skullduggery would have been submerged — hidden — never to be resurrected. But she lost, and those who planned and orchestrated this abuse of power should suffer the legal consequences of their actions.