Now that the Russian collusion hoax has been debunked, and not even the Hillary Clinton acolytes who comprised Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office saw fit to charge the president with obstruction of justice, the party is about to get very rough for the FBI, Justice Department, and CIA leaders who concocted the hoax and who illegally spied on American citizens. On April 10, 2019, Attorney General William Barr testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had been spied upon by U.S. intelligence agencies. According to Barr, the “question was whether it [the spying] was adequately predicated.” Barr was careful to state explicitly that he had made no determination as to whether there was an adequate justification for the spying, but that he was going to investigate to resolve the issue.

Clearly Barr was talking about the eponymous and unverified Steele dossier which was used by the FBI and Justice Department to obtain FISA warrants to intercept the communications of Trump campaign associate Carter Page and, by extension, everyone in or out of the Trump campaign with whom he communicated.

Predictably Barr’s testimony resulted in a tidal wave of apoplectic outrage by Democrats and their media adjunct. Some denounced Barr as a shill for Trump while others called for his impeachment.

Now it appears that Barr was only hinting at the enormity of what is actually being investigated.

Joseph diGenova is the former U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and a former legal counsel to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He has also been a frequent commentator on Fox News and Washington’s WMAL Radio. Throughout the Trump-Russia collusion fiasco and Team Mueller’s investigation of the president, diGenova has proven to be a reliable source of information as to what was happening behind the scenes. His pronouncements and predictions have consistently proven to be true.

On April 24, 2019, diGenova appeared on the Ingraham Angle and made his most explosive predictions yet. Here’s the link to the video. What follows below is a partial transcript of his remarks starting at 27 seconds into the broadcast.

It has been evident from day one that there was a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton illegally, and then, if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump. This [Steele] dossier was a knowing part of that. It was created by Hillary Clinton. It was created knowingly by [former CIA Director] John Brennan as part of a scheme to do everything they could to harm Donald Trump. The problem for Brennan and [former Director of National Intelligence]Clapper and [former FBI Director] Comey and [former FBI General Counsel] Baker and all of them now is, is that the FISA Court has already communicated with the Justice Department about its findings. And their findings are that from more than four years before the election of Donald Trump, there was an illegal spying operation going on by FBI [private] contractors — four of them — to steal personal information, electronic information about Americans and to use it against the Republican Party. There are going to be indictments. There’s going to be grand juries. John Brennan isn’t going to need one lawyer. He’s going to need five!

After the discussion turned to the upcoming report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, diGenova made another stunning prediction, to wit:

There’s another report that everybody has forgotten about that involves James Comey alone. That will be out in two weeks. That report is going to be a bombshell. It’s going to open the investigation on a very high note. The FISA Court abuse is the center of this entire abuse of governmental power. The Chief Judge of that court [Rosemary M. Collyer] has already ruled that the FBI broke the law and that the people at the head of the [Obama] Justice Department — [former Deputy Attorney General] Sally Yates, John Carlin, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, all knew about it and lied to the court, the FISA Court, about it.

Near the end of the show, diGenova concluded his remarks as follows:

There is a hero in this entire story, and it’s not a lawyer. All the bad people in this story are lawyers. There’s a hero. His name is Admiral Mike Rogers. He was the head of the National Security Agency. He discovered the illegal spying. He went personally to the FISA Court and briefed the Chief Judge and worked with her for months to uncover the people who did it. The FISA Court has already told the Justice department who lied to that court and that has been given to [Attorney General] Bill Barr already.

Much of what diGenova said is partially supported by Chief Judge Collyer’s heavily redacted April 26, 2017 Memorandum Opinion, which is linked here. Reading and understanding the opinion is very difficult due to its use of technical and legal terms and extensive redactions at strategic points. The opinion states that it was the National Security Agency that brought the abuses to the court’s attention and that raw intelligence data from FISA intercepts had been illegally disseminated to “private contractors” working for the FBI. If you make the effort to read it, the juiciest parts start at page 82.

So, there it is. If diGenova’s track record holds, a legal rain of ruin is about to befall the deep state operatives who tried to steal the 2016 election and, failing that, to unwind the result. And if, in fact, the enormous surveillance powers of our intelligence agencies were usurped by the Obama administration to spy for years before the election on the opposing political party, then the implications go far beyond just one election and one presidential candidate. If that happened, then there can be no doubt that, when candidate Obama promised to “fundamentally transform America,” he really meant it. If Obama’s “fundamental transformation” involved not only the atrocious harassment and intimidation of the Tea Party patriots by his Internal Revenue Service, but also included surveillance state spying on the Republican Party generally, there must be no question about whether the deep state actors should be punished for their actions.

Think about it. The Watergate burglary was a bungled attempt by the Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon to break into Democrat headquarters to plant listening devices in the telephones. The burglary failed, but the national outrage at the mere attempt drove Nixon from office and sent members of his administration to prison. As bad as that was, at least the Nixon campaign didn’t corrupt the FBI and CIA to do its dirty work. So it is that, if our official law enforcement and intelligence agencies were co-opted by the Obama administration to illegally spy on American citizens and the opposition party, this will be the worst governmental scandal and threat to our civil liberties in the history of the nation.

If Joe diGenova is right, the very survival of the rule of law and our constitutional republic mandates that these treasonous thugs — no matter how highly placed in the Obama administration — be exposed, charged, and imprisoned.

George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor who practices law in Philadelphia. He is a regular contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer and blogs at knowledgeisgood.net. He can be reached by email atkignet1@gmail.com.