By Scott Lazarowitz

At the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the mainstream media had already launched their propaganda campaign against “fake news,” i.e. real investigative reporting from alternative news sources not government propaganda-distribution (i.e. mainstream media).

The Washington Post began the anti-honest journalism campaign coinciding with the Obama DOJ and FBI’s targeting of the Trump campaign in “Russia collusions,” with WaPo’s post-election article, “Russian propaganda effort to spread ‘fake news’ during the election.”

Even at that early time, plenty of objective people could see that this was already a witch hunt. As I wrote and documented last July, many in the news media colluded with the Clinton campaign to help Hillary while pushing the false “Trump-Russia” narrative.

Well, it appears that the Obama DOJ, FBI and CIA also attempted to help Clinton win the 2016 election, and at the same time trying to oust Trump.

This is an extremely elaborate case involving a combination of criminal abuse of governmental powers and propaganda. Chances are, most people who rely on mainstream news media for information probably do not know any or much of what follows here. (Please read linked articles for further information.)

To begin, in the Washington Post‘s mid-2016 article, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump,” the main source of that assertion is the DNC’s cyber firm, CrowdStrike, one of whose founders had ties to an anti-Russian think tank in Washington, and was proven to use faulty software. However, there is also an exploit that intelligence agencies have used to associate “Russian fingerprints” with hacks.

This July, 2016 New York Times article states, “…Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, argued on ABC’s This Week that the emails were leaked ‘by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump’ citing ‘experts’ but offering no other evidence.”

Former NSA analyst William Binney and CIA analyst Ray McGovern have shown even more holes in the Russia-“hacking” narrative, by demonstrating that the DNC emails were not hacked remotely but were accessed directly and leaked to WikiLeaks, probably by a DNC insider. Former British ambassador Craig Murray had confirmed this.

Then there was Hillary Clinton’s claim that “17 intelligence agencies” concluded that Russians meddled in the 2016 election. But it was really 4, not 17. At least, that is what former director of national intelligence James Clapper stated in testimony.

Claims of “Russia hacking U.S. election systems” were continuously debunked. And investigative journalist Gareth Porter has this further analysis.

Former FBI director James Comey and former NSA director Mike Rogers both testified that they were not aware of any evidence to show the 2016 election was hacked.

In early 2017, when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was negotiating with U.S. government officials for “limited immunity” in exchange for Assange’s refraining from releasing further CIA-related documents, such talks were squashed by then-FBI director James Comey and Sen. Mark Warner, because Assange was also going to provide evidence which ruled out Russia as the source of the DNC leaks, according to Ray McGovern of Consortium News and John Solomon of The Hill.

The Obama FBI, DOJ and CIA’s attempt to set up Trump and his campaign associates in an elaborate frame-up

In mid-2016, Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and others met in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer, supposedly because the Russian lawyer had some campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. The meeting may have been a set-up.

Also the Russian lawyer had been given a special visa under “extraordinary circumstances” by attorney general Loretta Lynch, who had Manafort’s phone tapped during that meeting. So FBI director James Comey lied to Congress when denying Trump’s claim that Trump Tower was “wiretapped.”

In early January 2017 Obama issued an order to allow intelligence agencies to share surveillance data on Americans.

And then it turns out that Obama national security advisor Susan Rice requested the “unmasking” of names of people caught up in the illegal surveillance of Trump campaign and transition associates, and had the names given to the heads of various national security agencies, including the director of national intelligence James Clapper, the Department of Defense and the CIA.

And it wasn’t just the names of people but Rice allegedly ordered spreadsheets of the persons surveilled and their legal phone calls as well, and, according to the Daily Caller, “many hands had to be involved throughout the Obama administration to launch such a political spying program.”

Apparently Bloomberg and the New York Times were sitting on the Susan Rice “unmasking” story in order to protect the Obama administration from embarrassment.

Clapper and acting attorney general Sally Yates also admitted to reviewing Trump campaign people’s communications, according to Sharyl Attkisson, who also quotes from a Stratfor internal email leaked to WikiLeaks stating that “[John] Brennan [then an Obama Homeland Security adviser] is behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists…”

And we know that John Brennan’s CIA spied on the U.S. Senate as well. Then it turns out that Brennan and Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper had also been spying on U.S. intelligence workers to go after legitimate whistleblowers.

Mueller’s irrelevant indictments

Mueller indicted Paul Manafort with charges going back to the mid-2000s, totally unrelated to the Russia-2016 election investigation, for which Manafort had attempted to sue Mueller for going beyond his assignment as “special counsel.”

The grand jury handing down the indictments were apparently “Trump haters.” Wrote Richard Johnson of Page Six: “‘The grand jury room looks like a Bernie Sanders rally,’ my source said. ‘Maybe they found these jurors in central casting, or at a Black Lives Matter rally in Berkeley [Calif.]’.”

And then in February 2018 Mueller handed down indictments to “13 Russians and three companies,” according to the New York Times, charging them with “conspiracy to defraud the United States” and “conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud.”

However, Moon of Alabama points out that the operation was really just a click-bait marketing scheme to make money, and that’s basically it.

So the case that Russia changed any U.S. 2016 election results via social media is shaky at best.

Further, to Mueller’s surprise one of the indicted Russians unexpectedly appeared in court to fight the charges.

But later, in July 2018 Mueller indicted 12 more Russian agents, supposedly of Russia’s intelligence agency the GRU, this time to do with “hacking” the DNC and the Clinton campaign computers, once again with no evidence produced, as Moon of Alabama and Joe Lauria explained.

Trump campaign associate and briefly national security advisor Mike Flynn was entrapped. That entrapment began just days after the Trump inauguration. The FBI even set him up by telling Flynn that he wouldn’t need a lawyer in his interview with the FBI.

One probable reason why Flynn insisted on pleading guilty to lying to FBI even though investigators didn’t think he had lied was the possibility that Mueller was going after Flynn’s son.

George Neumayr of The American Spectator wrote about the early John Brennan CIA-British GCHQ spy ring, spying on Trump associates especially Mike Flynn in 2014 and ’15, well before Trump announced his Presidential run. The Hill’s John Solomon expands on the London connection to Russia-gate.

According to Fox News, Rudy Giuliani referred to Brennan as the “quarterback” who passed the unverified Steele dossier on to Sen. Harry Reid. And Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel called Brennan the “ringmaster” of the whole thing.

To spy on the Trump campaign in 2016, the Obama FBI and DOJ relied on unverified information, mainly from the notorious “Steele dossier,” to get judges to sign on to the FISA spying applications, according to Andrew McCarthy.

The FBI relied heavily on the Steele dossier to present it as “evidence” against Trump associates to obtain the FISA warrants, even though they knew that Christopher Steele, hired by Fusion GPS, had lied to them and was not credible, according to Byron York of the Washington Examiner. (i.e. the FBI lied to the FISA court judges, which is not a surprise, given the FBI’s own shady history.) Zero Hedge provides informative specifics on the FISA warrant applications.

Despite knowing that the Steele dossier was, in James Comey’s words, “salacious and unverified,” Robert Mueller continued to rely on the dossier anyway, according to Real Clear Investigations.

The Daily Caller reported that a CIA and FBI informant named Stefan Halper had infiltrated the Trump campaign to spy on Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. And then it was revealed by Naxios that Halper had gotten Trump administration economic advisor Peter Navarro to recommend Halper for a top position in the administration.

There was a second spy, supposedly on behalf of the Obama administration, who had approached Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo and campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis. Caputo implicated the Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper, according to Zero Hedge.

Incidentally, Glenn Greenwald reported that Stefan Halper had previously been a Jimmy Carter administration spy in the Reagan 1980 campaign. (Can you make this stuff up?)

The FBI has admitted it used multiple spies to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

FBI agents “insurance policy”

Mid-2016 texts between a top FBI counter-intelligence agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page came to light, in which they discussed an “insurance policy” should Donald Trump win the presidency.

Strzok was investigating the Hillary email scandal and was also the one who interviewed Trump campaign aide and future national security advisor Mike Flynn.

Apparently, President Barack Obama was not “our of the loop,” during all these shenanigans, according to the New York Post. Sad.

Andrew McCarthy of National Review discussed the Peter Strzok/Lisa Page emails and texts and how the Trump-Russia investigation really began while Obama was still President.

In September, 2018 Rep. Mark Meadows revealed April 2017 texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page suggesting forming a “media leak strategy” with the DOJ, and subsequent texts indicate articles in the Press that were damaging to Carter Page apparently from the leaked information, according to Daily Caller.

And according to John Solomon of The Hill, the FBI lawyer Lisa Page had apparently testified before a closed-door congressional committee that Strzok had texted her that “there’s no big there there,” regarding any possible evidence against Trump associates and Russia collusions. But they continued with investigations anyway with the hope for impeachment, for political reasons.

The real “Russian collusions”

But it was Hillary Clinton who was inviting Vladimir Putin to “Pay for Play” events at the Clinton Foundation. Following Hillary’s Uranium One deal while she was at the State Department, the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in donations from Uranium One shareholders. The FBI threatened an informant to keep quiet about linking the Foundation to a Russian “bribery, extortion and money laundering case.” (More.)

And according to forensic investigators, the Clinton Foundation allegedly operated as a “foreign agent,” and not as a “501c3 charitable foundation.” The whistleblower investigators had already given the IRS and FBI such information in 2017.

But wait. It turns out that the FBI had raided the home of a different Clinton Foundation whistleblower because he had given documents over to the DOJ inspector general and House and Senate intelligence committee members, documents showing potential criminal activity at the Foundation. The FBI spent 6 hours ransacking the whistleblower’s home, despite the individual’s protected status under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act.

On the Hillary Clinton email investigation, the FBI turned down FOIA requests for information based on “lack of public interest.” According to Judicial Watch, the State Department worked with Hillary to cover up the email logs and schedules.

Further, then-FBI director James Comey was already working on a Hillary exoneration statement even before the FBI interviewed Clinton. And then FBI edited the exoneration to change the words “gross negligence” to “extremely careless,” to turn what would have been a criminal indictment into merely a slap on the wrist.

To get an idea as to how objective James Comey is regarding Hillary Clinton, Breitbart has this article on the cozy relationship between Comey and the Clinton Foundation, the millions of dollars Comey received from Lockheed Martin the same year Lockheed donated to the Clinton Foundation, Lockheed’s “17 approvals for private contracts from the Hillary Clinton State Department” in 2010, Comey’s involvement with London HSBC Holdings, DLA Piper, and Comey’s brother, Peter Comey.

Back to FBI-DOJ bias and collusions

Former FBI assistant director James Kallstrom said that there was a plot of “high-ranking” people in the intelligence community, “not just the FBI,” to aid Hillary Clinton’s avoiding being indicted and to damage Donald Trump, according to Zero Hedge. Kallstrom especially accused Obama CIA director John Brennan of direct involvement as well as leaking to the media.

Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe canceled testimony before the House Intelligence Committee when news surfaced that the “wife of Senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr worked for Fusion GPS,” according to Zero Hedge. Fusion GPS was the firm hired by the DNC to do opposition research on Donald Trump. Christopher Steele (of the notorious “Steele dossier”) was hired by Fusion GPS.

McCabe, who had been criticized by the DOJ inspector general, had also testified that James Comey directed the FBI to “ambush” Mike Flynn.

The inspector general also confirmed the FBI Clinton email investigators’ extreme anti-Trump bias, their unjustified exoneration of Hillary Clinton, and that Barack Obama lied about the Hillary private email server and that James Comey knew that Obama had lied about it.

Because then-attorney general Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein took charge of it. That was despite Rosenstein’s egregious conflicts of interest in the matter: Rosenstein was one of the DOJ officials who signed a FISA warrant that was based on the unverified Steele dossier, and Rosenstein was friends of James Comey and Robert Mueller.

In May of 2017 Trump had fired FBI director James Comey, who then leaked his memos (regarding Trump’s asking him to end the investigation of Mike Flynn) to the New York Times, via Comey’s law professor friend. Trump had been advised by deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to fire Comey. After Trump fired Comey, Trump was then being investigated for obstruction of justice apparently by the one who advised him to fire Comey, Rod Rosenstein. Huh.

It turns out that Rosenstein had expressed wanting to secretly record conversations with Trump and also had mentioned possibly making use of the 25th Amendment to get rid of Trump.

For all the above reasons, Donald Trump really ought to order the DOJ to declassify and unredact documents, not just the FBI’s FISA applications but also important emails among Comey, FBI investigators and DOJ lawyers, which will refute the original and much repeated allegations of “Trump-Russia collusions.”

Contrary to the London-to-Langley claims of possibly revealing “sources and methods” and compromising “national security,” the redactions and declassification will merely embarrass the spooks by exposing their shenanigans and criminality.

So there were collusions between DNC lawyers and the FBI to use made-up information in a dossier to illegally obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, and the Mueller kangaroo inquisition really began as a political insurance plan.

Conclusion

After the Flynn and Manafort indictments that weren’t related to the 2016 election and “Russia collusions,” in desperation the Mueller people and the FBI raided the offices of then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Mueller has gotten Cohen in a plea deal and probably an agreement by Cohen to lie about Trump based on what the Mueller people told Cohen to say, and not the truth, in my view.

Out of desperation, the Mueller team have also attempted to coerce investigative reporter Jerome Corsi to deliberately lie in return for a plea deal, which he will not do, and instead Corsi is suing Mueller.

And Mueller has now been accused of destruction of evidence. No surprise there. It’s all a part of Mueller’s ongoing crime spree, I suppose.

Regarding the biased media, Chuck Todd interviewed James Clapper on March 5, 2017, asking Clapper if any evidence exists to prove any collusion between Trump and Russians.

Clapper told Chuck Todd: “We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, ‘our,’ that’s N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.”

And Todd asked if the evidence actually exists, and Clapper answered, “Not to my knowledge,” and “we had no evidence of such collusion.”

Senators such as Chris Coons and Dianne Feinstein have also spoken of lack of evidence.

Do you mean that for nearly two years since then Chuck Todd (and others in the media) continued with “Trump-Russia collusions,” despite knowing that there was no evidence to support such a narrative?

And then there is Felix Sater, a.k.a. “Individual 2,” who, as an FBI informant since 1998, had infiltrated the Trump organization as early as 2003. That sure tells us something.

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.