Undisclosed location, Florida

In January, when heavily armed FBI agents swarmed my south Florida home in the predawn hours to arrest me for a series of process crimes, it changed my life far more than I ever imagined. The judge in my case has issued a gag order so I am not permitted to discuss the case, the prosecution, the court or the specific charges against me and will not do so here. As the judge said, the place for talking is in court — and that time will come.

***

A vast American television audience was allowed to view the spectacle of my arrest, because CNN arrived 15 minutes before the FBI swat team. CNN denies it was tipped off, instead chalking its good fortune up to a ‘hunch’. President Trump asked in a tweet ‘Who alerted CNN?’ Who indeed?

This week, it was widely reported that the FBI is refusing to turn over emails between the agency and CNN in the days before the raid on my home. Now the US Department of Justice is being sued for these documents and perhaps we will learn the truth about how and why CNN was present and why it was allowed to stay when the street was sealed off to all others.

***

CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Politico and the Wall Street Journal have repeatedly accused me baselessly of collusion with the Russians, conspiracy, and treason. That is not the case. I plan a vigorous legal defense. I will be vindicated.

The vicious biased media coverage since I was charged has been well beyond anything I have seen in 50 years of American politics. At an appropriate time I will document the lies and misrepresentations. Of the press, suffice to say, CNN is not a news organization but a propaganda front. I do not get my news from CNN for the same reason I do not eat out of the toilet. Wolf Blitzer can kiss my ass!

***

The last two years have taken an extraordinary toll on my family. We lost our home, our savings, and my ability to make a living. I am no longer allowed to talk and write about the topics people most want to pay me to speak about.

This week, we moved from our nine-room home to a one-bedroom apartment. Frankly, I got tired of the tour buses pulling up in front of the house and hearing the dissertation from the tour guide regarding my arrest. I was also getting on average of 10 death threats a week. The new place is much smaller but more secure.





Unfortunately, because we could not afford a moving company, my wife Nydia and I did the move ourselves. In a freak accident on the final day of our move, Nydia broke her ankle when the truck broke out of gear, slid and hit her. She is on the mend and still supervising the unpacking of our things in our new residence.

***

So far, more than 35,000 Americans have donated to my legal defense fund. I am increasingly confident that I will be able to mount an aggressive defense in what is a complex case. My lawyers think I will need at least $2 million and I believe that I can raise it.

***

In all of the reporting regarding the charges against me, there is one constant: I am called a ‘self-described dirty trickster’. I have never described myself like this anywhere and was impressed with the professionalism of the Los Angeles Times when it corrected this particular smear. I did once acknowledge in an interview that others described me as a ‘dirty trickster’, and therefore I am probably stuck with it.

***

I was also shocked to watch USA Today’s Susan Page on MSNBC discussing her newly published biography and diaries of Barbara Bush. These contain a falsehood that is so wrong it requires correction. Barbara Bush said in her diary that when she learned I was ‘hired’ for her husband’s 1988 campaign, she then had me ‘fired’. Unfortunately I was never hired for H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign and never wanted to be.

I had been regional political director for Ronald Reagan’s 1976, 1980 and 1984 campaigns and knew Bush would squander Reagan’s legacy. It is true that in the last two weeks of the 1988 Bush campaign, Lee Atwater and James A. Baker III asked me if I would undertake a specific mission to go to California to troubleshoot there. ‘Every week I increase our television budget, yet we trail Dukakis by three points,’ Baker said. Because Baker had convinced President Ronald Reagan to campaign for my client New Jersey governor Tom Kean in 1981 over the objections of the Reagan political staff, I felt I owed Baker and agreed to take on this voluntary assignment.

I quickly ascertained the Bush campaign in the Golden State was rotating too many television spots without putting sufficient weight behind any one commercial. Baker quickly corrected this and Bush carried California by one point. After the election, I got a nice hand written note from then Vice President George H.W. Bush thanking me for my effort. I guess he didn’t show it to Barbara.

***

I did find it curious that Barbara was ‘too sick’ to fly from Houston to Los Angeles for Nancy Reagan’s funeral but not ‘too sick’ to fly from Houston to Boston and then drive two hours to New Hampshire to campaign for her loser, low-energy son Jeb the very next day. You would think that Mrs Bush would pay her respects to the wife of the man who had breathed life back into her husband’s failed political career after he lost back-to-back US Senate races in Texas and got skunked in the 1980 Republican presidential nomination contest. I always found Barbara to be vindictive, inebriated, self-important and rude. Her attack on me from beyond the grave required an answer. I pointed out that, while she had set a countdown clock for the end of Trump’s presidency, she had died and Trump was still president.

The media reactions to my comments were immediate and distorted. The Huffington Post said I ‘made fun of Barbara Bush’s illness at the end of her life.’ I did no such thing. Barbara Bush had said President Donald Trump was ‘greedy,’ which is laughable when she and her family profited from the Savings and Loan crisis and given her father-in-law Prescott Bush’s role in financing the Nazi war machine. The media said my comments were ‘vile’ when the only thing vile is their incomplete reporting of the facts.

Ironically none of this coverage mentioned that I have written a best-selling book on the Bushes, documenting all of their misdeeds. It’s called The Bush Crime Family.

***

After I was charged, I took a sabbatical from my daily syndicated radio show on Infowars. Although I do not agree with him on many things, I am grateful to Alex Jones for giving me a platform. I was also somewhat surprised that he attributed his much-discussed claims about the Sandy Hook massacre to his own ‘psychosis’. Then, I noticed on Saturday that he said there were posses of men dressed like clowns looking to abduct and sexually abuse children. I hope Alex is alright. The collusion among social media companies to censor his broadcasts are outrageous. Unfortunately, this is part of a broader and systematic campaign to ban non-liberal voices on the internet.

***

On another note, I read that Natasha Bertrand left The Atlantic and went to Politico. She is among the most dishonest and disingenuous journalists in the media today and essentially writes whatever horseshit is fed to her by House Democrats. She will be right at home at Politico.

***

The best thing about this pretrial period is that I am back in the gym. By the November trial I will be in the best condition of my life.

A version of this article was originally published in The Spectator magazine. Follow Spectator USA on Twitter here.