For Trump, it was obvious that draining the swamp was never going to be easy because everything possible would be done to disguise and protect the illegal activities of the Obama/Clinton administration. But who thought they would go this far?

Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino’s explosive new book (with D.C. McAllister), Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, spotlights the left’s broken trust with the American people and the blatant criminality of the Obama/Clinton Deep State. Since the moment Donald J. Trump and his wife Melania glided down the Trump Tower escalator into history, the Democrats and the allies in the Deep State have been committed to crushing him.

Bongino has painted a highly detailed account of how the Obama administration criminalized our intelligence communities as well as other government agencies to stop Trump, and when that didn’t work to try and bring down the president of the United States.

The book relies heavily on left-leaning news outlets CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, CBS News, The Hill, London-based The Guardian and numerous others. All of this is carefully footnoted in the book. In a recent speech, Bongino said,

“The reason I wrote the book, is because of this whole spy scandal, this debacle, this atrocious disgrace of a scandal that happened to our president. We deliberately did not use footnotes from right-leaning resources. I used (the mainstream media) because anyone who tells you oh, this didn't happen, just go to the footnotes and say, did you read this article? It happened, folks. The President of the United States had the intelligence community and the law enforcement community of the United States, at the highest levels, weaponized against him.” [emphasis added]

But wait, you say, I knew some of this, but I wasn’t aware of this extraordinary level of criminality from the Democrats and their government allies. No, of course not, unless you have been intensively following, cataloging and linking developments on a day-to-day basis as Bongino has done. These once-trustworthy news organizations have written and broadcast piecemeal articles scattered over multiple outlets over several years when they had no choice to publish because the stories were so prominent they couldn’t cover them up. But they carefully avoided stitching the full and real story together thus earning the “fake news” label.

Where was a modern day Woodward and Bernstein team on this? This is a Pulitzer Prize level story but apparently no one in the media wants to claim it. It has taken the likes of Dan Bongino, a veteran of the US intelligence system and knowledgeable of the workings of the intelligence community, to weave it all into a crushing narrative that cries for a lot of big names to end up with long prison sentences.

These big names start with Obama, highlighted by FBI agent Peter Strzok who claimed in one email, “The White House is running this.” It goes on to Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, Former FBI Director Robert Mueller, senior Justice Department official Rod Rosenstein, and on and on. It’s an extensive cast of characters, some of whom you may not even be familiar with and others you will be, such as DNI James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Bob Mueller's chief of staff John Carlin, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, UN Ambassador Samantha Power, Obama's White House counsel and Clinton Foundation Attorney Kathryn Ruemmler, Mueller aide Andy Weissman, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, British academic and FBI informant Stefan Halper, Edward Lieberman, husband of Evelyn Lieberman, Bill Clinton's old chief of staff, a number of Russians and some other Brits and on and on. The number of people involved and the extensive amount of detail about their activities are nothing short of stunning. If there is any justice, there should be a lengthy set of perp walks.

As Bongino tells the story, when the Trump threat became clear, the Democrats and their allies in the Deep State panicked. They had a lot to cover up including the Clintons’ association with the Russians, who paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a single speech and arranged for millions to be poured into the Clinton Foundation. All of this was in exchange for the sale of 20% of America’s uranium reserves that could be funneled to the Iranians developing nuclear weapons. According to Bongino, “The Obama administration and FBI-paid informant admitted that we were giving the Russians uranium while they were building the Iranian nuclear program and chanting death to America.”

There was also the Benghazi scandal, the nuclear deal with Iran and Russia’s support for the program as well as the use of the illegal private server that connected Hillary directly to Obama. Bongino says Clinton

“...needed to win to keep incriminating details and possibly illegal activities while at the State Department buried … it was imperative that she escape Trump’s campaign pledge to lock her up. (page 266) So they came up with the idea of transferring her Russian entanglements to Trump.”

They cranked up what Bongino describes as

“…the most massive spying operation in a political campaign in US history…. They learned to manipulate queries in the NSA database, which has a whole boatload of information -- metadata, texts, that kind of stuff. The Obama administration figured out that through … wiretapping people, pretending they’re targeting foreigners and then querying information in this database, that they can get all the political opposition research in the world that they need against the Trump team. No one's going to call them out, the media's on their side, right?”

Until finally, after Trump’s victory, one brave American did step forward.

Mike Rogers, director of the NSA, smelled a rat. He saw that various parties were tapping into the massive NSA database making political queries. Queries such as these are legally required to follow very specific and strict guidelines about unmasking of US citizens. It is strictly against the law to spy on Americans in the database without a court ordered and individually approved FISA warrant. A report on this released in 2017 is devastating. Among other things, page 80 says the NSA database was being queried by private contractors working with the FBI. That’s right, people within the government were using private contractors to query highly classified information they had no judicial or legal authority whatsoever to look at.

Rogers knew about the bugging and/or wire tapping of the Trump team and Trump Tower by CIA Director John Brennan, possibly with White House approval. Ten days after the election, Rogers quietly visited Trump without asking for permission from anyone in the White House. The next day Trump abandoned Trump Tower and relocated to Bedminster, New Jersey. Another day later, the Obama administration called for Mike Rogers to be fired. Obama knew Rogers had the goods on him and probably correctly assumed had filled Trump in.

Now realizing that Trump had blocked their plan to bug his offices, Brennan and others found another way to spy on him. – “The FISA Court where . . . we can get a warrant on somebody. When you get a warrant on somebody in the Trump team they have this beautiful thing . . .called the two hop rule,” which means anyone linked to a FISA approved suspect can now be pulled into the surveillance.

Bongino says, “So what does the FBI and the State Department and the DOJ do? They say well, we don't really have any evidence, let's just make it up. We've got this guy we worked with in the past, this guy (British intelligence operative) Christopher Steele.”

And so the story goes. GCHQ, the NSA of British intelligence, is brought in by Brennan to help. And with their own set of concerns about Trump, they go along with it. Even today this remains a dangerous potential scandal overhanging the current British government as well as a potentially devastating crisis between the two long time allied agencies. As Bongino has noted,

“So not only is the United States government … weaponizing its intelligence community to listen in and computer search the Trump team to hurt them during the campaign for political oppo, they're working with the British and the Australians to pass information about the Trump team onto the Obama administration. Don't take it from me, take it from CNN.”

Bongino asks,

“Now does John Brennan's meltdown after the election make sense? He's the head of the intelligence community … it involve(ed) an intersection of players with different motives and the same goal of sabotaging the Trump campaign and presidency with false accusations, illegal spying and entrapment. This is the real story, and it’s the greatest scandal in American political history.”

A final plea from Bongino,

“If these people don't go down, the right way, unlike the Obama administration tried to do it to us, this will happen again. I'm telling you, what they did was such a grotesque, horrendous abuse of power. It disgusts me to this day … it's a grotesque thing to do to someone, to unleash the power of the federal government when they did nothing wrong. And Donald Trump did nothing wrong.”

Final word from Rod Rosenstein, “No evidence of (Russian) collusion with the Trump campaign is found.” (Page 320)

Frank Hawkins is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Associated Press foreign correspondent, international businessman, senior newspaper company executive, founder and owner of several marketing companies and published novelist. He currently lives in retirement in North Carolina.