The New York Times wants you to believe that President Trump “colluded” with Russian intelligence to swing the 2016 presidential election in his favor. A “breaking” story, released late last week, carried the conclusive headline: “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia.”

But the story is neither conclusive nor accurate. In fact, it elides that which both the president and his supporters have been arguing for nearly three years: the American Left has hijacked the country’s hallowed democratic institutions and weaponized them, turning them into nothing more than political assassins operating on behalf of the Democratic National Committee.

Apparently, there were two inciting incidents that prompted the FBI to launch a caustic counterintelligence investigation. The first was the president’s obvious joke on the campaign trail, when he urged the Russians to release Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails to the American press. The second incident was the president’s decision to fire James Comey as director of the FBI in 2017. According to unnamed FBI officials, the reason Comey’s firing initiated a counterintelligence investigation was the fact that Trump publicly tied the firing of Comey to the Russia investigation.

Another factor in the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation was the prima facie absurd claims made by former British spy, Christopher Steele. As even the Times admits, the Steele dossier on Trump’s Russian connections “contained unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.”

Absolutely none of Trump’s decisions should have prompted such a massive investigation. The New York Times piece explains that “agents and senior FBI officials” were “uncertain how to proceed” with a counterintelligence investigation into the president. In other words, most involved in the investigation knew the damage that such a ridiculous undertaking would do not only to their agency, but also to the institution of the American presidency and the country itself.

Despite these concerns, though, the FBI pressed on.

Proponents of the Russian collusion delusion would have you believe the FBI’s decision was honorable; that the Bureau was just “following the evidence.” But the evidence was entirely circumstantial and should have never been used as the basis for a counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States!

The fact that overt partisans, such as FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok and his loopy mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, were key players in the investigation further taints the integrity of the probe. It’s been clear from the start that the decision to investigate Trump was a combination of the American intelligence community chasing its own tail while at the same time attempting to punish a political opponent, Trump.

As the New York Times story notes several paragraphs in, “No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.” Talk about burying the lead! The indictments that have been handed down thus far as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s “collusion” investigation have had to do mostly with unrelated crimes, such as Paul Manafort’s failure to register as a foreign agent (of Ukraine) years before he went to work for the Trump campaign.

The scant evidence about Trump’s purported conspiracy to rig the 2016 presidential election with the Russians should have prevented any counterintelligence investigation from moving forward. The fact that during an interview with MSNBC’s Lester Holt, the president linked Comey’s firing to the Russia investigation is irrelevant. According to Article II, section two of the U.S. Constitution, the president can fire executive branch employees as he sees fit. In no way should that have been used as the basis of a counterintelligence investigation.

What’s more, the Supreme Court has ruled that presidential tweets cannot be used as an official declaration on policy. They’re merely an extension of the president’s First Amendment rights. So who cares what the president tweets or says in public about firing a government official? What matters is that Comey was presiding over a tainted investigation into Trump that should have never been allowed to go forward.

If public statements made by presidents are now fair game for initiating major investigations, then former President Barack Obama would have been impeached early into his presidency. Remember, Obama had assured voters that his signature healthcare law would not constitute as a tax increase—even as his administration’s lawyers were arguing that Obamacare was legal because it was nothing more than a tax increase on the citizenry. And don’t forget about the time that Obama assured then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would be more “flexible” after his reelection.

The one thing that the New York Times piece does prove is just how corrupt and partisan America’s intelligence services have become. It also completely undermines the left-wing narrative that Trump is a Russian stooge. He is not. The investigation into him is a disgusting abuse of power on the part of the feds and should be ended immediately.

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