Mueller Investigation: The Aftermath
Commentary
If you are paying any attention, you are aware that the Mueller investigation of President Donald Trump for alleged collusion with the Russians was completed and turned over to Attorney General William Barr, who, as required by law, prepared a summary of the findings for the White House and Congress.
The kicker, of course, is that the report confirmed there was no evidence or any reason to believe that Trump or anyone associated with the president had anything to do with colluding with the Russians. While a segment of the public might be surprised, everyone around Washington—and I really mean everyone—knew this conclusion was coming, including all of the Democrats.
In case of any doubts to this claim, in the weeks leading up to the investigation being completed, House Democrats pre-positioned themselves by moving to take impeachment off the table and by starting their own investigation and publicly stating they would call dozens of witnesses as part of this “new” investigation.
Normally, you would expect the Democrats to drop the whole subject like the hot potato it is, since it blew up in their faces and makes them look bad to their base. At the same time, it badly damages the credibility of the mainstream media that so adamantly supports Democrats.
The problem for Democrats is they have the tiger by the tail and can’t let go. There are two huge reasons for this: First, the Democratic base of voters has been promised that Trump was going to be taken out politically, and they aren’t going to stand for less; take a look at what they are saying on Twitter if you have any doubts. If Democratic politicians just walk away, their voter base will go ballistic, and we will observe a Democratic primary Armageddon like never before.
Remember, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocked off a popular and well-established Rep. Joe Crowley in a very safe New York primary. Nobody called that one in advance, and Democrats haven’t forgotten this lesson.
The second, and more important, reason is that some of the Democrats are at real personal risk in a legal sense, and this is the area where we will spend the next two years, leading to the 2020 elections. Now that the Mueller investigation is over, everyone is beginning to ask how this whole fiasco started, and that’s the tiger the Democrats own and have by the tail.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has already stated publicly that he’s going to investigate how this case got started when there was no underlying crime. Significantly, President Trump is now in the clear and will take his gloves off and get involved in the fight. If you enjoy paybacks, make sure to sit in the front row; we all know Trump loves to counterpunch.
Very quickly, we’re going to see Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the House Intelligence Oversight committee chair, and former Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan, and many other senior officials from the intelligence community come under the spotlight. They are the ones who gave serious gravitas to allegations against the president, and often made public comments to the effect that they were aware of classified details, had seen conclusive evidence, and were certain that Trump is guilty of collaborating with the Russians.
Since we now know those claims are false and no such evidence exists, we need to look closely at why they would knowingly make these false statements. There is really only one explanation that seems to fit all the facts, and that would be if Brennan and the others collaborated to create and use the Steele dossier as an attempt to take the presidency away from Trump.
If true, this is serious beyond belief and seems to constitute treason. Many others, including just recently, several sitting ambassadors have been implicated, and a number of senior Justice Department and FBI officials have long been under suspicion.
The first key step that we will see publicly over the next few months is a close examination of the original FISA application that allowed the warrant that kicked off the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. A version was released, which I duly read, but it was very heavily redacted, meaning about 70 percent of the report was blacked out.
Even so, it’s very clear that the FISA request was based almost exclusively on the Steele dossier and that’s going to come to light. That’s a serious problem for the Democrats, because everyone who signed the FISA request has been documented to have known in advance that the dossier was either false or unconfirmed at best and they used it anyway. That is illegal by itself, and was then was further used to create the Mueller special counsel investigation.
Next will be the scope memo, which was what gave Mueller the authority and parameters by which he was to conduct his investigation.
Brad Johnson is a retired CIA senior operations officer and a former chief of station. He is president of Americans for Intelligence Reform.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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