The Democratic Party has burrowed so deeply into the federal bureaucracy that it conducts “one continuous operation” of disinformation designed “to impact and interfere in our election using falsehoods across the board, election after election,” said Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.).
Federal agents’ refusal to investigate Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information, conducting a three-year-long inquest against Donald Trump over baseless charges of “collusion” with Russia, and classifying evidence of Joe Biden’s influence peddling taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation is “literally part and parcel of the exact same operation,” Johnson told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” recently.
“The individuals in the FBI that exonerated Hillary Clinton moved, went on to [the] Crossfire Hurricane investigation. That was a fraudulent investigation,” said Johnson, citing Special Counsel John Durham’s final report. “Then the FBI sees Hunter Biden’s laptop in December 2019. We have whistleblowers that said higher ups in the FBI said, ‘You will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop.’ We also have whistleblowers from the FBI who said that the FBI developed a scheme in August of 2020 to downplay any derogatory information on Hunter.”
The FBI Erases Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Bribery Scandals
The Durham report details how the FBI refused to investigate, much less prosecute, Hillary Clinton over three incidents involving receiving donations intended to sway her foreign policy following the 2016 election.
In 2014, a foreign nation sent an asset to curry favor with Hillary Clinton, who had not yet officially declared her candidacy. Agents sought a FISA warrant almost immediately, but officials in Obama’s FBI held up the application for five months. One agent remembered that “everyone was ‘super more careful’” about her application and “scared with the big name [Clinton]” involved. “[T]hey were pretty ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC, because there was a chance she would be the next [p]resident.” Two officials, including Peter Strzok, “alluded to the fact that they did not want a presidential candidate on tape.”
Ultimately, the warrant came down 11 months later, “conditioned on the requirement that the FBI give defensive briefings to the various public officials and candidates of both political parties”: that is, that the FBI warn both candidates of attempts by foreign agents to affect policy. The offer came although Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe admitted that defensive briefings “reduce your ability to get to the bottom of the threat.”
Hillary Clinton did not attend the briefing, opting to have her attorneys attend in her place.
In November 2015, an FBI informant embedded in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign warned of another foreign agent seeking to influence her impending administration. The informant made a $2,700 donation on behalf of the U.S. citizen fronting for this foreign agent seeking to influence the Clinton campaign. The foreign citizen was known by the FBI “to have foreign intelligence and criminal connections,” and a contribution of that sort would violate 52 U.S. Code § 30121. Federal Election Commission records confirmed a donation.
The informant told the FBI handling agent, “They [the campaign] were okay with it. […] yes they were fully aware from the start” of its origins, and intent to purchase access.
Yet “this apparent illegal contribution was not documented in FBI records,” Durham noted. “Instead, the FBI effectively removed their sole source of insight into this threat.” The agent in charge of the case, “responding to direction” from above, told the informant to have nothing more to do with Clinton fundraising:
“do NOT attend any more campaign events, set up meetings, or anything else relating to [Clinton’s] campaign. We need to keep you completely away from that situation. I don’t know all the details, but it’s for your own protection.”
Finally, Andrew McCabe quashed an FBI investigation into foreign donations to the Clinton family’s “philanthropic” nonprofits. Paul Abbate, now the FBI deputy director and then the assistant director of the Washington Field Office, described McCabe as “negative,” “annoyed,” and “angry” that the investigation took place, during a meeting on February 22, 2016. McCabe then told investigators in multiple FBI field offices that he must personally approve all investigations into the Clintons’ foundations.
In August 2016, Obama-era FBI Director James Comey shut down the investigation, turning it over to the New York office, and subpoena power was given to the U.S. Attorneys offices in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Those offices refused to issue subpoenas to investigate the Clintons.
The Southern District of New York issued 34 charges against former President Donald Trump at an April 4 arraignment over campaign finance violations, charges legal experts call strained.
Durham contrasted that with the way agents rushed to investigate 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump over charges they knew to be hearsay. Agents received the Steele dossier on September 19, 2016, and, within two days, incorporated it into a FISA application targeting the Trump campaign.
Hillary Clinton is “the one, with the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, that was cozy with the Russians,” Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told Perkins on Tuesday. “Clinton was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to go deliver speeches in Russia.” But the FBI responded to their prodding after “they created this narrative, they paid for this narrative, and they pulled together documentation and hired people to push this narrative. And the media went along with them every single step of the way.”
The CIA Peddles Disinformation about Russian Disinformation
When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke on the eve of the 2020 election, Obama-era Acting CIA Director Mike Morell, “at the direction of current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken,” who was then “working for the Biden campaign [came] up with a fraudulent letter signed by 51 intelligence officials” asserting the story carried all the hallmarks of Russian propaganda, Senator Johnson told Perkins. “But also, we now know the CIA tried to solicit signatures from current CIA employees.”
The CIA uncharacteristically expedited approval of the statement, which deemed any mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation,” according to a report released last week by the House Judiciary Committee. Morell asked the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board for a “rush job” to approve a statement via email on October 19, 2016 — three days before the final debate between President Trump and Joe Biden.
In an email to former CIA Director John Brennan the same day, Morrell revealed the letter’s intention was starkly political: to “give the [Biden] campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue.”
Partisan political appointees manifested their political bias in each of these cases — and tried, or succeeded, in changing the course of multiple elections, Johnson said.
“This is one continuous operation of the Left, of Democrats, of the Biden campaign, the Hillary Clinton campaign, to impact and interfere in our election using falsehoods across the board, election after election,” Johnson told Perkins on Monday.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) echoed his words Tuesday night. “We’ve got the pattern of recognition here,” Gaetz told Newsmax TV host Chris Plante. “You’ve got Big Government, Big Media, Big Tech all in this conspiracy to try to reshape the nature of truth. And guess what? You saw the very features of that conspiracy reemerge in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.”
Truth “shouldn’t be something defined by the powerful,” said Gaetz.
The Deep State ‘Goes Down Very Low’: Trump
Former President Donald Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to “drain the Swamp,” said clearing left-leaning partisans out of the U.S. government’s bureaucracy will take a herculean effort.
“There is a Deep State, and there are a lot of problems,” he told Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt on Tuesday. “I did a lot of firings, but it goes down very low” into the ranks of federal employees.
Durham closed out his nearly four-year-long investigation by declining to make any criminal referrals, or call for any new policies, to prevent future election-tampering. “Not every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense,” wrote Durham. “If this report and the outcome of the Special Counsel’s investigation leave some with the impression that injustices or misconduct have gone unaddressed, it is not because the Office [of Special Prosecutor] concluded that no such injustices or misconduct occurred. It is, rather, because not every injustice or transgression amounts to a criminal offense, and criminal prosecutors are tasked exclusively with investigating and prosecuting violations of U.S. criminal laws.”
The Biden administration’s FBI responded to the Durham report by declaring the agency needs no reform, because “current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented.”
Impeachment, Expulsion Resolutions Introduced in the House
While Trump states the Deep State goes low, House Republicans are starting at the top.
FBI Director Christopher Wray faces impeachment, thanks to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Her legislation, introduced Tuesday and reported first by The Daily Caller, raps Wray “for facilitating the development of a [f]ederal police force to intimidate, harass, and entrap American citizens that are deemed enemies of the Biden regime,” including pro-life advocates and traditional Roman Catholics.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) introduced a bill to expel Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a Democratic hopeful for U.S. Senate, from Congress, citing his role in promoting the Russian collusion narrative. “Schiff lied to the American people. He used his position on House Intel to push a lie that cost American taxpayers millions of dollars,” Luna said. “He is a dishonor to the House of Representatives.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has invited Durham to testify before his committee and co-authored a letter to Biden administration CIA Director William Burns over “the role of the CIA in helping to falsely discredit allegations about the Biden family in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.” Burns has until Sunday to respond.
Republican presidential candidates have called for massive retaliation against the agency. Aside from Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said the next president will “need to clean house at these agencies, as they’ve never been held accountable for this egregious abuse of power.” Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley agreed. “Heads need to roll over this. Anybody that touched it or had a part in it needs to be fired and every one of their senior managers needs to be fired. The FBI has lost complete credibility when it comes to this.”
Equality Under the Law Is a Battle ‘for the Soul of America’
Restoring even-handed administration of justice has spiritual connotations, one rising Republican said.
“The Democrats try to lecture us on democracy,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) told Schmitt on Tuesday. “It is Republicans, it is conservatives: We’re the ones that are actually fighting for the soul of America and for our republic, because we want the law to be applied equally.”
The Bible repeatedly condemns “respect of persons” (James 2:9, Colossians 3:25, Ephesians 6:9), especially in applying the law (Deuteronomy 1:17 and 16:19, II Chronicles 19:7, Proverbs 24:23).
The ongoing bias of deeply embedded federal bureaucrats in favor of one party across multiple election cycles “is going to have to be a campaign issue,” Tony Perkins told Senator Blackburn.
AUTHOR
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.
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