‘It is not difficult to understand what is so ominous and even tyrannical about the FBI investigating domestic political figures…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Journalist Glenn Greenwald made his name working with whistle-blower Edward Snowden to expose the National Security Agency’s routine domestic spying program during the Bush and Obama presidencies.
Now, he is taking on the corrupt FBI for investigating President Donald Trump.
“It’s the FBI’s job to investigate possible crimes under the law or infiltration by foreign powers, not ideological sins,” Greenwald wrote in a story published on The Intercept.
Greenwald, a former Guardian reporter and founding Intercept editor, has often roiled the Democratic establishment by attacking the deep-state and liberal dogma while obstinately refusing to fit the narrative of a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
His latest piece comes after a New York Times hit job on Friday reported that the FBI in 2017, after Trump’s firing of Director James Comey, opened an investigation into whether the president was, either knowingly or unknowingly, a Russian agent.
The Times article did little to move the chains or add new information into the mix, other than confirming that the Andrew McCabe-led FBI, in using an investigation to retaliate, was as much a political animal as many on both sides of the aisle had long suspected.
Nonetheless, partisan nitwits in the press did all they could to puff it up into hyperbole of Chicken Little proportions in order to justify coverage, the welcome counterpoint to a week riddled with “Chuck and Nancy” memes.
Just now @MalcolmNance said the truth concisely and directly on @MSNBC : This is, without exception, the worst scandal in the history of the United States.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 12, 2019
Trump and several other White House officials called the innuendo a ludicrous hoax.
“This is absurd,” said Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “James Comey was fired because he’s a disgraced partisan hack, and his Deputy Andrew McCabe, who was in charge at the time, is a known liar fired by the FBI. Unlike President Obama, who let Russia and other foreign adversaries push America around, President Trump has actually been tough on Russia.”
Greenwald’s article, which was linked atop the Drudge Report on Monday, connected the current Russia probe to a long continuum of politically motivated FBI cases dating back to J. Edgar Hoover’s attacks on Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II-era vice president, Henry A. Wallace, and Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era opponent George McGovern.
“It is not difficult to understand what is so ominous and even tyrannical about the FBI investigating domestic political figures whose loyalties they regard as ‘suspicious,'” Greenwald wrote.
Although the amnesiac leftist press has frequently declared the Trump allegations to be unparalleled and unprecedented in American history—despite there having been no evidence made public to implicate the president in any of the alleged misdeeds—such smear tactics have, in fact, been fairly commonplace, Greenwald said.
“Trump is far from the first time that the FBI has monitored, surveilled and investigated U.S. elected officials … The FBI specialized in such conduct for decades under J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the agency for 48 years…”
It has since been discovered through Congressional inquiries that the FBI’s basis for investigating Trump—including its application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court for clearance to eavesdrop on him—may have been based off of the unsubstantiated, now debunked, information in the Steele Dossier.
The FBI assumed payments on the dossier, a compilation of opposition research compiled by a former British intelligence operative, after the Democratic National Committee ceased commissioning the research following the November 2016 election.
In testimony before Congress, however, Comey dismissed the influence of the Steele Dossier, claiming the FBI had begun investigating Trump earlier, when another British asset of the FBI’s, Stefan Halper, spoke with Trump adviser George Papadopoulos about rumors that the Russians had hacked into the servers of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Those e-mails are believed to have been the ones provided to WikiLeaks, which revealed widespread DNC corruption that forced out party chair Debbie Wasserman–Schultz.
Regardless of which British operative provided the speculative intelligence, Greenwald said the point remains the same concerning the politicization of the FBI and its weaponization of investigations against American political adversaries.
“Even if you’re someone who hates Trump’s overtures toward Russia or even believes that they are the by-product of excessive subservience to the Kremlin, the dangers of having the FBI take on the role of investigating that rather than the political wings of the U.S. political system should be obvious,” he said.
Although Greenwald said he strongly favors an independent investigation, such as the Mueller investigation, to ascertain whether Trump cooperated with Russia during the campaign, the president also has several times decried the potential conflicts of interest that arise from it, including Mueller’s chumminess with Comey and his own pursuit of the FBI post.
Trump has also attacked Mueller’s partisan staff, which at one point included Lisa Page, who was forced to leave after it was revealed that she had swapped countless anti-Trump texts with her lover, then-FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok.
When is Bob Mueller going to list his Conflicts of Interest? Why has it taken so long? Will they be listed at the top of his $22,000,000 Report…And what about the 13 Angry Democrats, will they list their conflicts with Crooked H? How many people will be sent to jail and……
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2018