The Deep State Strikes Back
 
Late Friday evening, the New York Times broke a huge story:  In May of 2017, the FBI launched an investigation into whether the president of the United States was a Russian agent. 
 
The implications of such an investigation are enormous.  The obvious questions are: Who authorized it and based on what evidence?  Senator Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is demanding answers from FBI Director Christopher Wray.
 
As always, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy dissects the Times report and offers some important insights to help make sense of these Orwellian machinations.
 
Here's what we know:
 

• The FBI had the Steele dossier back in 2016 and they believed it.  It came to the Bureau from multiple sources -- Bruce Ohr, John McCain and Christopher Steele himself.

• There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the dossier.  Steele's intelligence had been suspect in the past, it was paid for by the Clinton campaign, and he was eventually fired for leaking. 

• Yet even though James Comey admitted that the dossier was never fully verified, the FBI still used it to obtain a FISA warrant to monitor Carter Page.  So the investigation was corrupt from the beginning.

• As McCarthy points out, the FBI's real target of the FISA warrants was not Page, but Donald Trump.  After all, the dossier wasn't about Page.  It was about Trump.  And the FBI never would have pursed the FISA warrants unless they believed the underlying allegations that Trump was colluding with the Russians.

• But Comey and others understood just how unprecedented and controversial an FBI investigation of the opposition party's presidential candidate would be.  So it deceived the FISA courts about the true nature and target of the investigation, saying the dossier had been verified when it had not been, and it requested warrants for campaign aides, not the candidate himself. 

• Throughout the entire operation in 2016, the FBI worked on the assumption that Trump would lose.  Yet he won, and that meant the Bureau had an even bigger problem -- the president of the United States would soon learn that the FBI had been targeting him all along, and he would want to "clean house at the FBI" and the Department of Justice.

• So the Bureau continued to dissemble that this was really just a counterintelligence campaign to figure out how the Russians had meddled in the election.  Yet there continued to be strategic leaks to the media suggesting collusion with the Trump campaign and by extension the president himself. 

• And when the president eventually decided that it was time to clean house by firing James Comey, deep state allies of the fired former director decided to strike back by triggering the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the false grounds that Comey's dismissal constituted obstruction of justice.

• Remember that during the time between Comey's firing and Mueller's appointment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe had discussed "wearing a wire" to secretly record the president and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president.

 
 
 
Trump Responds
 
Not surprisingly, President Trump reacted strongly to the New York Times report, tweeting:
 
"Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin' James Comey, a total sleaze!"
 
Respectfully to the president, I have a slightly different take on this.  I think the Times actually confirms what we have been saying from the very beginning:  The Obama Justice Department and the FBI set out in 2016 to destroy Donald Trump and they are still at it. 
 
You had to get deep into the Times report -- the ninth paragraph -- before getting to this sentence:  "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials."
 
In my opinion, the real news here is not that Trump supposedly conspired with Russia but that Obama officials conspired to destroy Trump by suggesting he was a Russian agent without any serious evidence. 
 
Joking comments, minor changes to the Republican Party's platform and the legal firing of the FBI director hardly constitute collusion with Russia.  If the things cited against Trump are evidence of collusion with Russia, then virtually every leading progressive for the past 30 years should have been under suspicion. 
 
Ted Kennedy invited the Russians to meddle in our elections.  Liberals opposed everything Ronald Reagan did to fight the Soviet Union.  Obama did nothing when Putin invaded Ukraine.  And what about Hillary's attempt to "reset" our relations with Russia or sell 20% of our uranium to a Russian company?
 
If the New York Times report is accurate, it shows that the deep state was doing exactly what many conservatives have feared all along.  It was meddling in our elections by trying to destroy Donald Trump.
 
This is incredibly dangerous to the Republic.  Unelected bureaucrats were using their power not against America's enemies, but against their political enemy, the Republican presidential candidate and later the duly-elected president of the United States. 
 
 
 
Strange Timing
 
There is a lot of speculation about the timing of the Times' piece, especially since it was followed up by a Washington Post story suggesting that Trump tried to "conceal details" of his meetings with Vladimir Putin. 
 
So we have these back-to-back hits by the favorite deep state media outlets.  It certainly seems like something is going on.
 
Perhaps a second inspector general's report is about to be released detailing extensive deep state abuses, so the deep state is trying to strike first.  Or maybe we will finally hear something from U.S. Attorney John Huber, who is also investigating the Department of Justice and the FBI.
 
 
 
Partying In Puerto Rico?
 
It's day 24 of the partial government shutdown, now the longest in history and there's no end in sight. 
 
How much longer will progressives hold federal employees hostage to their demand that Donald Trump not be allowed to secure the border? 
 
While the shutdown continues, more than 30 congressional liberals and their families chartered a private 737 for a big party this weekend in Puerto Rico with more than 100 lobbyists. 
 
The hypocrisy is mind blowing!  Just imagine the media reaction if President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence went to the beach right now.