The Illustrated Spygate Scandal - Part XXVIII
The first political coup in American history
See Part I to start at the beginning.
January 23, 2018
Senator Ron Johnson’s release of 384 pages of new Strzok-Page texts was documentary evidence that the Mueller campaign was tainted.
The texts revealed additional evidence of insurance policies, political coordination, and factory-style evidence manufacturing by corrupt FBI officials.
“This represents corruption at the very highest levels,” Johnson stated. He had more.
“Mueller must be dismissed,” Johnson stated.
The Mueller special counsel was both a cover up and a continuation of the coup.
January 24, 2018
The memo landed like a tactical nuke in Washington’s winter chill. Four pages that named names. Real names. Big names.
Devin Nunes had spent months building this case, brick by brick, document by document. Now his Intelligence Committee memo explicitly identified James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, and Andrew McCabe as participants in what looked increasingly like an institutional conspiracy. Not speculation. Not innuendo. Named participants.
“They used a fake dossier,” Nunes told his staff in the secure committee room. “They knew it was fake. And they used it anyway to get a warrant to spy on American citizens.”
The Daily Beast had gotten wind of it first, their sources inside the committee leaking like a sieve. But this wasn’t about the leak. This was about what the memo said. FBI and DOJ leadership had taken opposition research paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, dressed it up as intelligence, and presented it to a secret court to obtain surveillance warrants on Trump associates.
In a fifth-floor office at the Hoover Building, someone was already drafting the Bureau’s response. But responses wouldn’t matter much if the American people saw what was in that memo.
The question wasn’t whether to release it anymore. The question was how much damage it would do when they did.
January 25, 2018
The New York Times strike came twenty-four hours later. Haberman and Schmidt, the paper’s go-to reporters for administration leaks, had a new bombshell: Trump had wanted to fire Robert Mueller back in June. Would have done it, too, except his White House counsel Don McGahn had threatened to quit rather than carry out the order.
It had all the hallmarks of a strategic leak. Perfect timing, right as the FISA memo was gaining traction. Shift the narrative. Make it about Trump’s supposed obstruction instead of the FBI’s actual crimes.
In the West Wing, aides scrolled through the story on their phones with the weary recognition of people who’d seen this play before. Another “scoop.” Another anonymous source. Another attempt to revive the Mueller investigation’s flagging credibility.
“He didn’t fire him though, did he?” one aide muttered to another in the hallway. “That’s the whole point. He had every right to, and he didn’t.”
January 25, 2018
While the media played its games, Senator Chuck Grassley was doing actual oversight. The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman issued a sweeping demand for information about the “dossier” to a wide range of Clinton and DNC-related entities. Due date: February 8th.
The list read like a who’s who of the 2016 Democratic operation: John Podesta, the DNC, Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie law firm. Grassley wanted documents. He wanted explanations. He wanted to know who paid for what, and when they knew it was garbage.
The demand letter was clinical in its precision, each question designed to box recipients into corners they couldn’t escape from. Grassley had been in the Senate since 1981. He knew how to ask questions that had only one truthful answer—and several perjurious ones.
“Follow the money,” he told his chief investigator. “Always follow the money.”
The money trail led from Clinton’s campaign through a law firm to Fusion GPS, then to a former British spy named Christopher Steele, and from there into a hall of mirrors.
Lawyers across Washington began preparing responses, each word carefully chosen, each sentence designed to reveal as little as possible while appearing cooperative. The due date was two weeks away. It might as well have been two years for all the lawyering that would happen before then.
January 29, 2018
The New York Times got another leak, this one more desperate than strategic. Someone at Justice wanted the world to know that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein himself had approved the Carter Page surveillance warrant in May 2017. The implication was clear: if Rosenstein approved it, it must have been legitimate.
Except the leak had the opposite effect. It meant Rosenstein had signed off on a FISA warrant based on the bogus dossier—after James Comey was fired, after the appointment of Mueller, after there was no excuse for not knowing the dossier was political opposition research.
The leak was supposed to provide cover. Instead, it provided evidence of how deep the rot went. Rosenstein wasn’t just a witness to the abuse. He was a participant.
At Main Justice, someone realized too late that this leak had been a catastrophic mistake. They’d meant to shield Rosenstein by showing he’d followed proper procedures. Instead, they’d tied him directly to the scandal.
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” one Justice Department attorney said to another, reading the Times story. “They just threw him under the bus trying to save him.”
January 29, 2018
Then the earthquake hit. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe unexpectedly announced his resignation - effective immediately. Except “resignation” wasn’t quite the right word. Multiple sources reported he’d been removed by Director Christopher Wray.
