The Illustrated Spygate Scandal - Part XXIX
The first political coup in American history
See Part I to start at the beginning.
February 4, 2018
John Brennan couldn’t contain himself. The former CIA director launched a Twitter attack on Nunes and the House Intel Committee for “abuse of power” in releasing the FISA memo.
The irony was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Brennan, who had run the most powerful intelligence agency in the world, was accusing congressional oversight of being an abuse of power. Brennan, whose CIA had been caught spying on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers. Brennan, who had lied to Congress about drone strikes and torture.
That John Brennan was lecturing anyone about abuse of power.
“Nunes abused his power by spearheading the memo release,” Brennan told the Washington Examiner. As if congressional oversight was somehow illegitimate.
But Brennan’s panic was telling. His fingerprints were all over the intelligence community’s handling of Trump.
Now the memo had exposed how that intelligence was obtained. And Brennan was scrambling to delegitimize the disclosure before more people started asking what role he had played in all this.
The louder they scream, the closer you are to the truth. And Brennan was screaming louder than anyone.
February 5, 2018
The hammer fell twice on the same day. Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham dropped them both, knowing they would make any conspiracy theorist blush—except this wasn’t theory, this was documented fact.
The first revelation: Obama’s State Department had been feeding information directly to Christopher Steele to be included in his dossier. Let that sink in. The U.S. government was providing material to a foreign spy being paid by the Clinton campaign, who was then turning around and feeding it back to the FBI as “intelligence” to justify spying on Trump associates.
It was a circular laundering operation. The State Department gave Steele information. Steele put it in his memos. The FBI used those memos to get warrants. Then everyone pretended it was independent intelligence from Russian sources.
“They were literally creating their own evidence,” one Senate investigator said, shaking his head in disbelief.
The second bombshell was even more direct: Grassley and Graham issued a criminal referral of Christopher Steele to the Department of Justice and FBI. They were asking the DOJ to investigate whether Steele had lied to federal investigators about his contacts with the media and his sources.
The referral was clinical in its devastation. It laid out, in careful legal language, how Steele had told the FBI one thing under oath and told a British court something completely different. Someone was lying. And lying to federal investigators is a felony.
The message was clear: the dossier’s author was potentially a criminal, and the FBI had used his work anyway.
February 7, 2018
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte wasn’t waiting for permission. He sent a letter directly to FISA Court Judge Rosemary Collyer requesting documents related to the surveillance of Trump associates.
It was an extraordinary move. Members of Congress don’t typically make demands of federal judges, especially judges on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But these weren’t typical times.
