RUTHFULLY YOURS

Divided on partisan lines, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted yesterday to make public a memo asserting the FBI relied on the discredited Trump-Russia dossier to obtain court-ordered foreign-intelligence wiretaps against U.S. citizens, a breathtaking abuse of power.

The document is already generating shock waves in Washington, even though few on Capitol Hill are said to have read it.

The FBI admits the Left’s electoral collusion conspiracy theory is unsubstantiated but still refuses to distance itself from the discredited Russia propaganda dossier Democrats paid Fusion GPS to create to undermine President Trump’s candidacy. And congressional Democrats, long sympathetic to Russia, have suddenly been transformed into strong defenders of the nation’s national security apparatus, implying that criticism of the long-troubled FBI is somehow treasonous or unpatriotic. It is a vicious smear calculated to redirect Americans’ attention, but par for the course for the Left.

Why anyone is even surprised at FBI corruption is unclear. Although the nation’s premier investigative agency is top-heavy with fine, ethical men and women, the FBI was born in corruption. Its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, kept blackmail material on the powerful so he could stay in power for 50 years. The FBI needs a good housecleaning at the top.

It was a month ago that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe reportedly refused to criticize the dossier at a closed-door hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

McCabe was relieved of his leadership post earlier yesterday and is reportedly still on the FBI’s payroll for now. He had planned to retire in the spring in order to qualify for full retirement benefits but FBI Director Christopher Wray reportedly hinted in an internal agency email that McCabe was pushed out because an upcoming government watchdog report was highly critical of his conduct on the job.

Many more resignations are expected at the FBI, which President Obama weaponized and used against his enemies during his time in office.

Majority Republicans say they want to release the memo to clear the air in the current toxic political environment and reveal the extent of what appears to be an Obama-era FBI plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing as the nation’s secretary of state and frame Trump for allegedly working with Russia to unfairly influence the 2016 election. Despite the loud public bellyaching of left-wingers, there is no evidence Trump or his campaign are guilty of such collusion, which, even if it happened, wouldn’t necessarily violate existing laws.

The vote comes after Associate Attorney General Stephen Boyd called releasing the document “extraordinarily reckless.”

McCabe, a frequent target of President Trump on Twitter, served as acting director of the FBI from May 9 last year when Trump fired then-director James B. Comey and until Aug. 2 when Wray took over. While serving as acting FBI director, McCabe was involved in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s illicit email servers that put sensitive national documents at risk.

The problem is that McCabe is closely tied to Democrat politics and should never have been anywhere near the email probe.

His wife was a Democrat candidate in 2015 for the Virginia State Senate. Her campaign received nearly $675,000 in funding from the state’s Democratic Party and a political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D). McAuliffe is a longtime Clinton crony.

McCabe failed to recuse himself from the Clinton email probe until Nov. 1, 2016, which was four days after Comey, then the FBI director, announced the agency had reopened the investigation into the emails after finding new data on computer hard drives belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), the now-imprisoned sex-offender husband of Hillary’s top lieutenant, Huma Abedin.

Whether McCabe should have recused himself from the email investigation is now being examined by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

President Trump reportedly favors the release of the four-page memo, written by Nunes, whose dogged pursuit of the truth has subjected him to partisan slander for months, but has five days to decide whether to publish the document. The FBI’s Wray reportedly read the memo on the weekend at the insistence of Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and was alarmed by its content. Nunes is said to have asked Wray to point out any “factual errors, national security concerns or material that could put FBI sources at risk.”

To maximize public exposure of the memo without stepping on media coverage of the president’s first State of the Union address tonight, the memo could see the light of day as soon as Wednesday.

The dossier is the salacious report commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The statements, among them that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed, were in the partisan hit job compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and published by cat video website BuzzFeed. Steele relied heavily on Kremlin-approved sources.

The dossier was just one of many outrageous dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. Clinton used the Democratic National Committee to snuff out Bernie Sanders’ bid for her party’s nomination, Clinton also personally authorized the illicit efforts of socialist felon Bob Creamer and organizer Scott Foval who fomented violence at Trump campaign rallies, as James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group revealed in undercover videos.

The dossier, which BuzzFeed admitted is littered with errors, claims the Russians and the Trump campaign worked closely together, yet provides only unsourced evidence and rumors. The dossier is dominated by statements identified as coming from unnamed sources in and around the Trump team, the Kremlin, and the business community.

Will the release of the Nunes memo help calm things down in Congress?

Don’t count on it.