RUTHFULLY YOURS

Recently, Attorney General William Barr met with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier in a surprisingly candid and wide-ranging interview during which he confirmed many of my observations about the FBI and Justice Department’s attempt to interfere with the 2016 election and the peaceful transfer of power from the Obama to the Trump Administrations.

Although Barr gamely blamed the slow-moving “wheels of justice” for the seeming lack of accountability for the many conspirators, we should not forget that the wheels of “injustice” moved rather quickly as the get-Trump forces leveraged the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process and dubious criminal investigations to trump up charges against Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and a Russian catering company that the Department of Justice attempted to prosecute for daring to criticize HIllary Clinton on the internet.

Barr suggested we will learn of criminal indictments before the assigned prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham, issues a report on the Justice Department misconduct. The prosecutions will not reach former president Barack Obama or his vice president. But some of the names will be familiar. Barr declined to name names. For anyone following the Russian collusion hoax over the past three years, the list of possible defendants and people likely to be fired isn’t difficult to guess.

James Comey

The former FBI director may be the most villainous of all of the actors. Prosecution has already been declined for his illegal leaking of the memos he prepared of secret conversations he had with the president, even though that was clearly illegal. It’s pretty obvious that Comey used an early meeting with the president in an attempt to blackmail him with Christopher Steele’s story about Trump cavorting with Russian prostitutes.

Trump responded by asking Comey to investigate to clear his name. Failing at blackmail, Comey went on to use the FBI to promote the Russia collusion hoax while privately assuring the president that he was not the target of an FBI smear campaign. But those issues are not the low-hanging fruit.

Comey should expect to be in big trouble for lying to the FISA court about the FBI spying on thousands of Americans. And Comey also falsely certified to the FISA court three times that the FBI needed to spy on Trump campaign figure Carter Page, even after Page had offered to sit for a voluntary interview. Those lies are crimes that directly resulted in violations of a citizen’s constitutional rights.

If there is to be no punishment for Comey, then the constitutional safeguards in FISA have no meaning. Either Comey gets punished or we need to ban FBI spying on Americans.

Rod Rosenstein

The former deputy attorney general bears a lot of blame for the Russia collusion hoax. A charitable view of history paints him as a panicked bureaucrat thrust into the chaos of the power vacuum as Trump sought to gain control of the government. Rosenstein helped Trump fire Comey, but then ordered and supervised Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the motives of that firing.

Like Comey before him, Rosenstein also falsely certified to the FISA court that the FBI had no less-intrusive means of investigating Carter Page when Page had publicly offered to cooperate with an FBI interview.

Andrew McCabe

The former deputy director of the FBI is possibly the mastermind behind the entire Russia collusion hoax.

McCabe came under fire for his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton because his wife received a huge sum of money from a Clinton ally. McCabe refused to recuse himself from Trump matters and attempted to insulate himself from charges of bias by leaking details of an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. When he was caught, he repeatedly lied to investigators about the leaks. Prosecution was declined. But, there remains the question of McCabe’s involvement in the Michael Flynn case in which he may have played a role in leaking the wiretap transcript of Flynn’s conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to the Washington Post.

Bruce Ohr

In 2016, Justice Department attorney Bruce Ohr and his wife, Nellie Ohr, became heavily involved in the Russia collusion hoax. Nellie worked for Fusion GPS to help gather dirt on Donald Trump while Bruce secretly ferried the dirt to the FBI.

Ohr also sponsored the made-up Steele smears against Trump by acting as a source for the FBI. The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General questioned the ethics of Ohr’s actions in its report on the Carter Page FISA abuses. Indeed, I have spelled out how what Ohr did was a crime. In spite of everything, Ohr still works for the Justice Department.

Kevin Clinesmith

Remember the inspector general’s report that looked into FBI bias during the 2016 election? Kevin Clinesmith authored the “viva la resistance” text that foreshadowed his actions.

Former Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos accused Clinesmith of attempting to get him to lie by saying he had discussed stolen DNC emails with campaign officials. Clinesmith would later contact the CIA to run down a report that Carter Page was actually spying for the CIA (not the Russians). When that report turned out to be true, thus invalidating months of intrusive spying on Page, Clinesmith doctored the CIA’s email so it read, “not a source.” Clinesmith did that for the sole purpose of defrauding the FISA court. The FBI then protected his job and anonymity until he quietly resigned in advance of the inspector general’s report that exposed his fraud.

Perkins Coie/Clinton Campaign

While ex-Trump attorney Michael Cohen languishes in house arrest after pleading guilty to the non-crime of using Trump’s personal money to buy Stormy Daniels’ silence, the Hillary Clinton campaign and its law firm Perkins Coie have never faced the music on multiple campaign finance complaints involving the 2016 election (two involving concealed payments to Fusion GPS, at least one accusing Clinton of illegally laundering $84 million in donations).

While Trump fended off false allegations of colluding with foreigners to tip the 2016 election, Perkins Coie actually engaged a foreigner, Christopher Steele, and his Russian subsource to do exactly what Trump was accused of doing.

Former Perkins Coie alumnus and current Federal Elections Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub never seemed to find the time to look into allegations against her former employer. But she did have plenty of time to perpetuate the Russia collusion hoax from her perch within the FEC.

Glenn Simpson

As I noted at the Federalist, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) made a compelling case that a perjury investigation of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson is warranted.

Simpson testified that Fusion GPS had no client after the election for which his company continued anti-Trump research. This is a lie and a particularly obvious one. Fusion GPS operations against Trump continued after the election and appear to be ongoing.

As Paul Sperry reports, Fusion GPS now works for “The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP and “pumps out daily ‘research briefings’ to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia ‘collusion’ narrative alive.” Sperry also notes, “Simpson also appears to have been the source behind another discredited McClatchy story about Trump attorney Michael Cohen traveling to Prague during the campaign to hatch a plot with Kremlin officials to hack Clinton campaign emails.”

Christopher Steele

I also previously wrote about the potential criminal prosecution of the man behind the infamous Trump opposition research dossier. On February 5, 2018, Senators Grassley and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) referred Christopher Steele for criminal prosecution for lying about his contacts with numerous media organizations prior to the election.

This is extremely relevant to Americans and to Congress, as Steele worked for Hillary Clinton at the same time he passed off his dummy intelligence report to the media in an effort to influence public opinion against Trump.

Steele, of course, is the author and compiler of the infamous opposition research dossier that was the pretext for U.S. intelligence agencies surveilling an opposition party presidential campaign.

For over a year, the attorney general has teased Americans with promises of accountability for the greatest political scandal in modern American history.

But time is not on Barr’s side. As the election approaches, so too does the informal moratorium on “political” prosecutions that seems only to apply when it favors the get-Trump forces. We’ve now had a presidential and a midterm congressional election influenced by the Russian collusion hoax so it’s a little hard to bear complaints about the political consequences of holding the bad actors accountable.

Barr talks the talk. But is he really willing to weather the media firestorm that will rise up to defend the politicized criminal system that has become the status quo?