RUTHFULLY YOURS

The list of marquee speakers for this week’s Democratic National Convention includes more than just a roster of past, current, and future political stars. Several of the perpetrators of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax will take the virtual stage to once again inveigh against Donald Trump.

In a bit of irony, on the same day—Tuesday—that former deputy attorney general Sally Q. Yates is slated to speak, Lee Smith’s new book, The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the President, will hit the shelves. Yates, who signed two of the four illicit FISA applications against Trump campaign aide Carter Page, is a decorated soldier in the ongoing coup against Donald Trump.

In a just world, Yates would be doing prison time for presenting fake evidence to a secret federal court in order to spy on a private U.S. citizen based on his political interests; in the Trump era, however, saboteurs like Yates are heralded as heroines of #TheResistance.

Smith’s book is a sequel to his 2019 New York Times bestseller, The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History, an infuriating account of how Barack Obama’s henchmen concocted and executed, with the full complicity of the American news media, a lawless plan to derail Trump’s candidacy and then overturn the 2016 election after he won. But for Nunes’ fierce pursuit of the truth—even against the objections of some congressional Republicans and at great personal risk—the perpetrators might have succeeded.

The Permanent Coup picks up where Smith left off—a visit with the nine-term Republican congressman in his California home district. After the Senate acquitted Trump in February, the president singled out Nunes for praise during a White House celebration; the packed room gave the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee a standing ovation for taking on the treacherous Obama-Clinton-DNC-media dirty tricks operation almost single-handedly.

Smith updates readers on the subversive collusion stunt gleaned from his own research and interviews with people caught up in the coup, such as Nunes, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and a Turkish businessman pressured by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to squeeze former National Security Advisor  Michael Flynn. Smith also discusses new revelations disclosed from declassified official documents including FBI forms, transcripts from congressional testimony, and unmasking requests; the report on FISA abuse issued late last year by the Justice Department inspector general; court cases involving Christopher Steele and Michael Flynn; and current media reports.

The book deconstructs the infamous Steele dossier and describes how the fabricated document and its Fusion GPS handlers successfully helped the media change the subject from damaging DNC emails the week of the July 2016 convention to Trump-Russia election collusion.

“During the convention, WikiLeaks released Clinton-related emails,” Smith explains. “They were not among the thirty thousand the candidate deleted but instead documented mildly embarrassing intra-DNC debates. In any case, Clinton aides were on the ground ready with an explanation—Russia did it.”

That spin job propelled a three-year national nightmare that started in July 2016 with the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, James Comey’s counterintelligence probe into the Trump presidential campaign, and ended with a disastrous Capitol Hill appearance by feeble-minded Robert Mueller in July 2019.

Smith covers all aspects of both investigations and names all the key players, including journalists at top-tier news organizations. Neither Comey nor Mueller—both of whom served as FBI director for Barack Obama—uncovered evidence of Russian collusion but that didn’t stop the G-men from putting the president, his administration, his family, and the country through hell.

Thanks to unlimited resources and the unwavering support of Republican lawmakers, Mueller’s team of partisan prosecutors left behind an enormous trail of personal and professional wreckage. “Robert Mueller, credited in all corners as a man of honor, had authorized officers of the U.S. government to target sons to bring their powerful fathers to their knees,” Smith wrote, referring to both Donald Trump, Jr. and Michael Flynn, Jr.

An entire chapter is dedicated to former CIA Director John Brennan, who many consider the mastermind of the collusion hoax. Smith interviewed a retired CIA officer who gave a disturbing portrait of the man who once ran the most powerful intelligence apparatus in the world. “Brennan so wanted to show the nefarious nexus between Trump and his campaign and the Russians that he would have done anything to prove it,” the officer told Smith.

Brennan, Smith wrote, also “had it in for [Michael] Flynn, whose plans for reforming intelligence collection threatened the CIA directly.”

The egregious targeting of Flynn, initiated by Obama, Flynn’s onetime boss, is carefully recounted. A former foreign affairs reporter, Smith compares the Obama White House’s setup of Flynn to its sell job of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, one of Obama’s signature accomplishments that Trump—and Flynn—threatened to undo. The strategy worked. Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security advisor after less than a month on the job. “That Obama chose the Islamic Republic as a partner and used tactics against his political rivals that are typically employed by third-world police states partly defines his view of the world and his place in it.”

Smith takes aim at one of the media’s widely-accepted falsehoods—that James Comey’s FBI didn’t “spy” on the Trump campaign. (It did.) But the spying didn’t end after Election Day. “Some of the spies had managed to get inside Trump’s White House,” Smith writes.

This included Obama holdovers populating the National Security Council. One interloper was a young CIA analyst who worked in Trump’s White House for several months before being dispatched back to Langley in June 2017—Eric Ciaramella, also a onetime Joe Biden advisor, would end up acting as the so-called “whistleblower” who claimed Trump’s July 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president amounted to an impeachable offense. “Just two days after the curtain dropped on the Mueller investigation, Ciaramella was rebooting the collusion narrative.”

But just like Russian collusion was a head fake to draw attention away from the Democratic Party’s own self-made scandals in 2016, the Democrats’ impeachment case attempted to deflect increasingly negative coverage about both Joe and Hunter Biden’s shady ties to Ukraine. This included multiple news stories published in the fall of 2019 about the younger Biden’s multimillion-dollar gig with Burisma, a troubled Ukrainian energy producer, and the former vice president’s bragging about offering U.S. aid in exchange for the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma.

The onslaught of bad Biden coverage threatened to sink Biden’s candidacy—so Democrats once again changed the story. (Smith goes into careful detail about the Obama Administration’s dubious and profitable ties to Ukraine.)

“Democrats were turning their problems with Ukraine into Trump’s,” Smith writes. “Donald Trump was impeached, in part, to punish him for asking what Joe and Hunter Biden had been up to in Ukraine. Democrats and the media knew the Bidens were involved in questionable practices.”

Although the Democrats’ impeachment attempt ultimately failed, it did succeed in taking Hunter Biden off the front pages. The coronavirus calamity has kept Biden safely tucked away in the basement of his Delaware home away from prying questions about Ukraine.

But Biden isn’t the only Democratic leader avoiding accountability for his misconduct in office. Smith accurately assigns the five-year, anti-Trump rampage to the person who will headline the DNC’s virtual convention Wednesday night: Barack Obama.

The 44th president is at the center of every Trump-targeting campaign as he eyes regaining de facto control of the White House if Biden wins. As Smith observes, Obama is the first ex-president in nearly a century to remain in Washington, D.C. Biden, Smith concludes, is “just an avatar” for Obama; if his former vice president prevails in November, Obama and his loyalists will be back in charge. “This was the purpose of the coup: to block the agenda that Trump was elected to implement until Obama could retake control through a member of the party he’d shaped in his own image.”

Further, Obama has yet to face a single question about his role in what now is called Obamagate on the Right. The media’s more than decade-long coverup for Barack Obama remains in full bloom.

Collusion hoaxsters, thankfully, suffered their first real blow last week after a former FBI official pleaded guilty to falsifying evidence related to the FISA warrant against Carter Page. Truth-seekers such as Smith undoubtedly are encouraged that U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the investigators might yield more indictments soon. And there’s more good news: The book’s epilogue—“Justice and Michael Flynn”—details how the protracted hit job on the three-star general is falling apart in court.

The fight, however, is far from over. “Every day, it’s three yards and a cloud of dust,” Nunes told Smith.

And that won’t stop after Election Day.  “The coup aimed at toppling Donald Trump will not end in November 2020, whether he is reelected or not. That’s because it is aimed primarily at Americans, whether they support Trump or not. The tyranny that so many fled for the promise of America has taken root here, and so the fight is ongoing. It is the permanent coup.”

Thanks to fearless researchers and writers like Smith, future Americans will have a full account of this treachery. History should not be kind.