ROGER KIMBALL: Remembering What Was Done to the Trump Administration.
It begins back in 2015, when the resources of the federal government were mobilized to spy on the Trump campaign, and then to frame various people close to candidate, then President Trump, and eventually to launch a full-throated criminal investigation of the Trump administration.
Cooper gets it exactly right: “The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1.”
Remember the Steele Dossier, the fantastical document confected by the “well-regarded” British spook Christopher Steele?
It was the only relevant predicate for ordering FISA warrants against Carter Page and other American citizens.
But the dossier was oppo research covertly paid for by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was a tissue of lies and fabrications.
Everyone involved (but not the media, which gleefully circulated and commented on it) knew all along it was garbage.
But it was nonetheless used to deploy the awesome coercive power of the state against a presidential candidate of whom the ruling bureaucracy disapproved.
It was OK to subject Carter Page and others to secret FBI investigations, to mount dawn-raids (carefully coordinated with CNN so they could televise them) against the president’s colleagues.
Cooper limns the evolution of the story: “We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. [James] Comey [disgraced former director of the FBI] denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.”
Penalty for that? Comey gets a huge book deal and tours the country denouncing Trump to the gleeful satisfaction of his anti-Trump audiences.
Cooper is right: what was true of Comey was true of “everyone, from CIA Dir[ector John] Brennan & Adam Schiff—who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t—all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.”
It was all fake. Recollect that.
One guy who wasn’t a member of the political establishment got elected President, and virtually the entire political establishment — from both parties — united to destroy him. What does that say about the political establishment?
I think it says they’re deathly afraid that the great mass of Americans will find out what’s been done to them.