Trump's America

by Newt Gingrich

  Get real. The only reason Comey had a college professor leak these memos was to give Comey’s media allies the cover they needed to carry out the vendetta of a disgruntled ex-employee. Naturally, the media used the memos (which represent only Comey’s views) to float the absurd story that President Trump attempted to obstruct justice during the investigation of Flynn. Also consider this: Before Comey was fired, he was the head of the FBI. At any point in time, if he had believed a special counsel was needed to investigate alleged Russian interference—or even the president’s words or actions—he could have asked Congress to appoint one. Alternatively, he could have approached the attorney general’s office with concerns. He didn’t do any of this. The absurdity of Comey’s testimony was punctuated when Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, explicitly asked Comey “whether there was any kind of investigation about the President underway” and “was the President under investigation at the time of [Comey’s] dismissal on May 9?”

  Under oath, Comey answered “no” to both questions.

  Comey’s answer to Collins’s questions revealed the vindictiveness behind his memo-leak ploy. Comey saw no need for a special investigator until after he was canned. This was a clear act of retaliation. He wanted to cause the Trump White House pain, so when he saw an opportunity to do so, he took it.

  Another clue that the appointment of Mueller and the special investigation was a thinly veiled effort to undermine the president was the profuse flattery Comey poured on Mueller during his testimony. Over the course of the testimony, Comey referred to Mueller as “one of the finest people and public servants this country has ever produced.” He described Mueller as “one of… this country’s great, great pros,” and he said Mueller was the “right person” to lead the investigation. It all came together for me after the testimony. Comey got fired, so he worked behind the scenes to set up his good friend Mueller as a special counsel to seek vengeance on the man who fired him.

  At this point, I realized the special investigation was not about law and order. It was about a fired employee getting vengeance and the federal bureaucracy trying to assert its control over a president its members deeply oppose. Remember 97 percent of Justice Department employees who made campaign contributions during the 2016 election gave to Clinton over Trump.7

  BUILT-IN BIAS

  Despite these revelations about how the special counsel was appointed, a small remainder of my initial optimism that Mueller’s investigation might end up being an honest search for truth still remained. That hope was promptly destroyed once Mueller started putting his team together. The web of inherent bias is so thick in Mueller’s team, it is difficult to describe in text alone. Many of these attorneys are career Justice Department employees or worked with Mueller at the private law firm WilmerHale. At least one has faced allegations related to overzealous prosecutions and had major convictions overturned by the Supreme Court.

  Many others have overwhelmingly donated to Democrats—specifically Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Combined, Federal Elections Commission records show Mueller’s team has donated almost $50,000 to Democratic candidates over the last 12 years. They’ve given a mere $2,750 to Republicans. Some played roles in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, including the decisions not to put Clinton under oath or charge her with any crimes. Others have more direct financial and political ties to Clinton.

  Consider Andrew McCabe: McCabe was the deputy director of the FBI. He was in charge of the Washington, DC, office as it was carrying out the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

  Judicialwatch.org8 reported in November 2017 that days after the email server scandal became public, Jill McCabe, Andrew McCabe’s wife, was recruited by Democratic Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to run for the Virginia State Senate. McAuliffe is a former Clinton Foundation board member and is close to the Clintons. Shortly after McCabe’s wife announced her candidacy, McAuliffe arranged $700,000 in campaign donations for her from the state party and Clinton allies.

  Meanwhile, McCabe continued working on the Clinton email server case and didn’t recuse himself from the investigation until one week before the 2016 election. Subsequently, McAuliffe is now under investigation for campaign–Clinton Foundation funding issues. McCabe was urged to retire from the FBI in January over this glaring conflict.

  Jeannie Rhee is another clear example of pro-Clinton bias. She is a former partner at Mueller’s old law firm, WilmerHale, and a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Prior to this, however, she was an attorney for the Clinton Foundation. Additionally, Rhee donated a total of $5,400 to Hillary Clinton in 2015 and 2016. Before that, she gave a combined $4,800 to Barack Obama in 2008 and 2011.

  Then, you have Andrew Weissmann, a career DOJ prosecutor who gave $2,300 to Obama’s 2008 campaign and $2,000 to the DNC in 2006. Weissmann is most known for leading the Enron Task Force. During that prosecution, he allegedly intimidated witnesses and hid evidence that he should have disclosed to the defense.

  Ultimately, his conviction in the case against the accounting firm Arthur Anderson was overturned 9–0 by the Supreme Court. The high court ruled no crimes had been committed. Still, Weissmann’s overzealous prosecution of Arthur Anderson destroyed the company and cost 85,000 people their jobs.

  Aside from his history of donating to Democrats, and his attending Hillary Clinton’s election night party in 2016,9 Weissmann expressed his opposition to the Trump administration early on. After acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was an Obama appointee like Weissmann, ordered DOJ lawyers not to defend against legal challenges to the Trump administration’s initial ban restricting travel to and from several terrorism-wracked countries, Weissmann reportedly emailed Yates to congratulate her on refusing to uphold her oath of office.

  Early on, Weissmann was hailed as one of Mueller’s top lawyers. The New York Times referred to him as Mueller’s “pit bull.” In this case, the Times may be right. Weissmann’s actions seem more like those of a trained attack dog than an unbiased prosecutor seeking truth.

  Another longtime Democrat supporter on the team is James Quarles. A former WilmerHale partner and federal prosecutor who worked on the Watergate case, Quarles has given to Democratic Political Action Committees for decades. He gave more than $7,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last 10 years. However, in 2015, Quarles also donated $2,500 to former Utah Congressman Representative Jason Chaffetz. This list goes on and on. Victor Davis Hanson points out another conflicted attorney on the team: Aaron Zebley, who previously represented the Hillary Clinton IT staffer who reportedly built her illegal home email server—and who smashed her BlackBerries so they couldn’t be subpoenaed. Unbiased indeed.

  To the best of my knowledge, there are no Trump supporters on the Mueller team.

  Each one of these examples calls into question the integrity of Mueller’s investigation. However, they are small potatoes compared to other recent examples of profound anti-Trump, pro-Clinton bias at the heart of Mueller’s operation.

  THE PAGE-STRZOK AFFAIR

  As I am writing this book, we are learning more and more about the extraordinary, deep-seated bias shared by two early members of Mueller’s team—FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Page and Strzok were members of the Mueller investigation, but they were quietly reassigned in the summer of 2017. However, their reassignments later made big headlines. Page and Strzok were also members of the team investigating Clinton’s illegal email server in the spring and summer of 2016. The DOJ Office of Inspector General found the two had previously exchanged more than 50,000 text messages, many of which were fiercely anti-Trump and frequently pro-Clinton. Importantly, they exchanged these messages while they were investigating Clinton.

  Aside from occasionally bashing Trump with vulgar language, some of the texts apparently referenced sensitive stories which had been leaked to the press, and one referenced an “insurance policy” in case Trump won the election. On Augu
st 15, 2016,10 Strzok sent Page a message saying, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

  The “Andy” in this text is reportedly McCabe. The Wall Street Journal reported on December 18, 2017,11 that the “insurance policy” was the then budding idea among FBI leaders to investigate alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The implication is that the entire investigation into Trump was hatched by hyper-partisan FBI agents due to their dislike of the incoming president.

  Interestingly, in a later text to Page on May 19, 2017,12 Strzok expressed concern about joining Mueller’s team because he thought it might be a waste of time. “You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern that there’s no big there there,” Strzok wrote. This shows Strzok clearly only cared about this investigation if he “thought it was likely” to be able to take down Trump. We have already learned that Strzok is not above influencing important FBI decisions more directly. In fact, when it became clear that the 2016 election would be between Trump and Clinton, he texted Page saying, “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE.”

  MYE is reportedly the acronym for “midyear exam,”13 the FBI code name for the Clinton email case.

  Further, during the FBI’s probe into Clinton’s private emails—and specifically her handling of classified information—Strzok reportedly changed language in Comey’s statement describing Clinton’s actions14 from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless.”

  This change is significant. Gross negligence is a specific legal term that carries a specific meaning. Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute defines gross negligence as:

  A lack of care that demonstrates reckless disregard for the safety or lives of others, which is so great it appears to be a conscious violation of other people’s rights to safety. It is more than simple inadvertence and can affect the amount of damages.

  This is a term that could clearly lead to the prosecution of Clinton. “Extreme carelessness” apparently could not. An FBI investigator would know that.

  This language change perhaps sheds light on why Strzok said in a July 1, 2016, text message to Page that then Attorney General Loretta Lynch, knew “no charges will be brought” against Clinton in the email scandal a full four days before Comey made public his decision not to prosecute Clinton.

  It’s unclear if Strzok was able to influence the early Russia investigation the way he reportedly influenced the outcome of the Clinton email probe. This uncertainty is compounded by the fact that the FBI is claiming it failed to retain texts from Strzok’s phone over a five-month span due to a technical glitch. Conveniently, that five-month gap goes from December 14, 2016 to May 7, 2017—the first three months of the Trump presidency, when the so-called Russian collusion story was being covered full tilt.

  Attorney General Sessions announced in late January that he was going to investigate this supposed gap in information and turn whatever he found over to Congress for review. Sessions told Fox News that,15 “We will leave no stone unturned to confirm with certainty why these text messages are not now available to be produced and will use every technology available to determine whether the missing messages are recoverable from another source.”

  While you are considering all this, remember that 97 percent of DOJ employees who made campaign donations supported Clinton in the 2016 election. If these texts can be recovered, it will provide very interesting insights into the depth of Trump resistance at the top of the FBI establishment.

  REAL COLLUSION

  For those of us in Trump’s America, the bitter ironies behind the Russian collusion narrative are that our own government attempted to influence our 2016 election far more than Russia ever could, and the overwhelming evidence shows that the Clinton campaign colluded with Russia to undermine Trump, not vice versa.

  These two facts are unassailable.

  The real story of Russian collusion starts with the so-called Trump dossier produced by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research firm that was started by former Wall Street Journal reporters. During the primary, the Washington Free Beacon reportedly hired the firm to do opposition research on Trump when he was a candidate. Once he won the nomination, the Democratic National Committee retained Fusion GPS via the law firm Perkins Coie to do the same research. In the course of its work, Fusion GPS hired a former British Intelligence agent named Christopher Steele to do research on Trump’s businesses overseas. The firm paid this ex-spy roughly $160,000, according to testimony16 Fusion GPS co-owner Glenn Simpson gave before the House Intelligence Committee. According to Simpson, Steele didn’t actually go to Russia—that would have been dangerous since he was an outed former MI6 agent. So, instead, Steele reached out to his sources in Russia.

  Simpson declined to share Steele’s Russian sources with the Committee, citing security reasons, however, he did say he “knew generally where they’re positioning. In other words, we would discuss generally where that person sat in relation to a senior government official or, you know, what other position they held.”

  Based on information from these Russian sources, Steele developed an extraordinarily salacious, controversial dossier on candidate Trump. Steele then turned that over to Fusion GPS, and ultimately decided it was so damning he needed to share it with the FBI. Interestingly, Simpson acknowledged at the time that he “wasn’t convinced of the facts of anything in terms of—I wasn’t convinced that there was a specific crime that occurred.”

  From there, the illicit (unverified and likely unverifiable) dossier floated around Washington, piquing the interest of the anti-Trump coalition, and quietly fanning the flames of the Russian collusion narrative, which heated up once the DNC’s computers had reportedly been hacked. Despite this, President Trump won the election.

  At some point after this—the timeline is unclear—Simpson and Steele met with Bruce Ohr, who is yet another member of Mueller’s team of witch hunters.

  According to CNN, Fusion GPS had “contracted with Nellie Ohr [Ohr’s wife] to help with its ‘research and analysis of Mr. Trump,’ and that Simpson met with Bruce Ohr, ‘at his request, after the November 2016 election to discuss our findings regarding Russia and the election.’” Forget partisan bias for a moment, how is Bruce Ohr supposed to take an objective view of his wife’s work? The most flabbergasting thing about this entire Russian collusion story is the anti-Trump coalition’s willingness to ignore facts that are in plain view.

  Here’s what we know for sure:

  The DNC (which was under Hillary Clinton’s control) paid for some exceptionally damning opposition research on Donald Trump that was sourced from Russians. Then this Clinton-financed, Russian-sourced dossier of damning information was shared with the FBI as evidence that Trump was colluding with Russians to get damning evidence about Hillary Clinton—and the FBI is taking it seriously.

  GOING FORWARD

  At this time the president has agreed to be interviewed by Mueller under oath, although lawyers are working out conditions.

  The first thing Trump’s lawyers should do is ask Mueller what crime he is investigating. Then, following the spirit of the Manafort lawsuit, they should agree only to sit for questions about alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election. They should make Mueller put his case on the table.

  If, as I suspect, the Russian collusion trail has produced nothing, then the burden should be on Mueller to define what grounds he has for taking up the president of the United States’ time—and using the American taxpayers’ dollars.

  Make no mistake. Mueller’s out-of-control special prosecutor investigation is the greatest threat President Trump faces. He should meet with Scooter Libby to understand that being innocent isn’t enough if a prosecutor sets out to get you. The president need
s to focus on this and prepare for it as the mortal threat it is.

  National Review editor Andrew McCarthy has a few more pointed questions, which he wrote about in a column on February 17, 2018.17 He suggests that Trump’s lawyers ask the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel two questions:

  • “Why is there a special counsel in the Russia investigation?”

  • “May the president of the United States be charged with obstruction based on non-criminal discretionary acts that are unquestionably within his constitutional authority as chief executive?”

  The heart of McCarthy’s argument is that in the United States, law enforcement officers have to actually have evidence that a crime has been committed before they bring a case. As McCarthy puts it, “in the absence of such evidence, a prosecutor should never be assigned to investigate whether an American may have committed some unknown crime.”

  The Russian collusion investigation is a counterintelligence probe—not a criminal investigation. Further, alleged links between President Trump or any of his former team members are not illegal, McCarthy argues.