by Matt Gaetz
The Russia hoax not only debased Congress and harmed the presidency but it also distracted us from the real threat—namely China. Search your own home and count the things you own that were made in China. And you bought these things when relations were a lot better than they are now. Asia’s largest consumer of energy, China, is right next to Asia’s largest producer, Russia. They are building bridges to one another that could well imperil the free world.
We can beat Russia and other fossil fuel foes just by keeping the price of oil perpetually low. But don’t take my word for it. Ronald Reagan did just that, as Steven Hayward recounts in The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989. It was a deliberate policy of the Reagan administration to bankrupt petrostates even if it wound up hurting Oklahoma and Texas. Never again would Americans wait in line to fuel their cars and go to work. We should finish the job.
The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. The Coal Age didn’t end because we ran out of coal. Nor will the Oil Age end because we have run out of oil. Peak oil is a fantasy. Conservatives decry the Green New Deal because they rightly understand it as a socialist wish list, not a sane way to end our reliance on fossil fuels. Stewardship is not socialism, though, and we should indeed be doing what we can to husband our precious resources before they are gone forever, and think about replacements while we do so.
China is rising while Russia sinks. Even when China mimics Western-style capitalism, it does so with an authoritarian tinge. SenseTime tracks your face. BGI steals your genetics. DJI spies on you from the sky. The end goal of China is to make us all, like too much of China’s Uighur population, suspects under house arrest.
But criticism of Russia and China should not blind us to our own errors. We become like our enemies all too quickly when we think the ends justify the means. In the case of the establishment’s no-holds-barred war on Trump, the Bill of Rights very quickly became just a suggestion. Every civil liberty was thrown out the window in the effort to bring down the president. Baseless surveillance? No problem! Weird federal informants? No big deal! Planting fake stories? Of course! Convincing other countries to illegally monitor Americans? Absolutely cool. Changing evidence before a secret court? Why not! Attempting to entrap members of the president’s family and campaign? How exciting.
And the sick thing is that they thought they were ending American liberties to protect America. How quickly we do wickedness when we justify what’s wrong.
The Obama administration blamed Russia for its failures rather than its own stupidity. Scapegoating, as I suggested earlier, makes things easier emotionally. You don’t have to accept responsibility for, say, having told Russia on a hot mic that you’ll have “more flexibility” after the next election, so they shouldn’t worry too much about conservative hardliners here. On the other hand, you also don’t have to accept responsibility for expanding wars you said you’d end or starting a few new ones along the way.
Obama’s foreign policy misadventures needed scapegoats, and so his team would do anything to make the picture of Russia as an equal power to the U.S. appear true. The Obama team was also too proud to believe that they were outsmarted in an election by Donald Trump. We must have been defeated by the Russians, and they had to be underhanded to get it done! A cabal formed at the top of our government to shift the blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and that effort included President Obama’s closest allies. The recently declassified notes of disgraced former FBI agent and Trump hater Peter Strzok prove that it was Vice President Biden himself who suggested the never-before-used Logan Act to set up General Michael Flynn. Biden had a central role in the Obama era’s corruption. Like the autocratic foreign rulers they so often condemned, they deployed tactics that should never have been used on American soil.
We now know that on the final day of the Obama administration—the same day when I sat in the bleachers watching the president take the oath of office—the outgoing national security advisor, Susan Rice, was sending emails about the Obama group’s stay-behind contingency plan for coping with a Trump presidency they did not see coming, did not want, and would do everything to thwart.
Stalin’s security enforcer Lavrenti Beria, ironically, was the person who said, in a brazen show of elite corruption, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime”—meaning that a sufficiently corrupt investigation can concoct almost anything about anyone. Since the British intelligence consultant Christopher Steele had indeed built the so-called “Trump dossier” largely out of disinformation created by anti-Trump donors and Russia itself, the case against Trump had more in common with KGB-style pressure tactics than did the intensely American, very non-stealthy Trump campaign itself. It still amazes me that the media believed the Trump campaign was able to keep up a criminal conspiracy with Russia when they couldn’t even keep a secret about their own campaign-inspired sexual hijinks. (Don’t judge. Every campaign has some.)
The anti-Trump plotters had a perfect scapegoat in Gen. Michael Flynn, a former Democrat who had publicly joined the calls for Hillary Clinton to be prosecuted. Having served in the Obama administration, Flynn was a traitor in his former colleagues’ eyes and had to be punished severely. His crime was merely behaving as Washingtonians always do once out of office: he wanted to monetize his time in a new way after exiting the military.
With Flynn as the primary target, the man putting the Russia hoax into action was FBI Director James Comey, who Trump—depicted as partisan and paranoid by Democrats—was trusting enough to keep around until May 2017. Trump thought, like many Americans, that the nation’s police and intelligence agencies had a certain code of honor that helped them rise above politics and methodically seek the truth. No such luck, as Trump increasingly grew aware. A disinterested, professional government doesn’t exist.
I suspect that even a political brawler like Trump found it hard to believe, prior to his first term in office, that the Democrats and deep state agencies would disgrace themselves with the kind of dirty tricks they were deploying. At its heart, starting slightly before Trump won the election, the plan was to use thinly sourced or outright fictitious accusations of collusion between his staff and Russia as a pretext to further investigate the Trump campaign. The investigation would then go right on into the new president’s first term. There would be no “honeymoon period” for this president, but there would be plenty of acrimony.
If you thought the president’s marriage to Marla Maples was bumpy, his presidency would prove to be a very wild ride. It was as if a spying maid had been left in the household by a disgruntled ex-wife to dig up dirt on her successor—including any contact, however trivial, between Team Trump and anyone with current or former ties to Russia. Thus Dr. Carter Page was gussied up as a potential Russian agent to enable otherwise baseless surveillance, despite the fact that our own intelligence community was debriefing a cooperative Page following contacts with Russians.
But once Team Trump was under the Obama/Comey spying regime, any forgotten or half-remembered brush with an Eastern European would now be twisted into a verdict of treason—with an obliging press braying its Putin paranoia each night.
Americans tend to trust the federal agencies tasked with enforcing the law, and it became an easy strategy for the Democrats to paint themselves as patient people who just wanted to see what the investigation turned up, even as they fanned the flames of anti-Trump hatred, encouraging the narrative that a man who might be a double agent in thrall to a foreign power was now sitting in the Oval Office.
On May 9, 2018, Trump carved a cancer out of the FBI when he fired James Comey. I got the news while in the Balkans with a bipartisan delegation of the Judiciary Committee. It felt odd lecturing new nations on the importance of a professional and fair judicial system as our president was having to fire the FBI director.
I spent most of the trip with David Cicilline (D-RI). David is a gay former mob lawyer who served as mayor of Providence be
fore entering Congress. One must be smart and tough to be a gay mob lawyer, I figured. David is both. Everyone else on the trip brought a spouse, so David was my platonic travel buddy. We both understood that upon returning to Washington, the fight over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency would be on, and we would each be called to it. Despite our fiery ways and opposing views, we remain friends.
In the days and weeks that followed, Trump’s fellow Republicans could have risen to his defense. Canning Comey was delivering on the promise to “drain the swamp!” It turns out, though, some of the alligators were going to miss him.
The calm, above-the-fray posture of some establishment Republicans made it easier for them to wait instead of pressing the strategic advantage. For those of us who were frustrated, chomping at the bit to make good on our promise of a populist rebellion, it looked as if party leadership might be just as happy if Trump were removed. The only thing permanent in Washington is sloth.
Media and establishment figures on both sides extolled Mueller’s professionalism and low-key objectivity. His biography was endlessly covered so that you didn’t look too closely at what he was doing. Meanwhile, Mueller’s team was shaking down Gen. Flynn, who had briefly become Trump’s national security advisor, threatening to prosecute his son for minor offenses unless Flynn himself pled guilty to “lying” to investigators. The goal of such moves was never justice but the creation of pressure on Trump’s associates to get them to “roll” on their boss.
While I’ve never met Flynn, it’s clear he’s a fan of my work. On several occasions, he would send me direct messages via Twitter with cryptic slogans and images that seemingly encouraged me to keep fighting.
Meanwhile, as media leftists like Rachel Maddow warned nightly that the republic was imperiled, establishment Republicans judiciously “waited to see” what Mueller’s team—stacked with partisan Democrats—would turn up.
Russiagate was a pivotal example of that passive Beltway conservatism that turns, inevitably, into the maintenance of business as usual. Just as many members would rather let an executive agency promulgate a new rule to avoid actual lawmaking, so could play-it-safe Republicans claim they were “waiting to see the results of Mueller’s investigation” before weighing in for or against their president.
That isn’t what we are called to do. Our voters expect us to have our own views, as a coequal branch of government. The separation of powers requires us to think seriously about our duties. Fence-sitting and cowardice are often dressed up as prudence and judicious respect for due process. This passive-aggressive approach to opposing Trump and his populist voters permeates the conservative movement, or at least the Republican Party.
What began during the election with the misguided Twitter hashtag #NeverTrump, used by Republicans who thought they could somehow pressure their party into picking a different standard-bearer, later became a lasting mini-movement of obsolete yet influential “Never Trump” Republicans who would continue to praise Mueller, posture as champions of the rule of law, and find ever-new excuses to fawn over Democrats until Mueller finally delivered his mild, confused, and anti-climactic report.
The #NeverTrumpers promoted their hashtag much as they had promoted the Iraq War and its chaotic aftermath: by repeatedly lying and demonizing anyone who disagreed. If they had their way, we’d be in dozens of wars right now. The faction’s ringleaders included former Bush administration officials William Kristol and David Frum, hated for years by Democrats for defending George W. Bush but now lionized as the “conscience” of the Republican Party. George F. Will, once considered the “dean” of American conservative journalists, also threw in his lot with these unemployed Bush-era holdovers.
While the Trumps had promised we’d get sick of winning, the #NeverTrumpers never tired of losing. I once heard Ivanka Trump share her perspective on this sad batch of loser Republicans. We were riding with her father and brother in the presidential limousine, the famous “Beast.” “They either lose elections, are totally forgotten, or they get a job on CNN/MSNBC,” she dispassionately observed.
Some were still in Congress, though, hiding in plain sight behind the speaker’s rostrum.
With Mueller as a malleable masthead, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused from everything save his own dithering weakness, and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein a secret member of the Resistance, the special counsel’s team of partisans effectively had unbridled power. They used their nascent evidentiary foundation for maximum political effect.
They indicted never-to-be-seen-or-heard-from Russians, harassed innocent members of the First Family, busted Roger Stone for accidentally guessing right about WikiLeaks disclosures, drove up massive legal bills for administration officials, and found out that Paul Manafort was up to no good back in the ’80’s. Not exactly a bargain at roughly $40 million for a taxpayer-funded coup attempt.
Rather than punish these rogue agents, the media empowered them, touting their mendacious books, and even going so far as to promote their crowdfunded legal expenses. Former CIA director John Brennan was allowed to bloviate about the Trump/Russia nonsense nightly on CNN.
Of course, we now know that Brennan said one thing on television and another under oath. TV-Brennan declared Trump “treasonous” and “in the pocket of Putin.” Sworn witness-Brennan sheepishly admitted that there was no basis to allege criminal conspiracy.
Obama-era DNI James Clapper was no better. On CNN, Clapper accused Trump of “essentially aiding and abetting the Russians.” But under oath in 2017, he admitted he “never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”
Whether Brennan, Clinton, or Obama should be considered the real instigator of all this is debatable. But Joe Biden at least acknowledges he was in the room while Obama was discussing how to hand off the Trump investigation to FBI Director Comey after the administration exited. So even sleepy Joe can’t be let off the hook (assuming he remembers he even worked in the White House).
In truth, Biden was one of some dozen Obama officials who were in on the decision to “unmask” surveilled Trump campaign figures—naming them in shared transcripts regardless of whether warrants or charges were being pursued and in the process gaining useful partisan intel on Trump’s allies. All regarded Trump as a dangerous interloper to be stopped by any means necessary.
You get a sense of this urgency in the 2017 film The Final Year. The film chronicles the final moments of the Obama administration when the us-versus-them attitude of the globalist administration is laid bare. The unseen enemy is all those nations who just won’t go along with the optimistic, neoliberal worldview the Obama foreign policy team chants as a mantra. The chief foe for them is Russia—ironic, considering their assiduous efforts to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations.
“The Russian Federation doesn’t care about atrocities committed against people…. When Putin wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t think, ‘How can I prevent mass atrocities today?’ ” said former Obama official (and bestselling author) Samantha Power. Power would later lie to Congress about how often she had unmasked Americans named in foreign intelligence reports, including, of course, Michael Flynn. “Are you truly incapable of shame?” Power asked of Russia before the UN General Assembly. “Is there literally nothing that can shame you?” We should ask her—and her publisher—the same question.
Watching The Final Year, it’s easy to see why so many of the Obama staff worked so hard to preserve the gains they thought they had made. “Putin doesn’t pursue Russia’s interests,” said Ben Rhodes. “He pursues Putin’s interests.” It would similarly be in the interests of the Obama regime to do all they could to oppose Trumpism, especially if (unable to understand him any other way) they thought of Trump as just another self-serving autocrat. “Any thought that any of us might have had that we could go gently into the night, that thought has been vanquished,” Powe
r said. “So we’re in this for the long, long haul.”
To some of us in that fateful spring of 2017, it looked as if the Republicans weren’t even going to fight back. For too long, they seemed content to let the Mueller investigation take its course without turning the magnifying glass back on the investigators themselves, and the cozy network of politicians and intelligence/DOJ operatives behind them.
During my first year in Congress, my best friends worked in the Atlanta Airport, Hartsfield. There was no direct flight from my district to Washington then, so Hartsfield is where I spent much of my free time. One July 2017 layover, I called my mentor, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. “Aren’t you tired of just taking punches in the face, Jim?” I asked. “I’ve got a plan to raise our fists and start swinging back. Wanna hear it?” He did.
Jim Jordan is Congress’s most talented and hardest-working member. Like me, he is not a patient man. He is that rare combination of someone who both honorably serves in Congress and actually likes serving in Congress. A national champion collegiate wrestler and legit political Firebrand himself, Jordan once told me that the reason he loved the job was that every day was a chance to compete hard for something to help people. If I couldn’t convince Jordan, my plan was going nowhere.
“Why is only Trump facing a special counsel? We all know Hillary was using the Clinton Foundation as her international money-laundering operation. We know this ‘dossier’ is Russian interference fueled by the Democrats. Let’s come out for a special counsel to investigate them too!”