by Sean Hannity
How about Saint Jim’s claims that he doesn’t lie? Comey signed off on the very first FISA application against Page and then two more renewals. Every one of those warrant requests was marked “verified” at the top of the document. He swore three times that the evidence in those applications was true, accurate, and verified. None of it was.
He also misled President-elect Trump when he went to “warn” him about the dossier in January 2017. Comey outright told Trump that he was not the target of an investigation. But one of the Horowitz reports revealed that Comey was using that meeting to probe Trump for information and to get his reaction to the dirty dossier. He didn’t tell Trump that just a couple of months earlier he’d signed a FISA into one of his campaign aides. He instead told Trump the very dossier that he’d verified as truthful in that application was “salacious and unverified.”48
About the only FBI official who even competed with Comey on the liar front was his deputy. Andrew McCabe was also fired from the FBI for lying. Horowitz issued a separate report about McCabe’s behavior in February 2018, a seething rebuke of the fired deputy director. It examined McCabe’s role in disclosing the existence of an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. McCabe’s wife had run for state election in Virginia and taken money from a Clinton ally, and McCabe was getting questioned over his impartiality. So he authorized the release of information to the Wall Street Journal, resulting in a story that suggested McCabe was heroically pushing forward a Clinton investigation.
The Horowitz report slammed him for a leak designed solely to “advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership” and for lying about the leak. The IG said McCabe was guilty of “lack of candor”—that’s “lying” in FBI-speak—at least three times under oath in talks with investigators. He also told Comey he didn’t know who was behind the leak. And he was unclear with investigators about what he’d told Comey.49 And he blamed FBI colleagues for his own leak. This troubled relationship with the truth is presumably why Fake News CNN hired McCabe as a commentator—he fits right in.
This is the same McCabe who says that in the spring of 2017 he discussed with Rosenstein a plan to have the deputy attorney general wear a wire during conversations with Trump and secretly try to recruit cabinet members to remove the president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.50 Assuming McCabe’s being honest just this once, let’s call this what it was: McCabe was actively working to stage a coup against the commander in chief.
Yet McCabe also skipped out of jail time. Washington prosecutors ended his case in February 2020, after the same disgraced FBI cabal that caused this mess came to his rescue. The New York Times earlier reported, “A key witness in the case—Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer whom Mr. McCabe authorized to speak to the Wall Street Journal reporter—also told the grand jury that he was not motivated to lie about the episode…. Her sympathetic testimony to Mr. McCabe would most likely be a problem for prosecutors.”51
These FBI officials weren’t the only government players engaged in mass corruption. They had help from the intel community. Never forget Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s warning to Trump in January 2017. The Obama intel groups had rushed to release their official “assessment” of Russian interference in the 2016 election and to distort intelligence to claim that Putin had interfered specifically to get Trump elected. The president-elect correctly pointed out that intelligence forces were playing politics. Schumer crowed that Trump would rue the day he said that. “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC.52
They were already sabotaging Trump under the direction of partisans like former CIA head John Brennan. Intel community leaders were part of the plot to gin up the investigation into Trump, his associates, his campaign, his transition, and later his presidency. And they were likely behind the leaks of raw intelligence designed to sabotage Trump team members like Flynn.
Since crawling from the CIA straight into the arms of NBC News and MSNBC, Brennan has repeatedly made vicious, bitter accusations against Trump. He’s called the president’s behavior “treasonous” and once raged on Twitter at Trump, “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.” Maybe no surprise then that in a May 2017 congressional hearing, Brennan claimed he was the guy behind the Trump investigation. He said the CIA discovered intelligence about contacts between Russian officials and Americans and made sure every “bit” of it was shared with the FBI. He claimed those details “served as the basis for the FBI investigation.”53
Brennan is also the reason the story exploded on the public in the fall of 2016. Brennan kept pushing through the spring and summer of 2016 for the intel community to take the line that Russia was working to get Trump elected, but he couldn’t convince some of his colleagues to go that far. So he used an August meeting with former Senate minority leader Harry Reid to voice his conspiracy theory. And sure enough, Mr. Reid instantly sent a letter to Comey—which leaked—asking about the “direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” He demanded the FBI launch a full investigation, just as Brennan had hoped.54
THE FINAL STEP: ACCOUNTABILITY
It was law enforcement and intel figures who perpetrated the corruption. But we also need to hold to account the people who then aided it and covered it up, pursuing their own agenda against Trump. Mueller is at the top of that list. Mueller had the opportunity—the obligation—to get to the truth about the political corruption, the dossier, the FBI’s abuse of power, and its lies. He instead kept alive the FBI’s collusion hoax for years, feeding the fevered anti-Trump press and undermining the Trump administration’s ability to govern.
The fix was in the minute Mueller chose for his team the same Obama holdovers who had worked side by side with Comey and McCabe and former deputy attorney general Sally Yates on their Trump takedown. That included prosecutors like Andrew “Pit Bull” Weissmann and Jeannie Rhee, both fervent Democrats. Of the seventeen attorneys whom Mueller had publicly appointed by 2018, thirteen were registered Democrats and half of those had donated to Clinton’s presidential campaign.55 This group hired an army of investigators, subpoenaed millions of documents, and spent more than $30 million in a desperate attempt to prove a collusion accusation that the FBI already knew was false.
Mueller’s team left a trail of devastation. It went after Flynn and other Trump officials for “lying” to the FBI or the special counsel. That included George Papadopoulos, who from the start had cooperated with the FBI and the special counsel investigation but was sentenced to two weeks in jail anyway. The team jailed former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for unrelated financial crimes. Ditto former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Manafort—who was never accused of any violent crimes—was held in solitary confinement and locked in a cell for twenty-three hours a day as part of an intense pressure campaign to get him to plead guilty. Roger Stone endured a predawn raid by more than a dozen armed FBI agents at his house, where a CNN news crew just happened to be positioned at the time. This is not how our American democracy and system of justice are supposed to work.
And yet here’s what Mueller never found: a single case of a Trump person conspiring with Russians. His final 448-page report had to admit he failed to discover a shred of evidence to support the insane conspiracy theories of the prior three years.
Still, Mueller’s team couldn’t leave it at that—his report included an entire second section meditating on whether President Trump had committed “obstruction of justice” throughout the Mueller probe. The team was furious Trump had questioned their motives and denounced their probe as a “witch hunt.” So they devoted 187 pages to Trump’s tweets and whether he had ordered Mueller fired. The very fact that Mueller completed his project—and was provided every resource he needed—was proof there was never any obstruction. Unable to recomme
nd prosecution for a nonexistent crime, Mueller left it to DOJ superiors to decide whether his obstruction “evidence” was worthy of an indictment. The DOJ determined there was absolutely no ground for a case, but Mueller’s real interest was in providing Democrats in Congress a road map for impeachment.
Cue the Mueller House testimony of July 2019. Democrats vowed the special counsel would bring his report “to life.”56 They promised Mueller would swoop in and prove that Trump remained an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a separate Mueller prosecution—thereby laying the groundwork for impeachment. Instead, Mueller’s stumbling, incoherent House testimony was an epic embarrassment. He spent the day confused and dazed, unable to remember basic facts, slow to comprehend questions, and evasive or clueless on anything to do with Hillary, the dossier, or obvious FBI malfeasance. “I’m not going to get into that” was his favorite line. By the end, the media was in mourning, the most depressed they’d been since Trump was elected.
Republicans on the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees did their job: they highlighted just how badly Mueller had failed in his most basic mission. The special counsel’s job was to look at Russian interference in the 2016 election, but he failed to investigate what the FBI itself strongly suspected: that the Russians interfered in the election by feeding disinformation into Christopher Steele’s dossier. In fact, Mueller’s team was so intent on protecting the FBI, it refused to investigate the dossier at all. “Can you state with confidence the Steele dossier was not part of Russia’s disinformation campaign?” Florida congressman Matt Gaetz asked the special counsel during the hearing. Mueller dodged, saying questions about the dossier “predated” him.57
Another hype-and-cover-up award goes to crazed congressional Democrats. To serve as one of the country’s elected congressional representatives is one of the highest honors in the land. Sure, we expect the political parties to engage in spin and politics. But we also expect them to play by the rules of the game, abide by the Constitution, and tell the truth.
Democrats for decades positioned themselves as the party of “civil liberties,” the party that cared the most about intrusive government surveillance. Some of them probably really believed it. But that’s what makes their actions throughout the Russian hoax all the harder to stomach. They were willing to abandon every principle they’d ever claimed—cheering on the FBI’s violations of Carter Page’s liberties and its manufacturing of process crimes against other wrongly accused Trump aides—in order to hide their party’s role in the dossier trick and to try to remove Trump from office.
When Congressman Devin Nunes in March 2017 uncovered evidence that the Obama White House had in its waning days been unmasking the names of Trump transition officials in intelligence reports, he held a press conference. He was convinced his news that an outgoing administration had been surveilling an incoming one would provoke strong bipartisan condemnation. Yet even the seasoned Nunes—who was used to partisan warfare—was shocked by Democrats’ response. Instead of joining him to ask for answers, they accused him of mishandling classified information. They were still in a rage about the Trump win and willing to say or do anything to protect the corrupt actions of Obama officials.
Leading the Democratic assault on Nunes was none other than his counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff. I’ll have a lot more on Shifty Schiff in the next chapter on impeachment. But suffice it to say the Russian hoax was where Schiff first cemented his reputation as a congenital liar.
After Trump was inaugurated, Schiff spent more than two years distorting and perverting Intel Committee information, misleading the public into believing the dossier hoax. The more Nunes and Republican members of the committee unraveled the truth of the dossier-FBI lies, the more Schiff publicly doubled down, telling Americans he had proof that Trump was a Manchurian candidate. As early as March 2017—before Comey was fired or Mueller hired—Schiff told NBC’s Chuck Todd that “there is more than circumstantial evidence” of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia.58 In December 2017, he revealed the supposed details to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the president made full use of that help.”59 The Mueller report proved every word of this Schiff statement a lie, but the public wouldn’t get that truth for another eighteen months. Schiff engaged in the same pattern of deception with his memo on the Carter Page FISA applications, claiming the FBI committed no abuses whatsoever and that the dossier information used in the applications was corroborated. But again, the country had to wait nearly two years for Horowitz to set the record straight.
While Schiff was publicly hoodwinking the nation, behind the scenes he was working to obstruct and hinder Republican efforts to get to the truth. He objected to nearly every element of Nunes’s FISA abuse investigation—including the subpoena that eventually revealed that the Democrats had funded the dossier—and his legal staff objected to Republican questions during depositions to help shield witnesses (like Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson) from answering. Schiff’s steady stream of falsehoods was designed to undercut Republican facts, to give the media mobsters new, shiny tales to chase.
Most damaging, Schiff acted as chief spokesman for the Democratic campaign to present the entire Republican effort to get to the truth as nothing more than damaging partisan politics. Asked about GOP concerns about bias on the Mueller team, Schiff in that same December Tapper interview said, “The intent here is nothing short of discrediting Mueller, then discrediting the Justice Department, then discrediting the FBI, then discrediting the judiciary… this is an effort to tear at the very idea that there is an objective truth.”60
Schiff’s colleague in the Senate, Intelligence Committee vice chairman Mark Warner, was no better. At the center of the Senate’s bipartisan Russia investigation, Warner must have known there was never any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. Yet to this day, he insists Trump may have been conspiring with Putin to win the election. They all do. Democrats promised Mueller would be the final word on their conspiracy theory. But now that we have the truth, have any of them accepted that judgment? Have any of them apologized? Not at all. The Russia conspiracy theories go on.
Aided, of course, by the final, fraudulent players in this scandal: the media. The press continues to pretend to be arbiters of truth and facts. But the Russia hoax showed them to be nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. They spent three years peddling baseless conspiracy theories simply because they fit a vengeful, psychotic, anti-Trump narrative.
For more than a thousand days, it was Russia, Russia, Russia, with minute-by-minute headlines. Americans were told Trump campaign members had engaged in repeated interactions with Russian intelligence; that Trump Jr. and Michael Cohen and Carter Page and Roger Stone were all Russian cutouts; that the Russians had a server in Trump Tower; that Manafort secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; that the National Rifle Association laundered Russian money for the Trump campaign. All complete lies. And all from supposedly legitimate “news” outfits: the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, McClatchy, CNN, MSNBC, and many others.
And when the press isn’t lying, it’s busy spinning its narrative—again, all to undermine Trump. They promised us that Steele was a brilliant spymaster and that the FBI was motivated by nothing but good intentions. They assured that the government had fail-proof safeguards to protect against surveillance abuse and that anybody who suggested otherwise was spinning a “conspiracy theory.”
We at the Hannity TV and radio shows were among the people most frequently accused by this preening press corps of floating those conspiracies. And again, that’s why the Horowitz report was so valuable. We never went out with a story until we had corroboration; we crossed every “t” and dotted every “i.” We told the country the truth.
It was the swamp that perpetrated a massive fraud on the nation.
For all we learned from the Horowitz report, there�
��s still much we don’t know. Horowitz couldn’t issue subpoenas or empanel a grand jury. He was entitled to speak only to currently employed members of the DOJ and FBI, which meant he had to rely on the cooperation of former employees. Some weren’t very helpful. Horowitz reported, for instance, that “loyal” Jim Comey refused to have his security clearance renewed as part of his interview—a clear attempt to evade tough questions related to classified information.61 Horowitz also couldn’t interview witnesses in other intel agencies or private or political actors.
But current U.S. attorney John Durham has no such constraints. Attorney General William Barr in May 2019 assigned the Connecticut prosecutor the job of investigating the origins of the Trump investigation. Durham’s reputation is that of a crack investigator, with a history of probing government malfeasance. His past jobs included looking into accusations of CIA abuse of detainees and the FBI’s ties to mob figures in Boston. He’s widely respected as tough and no-nonsense.
There are already indications Durham is digging into the spring of 2016, the crucial months prior to the FBI opening up its “official” counterintelligence investigation. Indeed, when Horowitz issued his report, Durham took the rare step of issuing a public statement that took issue with the IG’s claim of sufficient “predicate.” While he had “utmost respect” for the work Horowitz put into his report, Durham’s team did “not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”62
Durham will hopefully get to the truth about whether the United States was outsourcing intelligence gathering to friendly countries like Italy, Great Britain, and Australia in order to circumvent laws against spying on Americans. He needs to look into the political side of this equation, and what role Fusion GPS, Democrats, and Obama officials had from the start, and what they knew as it went along. What were the roles of Brennan, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former national security adviser Susan Rice, and former attorney general Loretta Lynch? What, for that matter, did Barack Obama know? We now know that Brennan, Clapper, Biden, former ambassador Samantha Power, former Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough, and dozens of other Obama officials unmasked Flynn’s name in intelligence reports. We need to know which other Trump associates were unmasked and who criminally leaked information on them.