Another issue that needed investigation was the FBI application filed in October of 2016 for a surveillance warrant from the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), that enabled them to spy on the Trump campaign. The Steele dossier again was used to provide a basis for the application. FBI officials, including Comey, conceded later that they never verified the claims in the document. But they went ahead anyway with the application for the warrant.
It also appears that FBI and Justice officials did not adequately disclose to the court the political origins of the dossier. If the court was intentionally misled, that would be fraud, and those who signed off on the application, including Comey, could be prosecuted.
These issues need to be fully investigated, because they turn on whether there have been serious abuses of power by the leaders of our government, in the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department and even by the former president, Barack Obama.
Looking back on the whole saga, there is good reason to believe that the drive to portray Trump as compromised, was orchestrated by members of the intelligence community, officials of the Justice Department and possibly Obama.
This cabal, oriented to the neo-con interventionist mindset, wanted to make sure that the hawkish Hillary Clinton won the presidency. They didn't like Trump. The New York businessman, who had talked in his campaign about improving relations with Russia and staying away from interventions such as Syria, was seen as an unreliable commodity, who couldn't be trusted to do the right thing.
What better way to undermine Trump's campaign than to paint him as a Russian agent --- after an FBI-authorized investigation found that Democratic National Committee campaign computers were hacked by Russians and information damaging to Clinton was then given to Wikileaks for publication? It was a perfect storyline. Trump had sold out to the Russians.
The transcripts of cell phone text messages between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, released by the Inspector General and a Senate committee in January 2018, point to a conspiracy by FBI officials and others to frame Trump and block his election.
Strzok, who was the lead investigator in the Trump probe, and his paramour, Lisa Page, an agency attorney, exchanged numerous messages in which they showed a hatred for Trump and an strong preference for Clinton. They used profanities to describe Trump.
Then in one message to Page, Strzok referenced a meeting in FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's office, in which Trump's election chances were discussed.
"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," Strzok wrote.
What was the insurance policy? Apparently it was using the counter intelligence probe into the Trump campaign to gain negative information about Trump and use that, together with the dossier, to spread misinformation in the media about the GOP candidate and thwart his election.
Another text message from Page to Strzok linked Obama to the conspiracy.
"POTUS wants to know everything we're doing," Page wrote.
After his surprising election victory, the drive against Trump turned into a coup attempt. First, anti-Trump forces took the highly-unusual step of trying to persuade electors in the Electoral College to change their votes from Trump to Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State and military hawk. That didn't work.
In the spring of 2017, according to a report on "60 Minutes," McCabe, Rosenstein and other officials discussed the idea of Rosenstein wearing a wire and then meeting with Trump and seeing if the president might say something incriminating. If that happened, members of the Cabinet were going to be asked to invoke the 25th amendment, which allows the Cabinet to remove a president if he or she is deemed unable to carry out the duties of their office. There was never any follow-up on this discussion, which Rosenstein denies having.
With respect to the entire Russia-collusion case, the actions of FBI and Justice Department officials, CIA Director John Brennan (who behind the scenes peddled the phoney Steele dossier to members of Congress and the media) and President Obama, need to be thoroughly investigated by Congress or by an independent commission.
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