Did You Hear A Superonic BOOM? Avez-vous entendu un boom superonique?

By John Solomon
Opinion Contributor 

Don’t tell former FBI general counsel James Baker that those now-infamous discussions about secretly recording President Donald Trump and using the tapes to remove him from office were a joke.

He apparently doesn’t believe it. And he held quite the vantage point — he was on the inside of the bureau’s leadership in May 2017, when the discussions occurred.

Baker told Congress last week that his boss — then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe — was dead serious about the idea of surreptitiously recording the 45th president and using the evidence to make the case that Trump should be removed from office, according to my sources.

Baker told lawmakers he wasn’t in the meeting that McCabe had with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in which the subject came up. But he did have firsthand conversations with McCabe and the FBI lawyer assigned to McCabe, Lisa Page, about the issue. 

“As far as Baker was concerned, this was a real plan being discussed,” said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation. “It was no laughing matter for the FBI.”

Word of Baker’s testimony surfaces just days before Rosenstein is set to be interviewed in private on Thursday by House Judiciary Committee lawmakers.

Since The New York Times first reported the allegations, Rosenstein, the No. 2 Department of Justice (DOJ) official, has tried to downplay his role in them. His office has suggested that he thought the discussions were a joke, that Rosenstein never gave an order to carry out such a plot, and that he does not believe Trump should be removed from office.

But making those statements through a spokesperson is a bit different than having Rosenstein himself face Congress and answer the questions under penalty of felony if lawmakers think he is lying.

Baker’s account to lawmakers this month clearly complicates an already complicated picture for Rosenstein before Congress, assuming he shows up for Thursday’s interview.

But even more so, Baker’s story lays bare an extraordinary conversation in which at least some senior FBI officials thought it within their purview to try to capture the president on tape and then go to the president’s own Cabinet secretaries, hoping to persuade the senior leaders of the administration to remove the president from power.

Even more extraordinary is the timing of such discussions: They occurred, according to Baker’s account, in the window around FBI Director James Comey’s firing. Could it be that the leaders of a wounded, stunned FBI were seeking retribution for their boss’ firing with a secret recording operation?

I doubt this is the power that Congress intended to be exercised when it created the FBI a century ago, or the circumstances in which the authors of the 25th Amendment imagined a president’s removal could be engineered.

This wasn’t a president who was incapacitated at the time. He was fully exercising his powers — but in a way the FBI leadership did not like.

And that makes the FBI’s involvement in the tape-record-then-dump-Trump conversations overtly political — even if Rosenstein believed the whole idea was farcical.

Keep in mind, this is the same FBI that, a few months earlier during the 2016 election, had its top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok talking to Page — his lover and the top lawyer to McCabe — about using their official powers to “stop” Trump in the election and having an “insurance policy” against the GOP nominee. That insurance policy increasingly looks like an unverified dossier created by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele — a Trump hater himself — that was bought and paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign through their mutual law firm.

“You walk away from the Baker interview with little doubt that the FBI leadership in that 2016-17 time-frame saw itself as far more than a neutral investigative agency but actually as a force to stop Trump’s election before it happened and then maybe reversing it after the election was over,” said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation.

Baker provided some other valuable insights in his congressional interview. He revealed that he accepted information in the Russia investigation from a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee.

Sources confirm Baker admitted he received a version of Steele’s dossier from left-leaning reporter David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, and then forwarded it to Strzok’s team. Corn says that occurred in November 2016, right after the election.

That transaction is significant for two reasons. First, at the time Steele had just been fired from the FBI probe for leaking to the media and he wasn’t supposed to be further assisting the probe. So Corn essentially acted as a back door to allow information to continue to flow.

Secondly, the FBI was using the news media as an investigative source outside the normal chain of evidence.

Whatever you think of Rosenstein or the Russia probe, the statements Baker made to Congress have implications for all Americans.

The FBI was created to investigate crimes and stop foreign intelligence and terrorism threats. It was never designed to be a broker in the political process of elections or the execution of the 25th Amendment.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.

Former FBI General Counsel James Baker told lawmakers last week that based on conversations with senior FBI officials, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was “seriously” considering secretly recording President Trump’s conversations. Rosenstein also discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment on the president in an effort to remove him from office for being unfit. This, according to sources with direct knowledge of Baker’s deposition.

Baker said he met with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former FBI attorney Lisa Page shortly after their meeting with Rosenstein in May, 2017. He told lawmakers that McCabe, Page and Rosenstein had discussed the possibility of secretly recording President Trump. Baker, who was the top lawyer for the FBI and a close confidant of Comey, noted that he was not in the meeting with Rosenstein. A source with direct knowledge of the testimony claims Baker testified that “Andy McCabe, Lisa Page took seriously what Rosenstein had said, and when they returned to the office, the three of them discussed the possibility of secretly recording Trump.”

Baker told lawmakers during his deposition last Wednesday, that he told Page and McCabe that “he didn’t think it was unethical’ to secretly record the president.

“He interpreted what McCabe and Page had said as serious,” another source with direct knowledge of Baker’s deposition said. “Baker also added that he ‘didn’t do a legal analysis on…the issue of ‘ bugging the president.'”

Baker’s testimony to lawmakers coincides with a New York Times story published in September that suggested Rosenstein was behind a move in May, 2017 to remove the president after he ordered the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. The irony, however, was that on May 9, 2017, Rosenstein had written the letter outlining the reasons Comey was unfit to serve as FBI director stating, “The director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement.” The letter continues, “The Director ignored another longstanding principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation.”

Baker told lawmakers that “he didn’t think it was unethical’ to secretly record the president…”

On Monday, President Trump flew to Florida with Rosenstein in their first sit-down meeting since the New York Times story was published.  According to the White House, Trump and Rosenstein met for a half-hour as they headed to the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Convention in Orlando, Fla.

Trump said at the event in Florida, “Thank you as well to our Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for being here, flew down together. The press wants to know, ‘What did you talk about?’ ‘We had a very good talk,’ I will say. That became a very big story, actually. We had a good talk.” (One should note that Trump has allowed some of the “Swampers” to take a soft exit. I believe Trump will not fire [RR] he will let him resign. It is my understanding that if he fires [RR] then his successor has to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate but if [RR] resigns Trump can appoint his successor.) 

It is unsure if the situation will remain the same in light of Baker’s testimony. However, Rosenstein is set to give his deposition to lawmakers on Oct. 11 regarding the information published in the New York Times story, along with the information recently provided by Baker, several congressional lawmakers confirmed to SaraACarter.com.

White House officials did not comment on the deposition by Baker but instead referred comment to the DOJ.

DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores declined to comment on Baker’s testimony.

But Baker’s testimony revealed even more than the circumstances surrounding the Rosenstein meeting with Page and McCabe.

He also noted that David Corn, a politics journalist with Mother’s Jones magazine also delivered a version of Steele’s dossier to him sometime after the election. Baker, who apparently has known Corn for a long time, said that he turned over the dossier version given to him by Corn to the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Corn had been communicating in the summer of 2016 with former British spy Christopher Steele, who during that time was hired by now embattled research firm Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS’s was paid over $9 million to conduct the research on alleged Russia Trump connections by both the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, according to reports.

Around the same time period Corn published one of the first big exposes in October, 2016 on the alleged Trump Russia connection A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump. Corn’s dossier appears to have been different than the dossier that now deceased “No Name” gave to the FBI but similar enough in its unsubstantiated substance.

In August, John Solomon published Did FBI get bamboozled by multiple versions of the Trump dossier ?  

Solomon noted that the dossiers arrived to the FBI by different messengers to include “No Name, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson.” The information was exposed in an email that Peter Strzok sent to FBI executives around the time BuzzFeed published a version of the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.

Strzok wrote in the email, “our internal system is blocking the site. I have the PDF via iPhone but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what “No Name” had. (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson.)” Strzok was referring to the BuzzFeed version of the dossier posted online, according to The Hill.  And the revelation is significant according to lawmakers that noted the FBI should be working diligently to ensure that there is no manipulation of evidence or stacked circular reporting in investigations.

Last week, SaraACarter.com revealed that Baker also met with the Democratic party’s top lawyer, Michael Sussmann, to discuss the ongoing investigation by the bureau into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia.

According to Baker’s deposition, the meeting happened prior to the FBI’s initial warrant to spy on short-term campaign volunteer Carter Page, sources close to the investigation have told SaraACarter.com. Moreover, information provided by Baker coincides with the House Intelligence Committee’s final Russia report that suggests Sussmann was also leaking unverified information on the Trump campaign to journalists around the same time he met with Baker, according to the report and sources close the investigation.

The information exposes the bureau’s failure to inform the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that the evidence used to spy on Page was partisan and unverified, lawmakers told this news outlet. It further reveals the extensive role and close connection Sussmann, a cybersecurity and national security lawyer with Perkins Coie, had with the now-embattled research firm, Fusion GPS.

The Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton Campaign retained Fusion GPS through Perkins Coie law firm during the 2016 election.