By Robert Parry
Official Washington is abuzz, comparing President Trump’s ouster of FBI
Director Comey to President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, but there is a darker
“deep state” interpretation of these events, says Robert Parry.
President Trump’s firing of FBI
Director James Comey on Tuesday reflected a growing concern inside the White
House that the long-rumored scheme by “deep state” operatives to overturn the
results of the 2016 election may have been more than just rumors.
The fear grew that Comey and
other senior officials in the U.S. intelligence community had concluded
last year that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump was a
suitable future president, albeit for different reasons. I’m told that Clinton
was seen as dangerously hawkish and Trump as dangerously unqualified, opinions
privately shared by then-President Barack Obama.
So, according to this account,
plans were made last summer to damage both Clinton and Trump, with the hope of
putting a more stable and less risky person in the Oval Office – with key roles
in this scheme played by Comey, CIA Director John Brennan and Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper.
When I first heard about this
supposed cabal in the middle of last year, I dismissed it as something more
fitting a Jason Bourne movie than the real world. But – to my amazement – the
U.S. intelligence community then began intervening in the presidential campaign
in unprecedented ways.
On July 5, 2016, Director Comey dealt a severe blow
to Clinton by holding a press conference to denounce her use of a private email
server while Secretary of State as “extremely careless,” yet he announced that
no legal action would follow, opening her to a damaging line of attack that she
jeopardized national security but that her political status gave her special
protection.
Then, on Oct. 28, just ten days before the
election, Comey reopened the investigation because of emails found on the
laptop of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton’s close
aide Huma Abedin. That move re-injected Clinton’s email controversy into the
campaign, along with the unsavory issues surrounding Weiner’s sexting scandal,
and reminded voters about the sex-related scandals that have swirled around
Bill Clinton for years.
To make matters worse, Comey
closed the investigation again just two days before the election, once more
putting the Clinton email controversy in front of voters. That also reaffirmed
the idea that Clinton got special treatment because of her political clout,
arguably the most damaging image possible in an election year dominated by
voter anger at “elites.”
Clinton herself has said that if the election had been held on Oct. 27
– the day before Comey reopened the email inquiry – she would have won. In other words, whether Comey’s actions were
simply clumsy or possibly calculated, the reality is that he had an outsized
hand in drowning Clinton’s candidacy, a point that Trump’s Justice
Department also noted on Tuesday in justifying Comey’s firing.
Russia-gate Probe
And, we now know that Comey was
leading a parallel investigation into possible Russian collusion with the Trump
campaign, instigated at least in part by a dossier
prepared by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, paid for by Clinton
supporters and containing allegations about secret meetings between Trump aides
and influential Russians.
Last July, the FBI reportedly secured a
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant
against former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Page was
mentioned in the Steele dossier and gave an academic speech in Moscow on July 7 mildly critical of U.S.
policies toward Russia and other nations of the former Soviet Union, two apparent
factors in justifying the FISA warrant.
Before the election, people close
to Clinton also tried to get the U.S. media to publicize the Steele dossier and
particularly its anonymous claims about Trump cavorting with prostitutes in a
Moscow hotel while Russian intelligence agents supposedly filmed him. However,
because media outlets could not confirm Steele’s allegations and because some
details turned out to be wrong, the dossier remained mostly under wraps prior
to the election.
However, after Trump’s surprising victory on Nov. 8,
President Obama and his intelligence chiefs escalated their efforts to
undermine Trump’s legitimacy. The Obama administration leaked an
intelligence assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had orchestrated
the hacking of Democratic emails and their publication by WikiLeaks to
undermine Clinton and help Trump.
The intelligence community’s
assessment set the stage for what could have been a revolt by the Electoral
College in which enough Trump delegates might have refused to vote for him to
send the election into the House of Representatives, where the states would
choose the President from one of the top three vote-getters in the Electoral
College.
The third-place finisher turned out to be former Secretary of State
Colin Powell who got three votes from Clinton delegates in Washington State.
The idea of giving votes to Powell was that he might be an acceptable
alternative to House members over either Clinton or Trump, a position that I’m
told Obama’s intelligence chiefs shared. But the Electoral
College ploy failed when Trump’s delegates proved
overwhelmingly faithful to the GOP candidate on Dec. 19.
Expanding Russia-gate
Still, the effort to undermine
Trump did not stop. President
Obama reportedly authorized an extraordinary scheme to spread information about
Russia’s purported assistance to Trump across the federal bureaucracy and even
overseas.
Comey, Brennan and Clapper also
set in motion a hasty intelligence assessment by hand-picked analysts at the
CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, producing a report on alleged
Russian electoral interference that was released on Jan. 6.
Though Clapper had promised to
release a great deal of the evidence, the
declassified version of the report amounted mostly to “trust
us” along with a one-sided analysis of Putin’s alleged motive, citing his
well-known disdain for Clinton.
But the report failed to note the
other side of that coin, that Putin would be taking a great risk by trying to
hurt Clinton and failing, given Clinton’s odds as the prohibitive favorite to
defeat Trump. Putin would have to assume that the NSA with its powerful
surveillance capabilities would pick up a Russian initiative and inform an
irate President Hillary Clinton.
In other words, the Jan. 6 report was not some
careful analysis of the pros and cons for believing or doubting that Russia was
behind the WikiLeaks disclosures. It amounted to a prosecutor’s brief, albeit
without any public evidence to support the Russia-did-it charge.
We learned later that the report’s
classified appendix included a summary of Steele’s dossier that was then
briefed to President Obama, President-elect Trump and to members of Congress,
guaranteeing that its damaging but unproven allegations would finally get
widely circulated in the mainstream media, as indeed promptly happened.
Hobbling Trump’s Presidency
So, going into the Inauguration,
Russia-gate was dominating the front pages of newspapers as well as the endless
chat shows on cable TV despite the fact that no real evidence was presented
proving Russia was responsible for the WikiLeaks’ posts – and WikiLeaks denied
getting the material from Russia. There was also no evidence that Trump’s
campaign had colluded with the Russians in this endeavor.
But those suspicions quickly
hardened into a groupthink
among many Democrats, liberals and progressives. Their hatred of Trump and
their dread about his policies convinced some that the ends of removing Trump
justified whatever means were employed, even if those means had more than a
whiff of McCarthyism.
On Inauguration Day, many
anti-Trump protesters carried signs accusing Trump of being Putin’s boy. Sensing a political opportunity,
congressional Democrats joined the #Resistance and escalated their demands for
a sweeping investigation of any connections between Trump’s team and Russia.
Their clear hope was something might turn up that could be exploited in an
impeachment proceeding.
As the principal intelligence holdover from the Obama administration,
Comey assumed an essential role in this operation. It would be up to the FBI to secure the financial
records from Trump and his associates that could provide a foundation for at
least suspicions of a sinister relationship between them and Russia.
Trump may have thought that he
bought some political space by complying with political pressure to fire National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Feb. 13 over what exactly was said in a
pre-Inauguration phone conversation between Flynn and the Russian Ambassador.
Trump also got the Russia-gate pressure to lessen when, on April 6, he fired 59
Tomahawk missiles at Syria over an alleged chemical attack. But
he soon came to realize that those respites from Russia-gate were brief and
that an incipient
constitutional coup might be underway with him as the target.
However, if those coup
suspicions have any truth – and I realize many Americans do not
want to accept the notion that their country has a “deep state” – firing Comey
may fuel Trump’s troubles rather than end them.
Trump clearly is unpopular not
only among Democrats but many Republicans who see him as an unprincipled
interloper with a nasty Twitter finger. The Comey firing is sure to spark new
demands for a special prosecutor or at least more aggressive investigations by
Congress and the press.
Watergate Comparisons
Although Democrats had condemned
Comey for his interference in the Clinton campaign, they now are rallying to Comey’s side because they
viewed him as a key instrument for removing Trump from office. After
Comey’s firing, from The New York Times to CNN, the mainstream media was filled
with comparisons to Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up.
One of the few voices commending
Trump for his action, not surprisingly, came from Carter Page, who briefly
served as a Trump foreign policy adviser and has found himself in the
crosshairs of a high-powered counterintelligence investigation as a result.
“It is encouraging that further steps toward restoring justice in
America have been taken with the termination and removal from office of FBI
Director James Comey,” Page said in a statement.
“Although I have never met President Trump, his strength and judgment
in holding senior officials accountable for wrongdoing stands in stark contrast
to last year when ordinary private citizens outside of Washington like myself
were targeted for exercising their Constitutional rights.
“Under James Comey’s leadership in 2016, I was allegedly the subject of
an intensive domestic political intelligence operation instigated by the FBI
and based on completely false allegations in a FISA warrant application.”
Yet, despite what Page and other
Trump advisers caught up in the Russia-gate probe may hope, the prospects that
Comey’s firing will end their ordeal are dim. The near certainty is that whatever Obama and his
intelligence chiefs set in motion last year is just beginning.
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