Welcome to the FBI, an Opposition Research Shop for the Hillary Campaign

Special Report

Why the FBI Is Dodging Nunes

• GEORGE NEUMAYR

Spectator

The left used to get very worked up about the CIA’s interference in foreign elections. Liberals would quote solemnly the work of Philip Agee, a CIA turncoat who wrote articles and books about the agency’s manipulation of this or that foreign election. But these days ACLU-style liberals shrug at the meddling of John Brennan’s CIA in the 2016 American election, mischief that the FBI is still trying to conceal.

It was reported recently that the FBI refuses to show Congressman Devin Nunes an unredacted copy of the origination document that triggered the probe into the Trump campaign. What is the FBI hiding? Paradoxically, nothing — that is, no classified information showing collusion between Trump and Russia. The FBI is simply trying to hide the embarrassingly partisan origins of its spying on the Trump campaign.

Were the redactions covering material harmful to Trump, that material would have been leaked by now. So the redactions can only be concealing the fingerprints of Hillary’s partisans in the Obama administration. The FBI will eventually have to fess up to the politicization to which it succumbed — that the most virulent Hillary partisan imaginable, John Brennan, had put pressure on FBI officials to start the probe, that a Trump hater, Peter Strzok, formally opened up the probe, that the smears of a paid opposition researcher for Hillary, Christopher Steele, contributed to the probe, that scandalous “intelligence-sharing” between Brennan and foreign intelligence agencies shaped the probe, and that FBI officials suspected the probe was unfounded but pursued it anyways at the insistence of Obama officials.

The FBI says it is redacting “sensitive information.” That’s true in an ironic sense: the FBI is very sensitive about the information, in that it illuminates the agency’s transformation into an opposition research shop for the Hillary campaign. Take her partisans out of the picture and the probe would never have started.

In an attempt to sanitize the probe, the media has attributed its origin to a drunken conversation between an Aussie diplomat and a minor Trump campaign volunteer. But that’s a joke. Maybe the FBI threw that into the pot at the last minute, but John Brennan had been stirring it for months before then. As Brennan told Congress, “we were uncovering information intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S. persons and the Russians. And as we came upon that, we would share it with the bureau.” Notice his use of “we” in that statement. By “we,” Brennan meant his retinue of Hillary partisans at the CIA who had been shaking foreign intelligence agencies down for any dirt on Trump.

The British intelligence, in cahoots with Brennan and Christopher Steele (who was on Hillary’s payroll), figured largely into this mischief. In all likelihood it will come out that the “information” British intelligence shared with Brennan was just recycled Steele material. The “allies tipped us off to Trump-Russian collusion” storyline is a sham, designed to distract attention from a chain of Hillary partisans who in the thick of a campaign were circulating smears among themselves and calling it “intelligence sharing.”

It was the blinding, viscerally personal hatred of Brennan for Trump, perhaps more than anything else, that turned all those phony “tips” into a counterintelligence probe. In the grip of that kind of feverish antipathy, combined with his desire to continue as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan could convince himself of any Trump monstrosity and made it his mission to prod the FBI into harassing him. Anyone who doubts that hatred should just take a look at Brennan’s Twitter account these days. This week he is rattling on about Trump’s “self adoration.” Also take a look at the people he is following on Twitter. They make up most of the cast of Obamagate, from James Comey to Samantha Power to Sally Yates to Susan Rice, not to mention the newest cast member, Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough, whose exposure is yet another product of Nunes’s refusal to accept redacted material from the FBI/Justice Department.

But it wasn’t enough for Brennan to push the FBI investigation. He also had to publicize it, which he achieved through another person in Christopher Steele’s orbit, Senator Harry Reid, whose Super PAC, as the Daily Caller reports, was run by the very Hillary lawyer who hired Steele’s services. Brennan briefed Reid on the beginnings of the FBI investigation he instigated, knowing that Reid would leak the contents of the briefing to the press.

About this astounding meddling in an election by a CIA director, the Philip Agees of the left have fallen completely silent. But that makes sense. After all, how can old radicals inveigh against the CIA as a “wilderness of mirrors” when it is John Brennan’s reflection in it?

Devin Nunes (Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)