The true scandal is not the swirling gossip that Rod Rosenstein mentioned the 25th Amendment, but what has been front and center for more than two years: It’s the dossier, stupid!
Margot Cleveland
By Margot Cleveland
February 22, 2019
Last week when Andrew McCabe launched his Orange Man Bad tour, he stunned the public with claims that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein suggested using the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office. Reaction on the hill came quickly, with Sen. Lindsey Graham calling the claim “beyond stunning.”
Graham, the new chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, promised an investigation, telling CBS’s “Face the Nation”: “There’s an allegation by the acting FBI director at the time that the deputy attorney general was basically trying to do an administrative coup, take the president down [using] the 25th Amendment process. The deputy attorney general denies it. I promise your viewers the following: that we will have a hearing about who’s telling the truth, what actually happened.”
But the supposed consideration of the 25th Amendment shouldn’t be the focus of the outrage. After all, that amendment, which allows the vice president plus a “majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” is part of our constitutional system. Its stringent requirements for removing a president ensure it cannot be used to execute a soft coup by political opponents.
The true scandal is not the swirling gossip that Rosenstein mentioned the 25th Amendment, but what has been front and center for more than two years: It’s the dossier, stupid!
It’s the dossier, its funding, its creation, and its use. It’s the leaks, the sabotage by political appointees and career DOJ and FBI agents, the media’s complicity, and the triggering of a special counsel, all with the end goal of removing the duly elected president by pressuring Trump to resign or face impeachment.
While we may never learn the full scope of this sting, what is known makes “Spygate”—for want of a better term—the worst political scandal in American history: A dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and authored by a former British spy (Christopher Steele, who despised Trump), falsely claimed Trump and individuals connected to his presidential campaign conspired with Russia. The dossier was shopped to multiple media outlets and passed off to the Obama administration’s DOJ, FBI, and State Department, as well as several members of Congress and their staffers.
The FBI then used confidential human sources and other allies, such as Stefan Halper and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, to target members of the Trump campaign to establish a pretext to launch an investigation of the Trump campaign and to obtain a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act surveillance order on former campaign advisor Carter Page. Multiple governmental officials signed off on the Page FISA application without reading it, and the FISA court granted the surveillance order based on double-hearsay and claims made in the unverified dossier. That surveillance order gave the government access to past communications of Trump campaign members.
Following the election, Steele continued to feed the DOJ and FBI fake intel on Trump. However, because the FBI had terminated its relationship with Steele in early November upon learning that the former spy had leaked the dossier to the media then lied about doing so, Steele passed the information on to DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr. Ohr then relayed the Steele’s info to the FBI.
With the new year came more meddling: On January 5, 2017, FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates briefed President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The following day, Comey briefed president-elect Trump on the Steele dossier.
That briefing was quickly leaked to the media, providing the hook CNN sought to report on the existence and substance of the dossier. But as recently released emails reveal, the press—which had long possessed copies of the Steele dossier—purposefully fed the public only the most believable details to make the unverified allegations appear credible.
The Daily Caller exposed this reality, reporting that after BuzzFeed published the full Steele dossier, “CNN anchor Jake Tapper lit into BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith for the decision, calling it ‘irresponsible’ and ‘uncollegial,’” according to emails released as part of a federal lawsuit brought against BuzzFeed. “‘I think your move makes the story less serious and credible[.] I think you damaged its impact,’ Tapper wrote to Smith on Jan. 10, 2017, just after BuzzFeed published the dossier in full on its website.”
The FBI seemed content with these developments, though, with disgraced lead FBI Agent Peter Strzok suggesting in a text to Lisa Page that now that the dossier “is out, we use it as a pretext to go interview some people.”
AND MORE AT THE LINK:
http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/22/thinking-pulling-25th-amendment-isnt-real-scandal-spygate-coup-attempt/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&;utm_campaign=ad504bdcae-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-ad504bdcae-84073723
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
| 
