One If by Land, Two If by Sea, and Three If They're Using the CIA

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This image released by CBS shows former FBI Director James Comey, left, with host Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Tuesday, April 17, 2018 in New York. (Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via AP)
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In reporting on apparent CIA involvement in spying on an American citizen, RedState’s Bonchie observed:

If this were a Republican implicated, it’d be treated as the largest political scandal of the last hundred years.

And so it would. Therefore: Let’s treat it as the largest political scandal of the last hundred years.

I don’t see evidence that we need the cooperation of the blue media establishment to convince a majority of the American people that such is the case. The Other Guys like to behave as though they are the gatekeepers of public opinion. But we don’t have to accept their formulation. There’s an awful lot of empirical evidence out there that they only have 35 to 45 percent of the voters under management. We can get to the rest, where “we” means the combined forces of the red media and the red citizenry. We do not have to sit here and grouse that “the media” won’t cover this. Sure it will. And that’s because we’re the media, too.

As the Mueller investigation was winding down, multiple polls began appearing to tell us that a majority of registered voters — a small majority to be sure, but a majority nevertheless — believed the Mueller investigation to be “politically motivated” or “a partisan witch hunt.” We enabled that. Activists and media figures on our side were the only ones who told people just how crooked that whole Mueller Show really was. It sure wasn’t CNN or The New York Times.

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The only thing The Other Guys have that our side doesn’t is a Google Group (or whatever they’re using now) where The Other Guys’ journalists get together and decide which stories they are going to pound, which stories they will ignore, and which ones need some reverse English applied prior to publication. We know they do that because they once got caught; their “Journolist” email group was exposed and we all got to see how it happened that The Other Guys would always be using exactly the same words in all their disparate “news” stories.

We don’t need anything that elaborate, and we don’t need to be coordinating at that level of detail. And a good thing, too, because it would be like herding cats. But even cats will run together if they need to, in order to survive. And that’s about where we are.

Abusing a term in office to employ the vast intelligence-gathering capabilities of the United States to conduct political surveillance on the opposition party, and then to use the Department of Justice to obstruct and sabotage the opposition party’s incoming elected President is — hello? — not a small thing. This isn’t like sending a team of clumsy goons to break into the other party’s campaign headquarters to plant a few bugs. This is using entire government agencies, and all the awesome tools at their disposal, to collect opposition research and to feed it into their party’s own campaign. And when they lost anyway, to throw sand in the gears of the next Administration. You know, the one The American People had just elected.

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They did this. The Democrats did this. The Obama Administration did this. Career Civil Servants did this. This is Watergate on steroids. If we don’t stop it right here, right now, our elections will become mere formalities, as The Other Guys win one term after the other by seemingly miraculous means.

Our side doesn’t have a Journolist, and we don’t want one. But we also don’t need one. The danger from what The Democrats — including their fans in the Civil Service — have done here is so obvious, so stark, and so threatening, that not even cats should need to be told which way to run.  If we don’t all see the common interest in keeping the government itself from becoming an arm of the opposition political party, we are sure to lose this nation to a group of vicious and corrupt totalitarians who will do anything to gain and to hold power.

We only have to act in our own self-interest. That we know how to do. But it is imperative that we do so now.

History demonstrates that we can trust the American people. We know they are going to hear the other side from every pore in the blue media. That has already started. What we have to do is make sure they hear our side as well. If the American people are informed, they will make the right choices.

I have noticed a tendency recently to group all of the various creepy, frightening, and even illegal acts performed by the previous Administration into the umbrella term “Obamagate.” I think this is a mistake. At a minimum, it allows our opponents to deem it all one big thing, claim that “Obamagate” has been debunked, and attempt to dismiss it all at a stroke. It also sounds like we’re trying to go after Obama, which is not only a political non-starter, it misses the point. The threat here isn’t from Obama. He’s gone. The threat is from all the nascent Brennans and Comeys who are brewing right now in our Civil Service, and who will do this again if we don’t nail the people who did it this time.

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This scandal has a lot of moving parts, and every single one of them deserves a chance to creep people out, one piece at a time. For instance: how many people know that as early as 2015, before Trump was even nominated, the FBI Counterintelligence Division (that’s Strzok & Co.) were totally abusing the NSA’s database of texts and emails to repeatedly snoop on a group of “U.S. persons,” something that the NSA database is not even supposed to be used for? The FBI people even deputized contractors to conduct queries on their own, with almost no controls on what was done with the information so collected. That is so against the law. What the FBI was doing got so bad that the Director of the NSA ran an audit on them and decided to lock them out of the database. Very few Americans know this was going on. But we do. We know it for a fact.

There are a lot of these facts. It isn’t just Flynn. It isn’t just Carter Page. It isn’t just FISA. It isn’t just an FBI Director who lied under oath to the Court; or a Director of National Intelligence who lied under oath to Congress; or even a CIA Director who persuaded foreign allies to run sting operations on U.S. citizens for political purposes. It’s all of that, and a lot more. Only a tiny percentage of the public has the vaguest idea how much of it there really is. Things we know for a fact.

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We need to fix that. Before November.

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