DougRoss

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

Nothing happened to Brennan for spying on U.S. senators.

If he could get away with that, what else could he get away with?

How about starting the bogus investigation into fictional “collusion” or “coordination” between the Russians and the campaign, and then the administration, of Donald Trump? How about that?

Was that the beginning of the Obama Administration’s inquiry into Donald Trump’s possible connections with “the Russians”? No, the inquiries begin even earlier. You may remember the excited article in the New York Times, “How the Russia Inquiry Began,” from December 20, 2017. According to this story, it all started in London in May 2016. It was a dark-and-stormy night—or at least a night of “heavy drinking”—when “George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to [Alexander Downer] Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.” (In fact, the “heavy drinking” consisted of “a couple of gins and tonic,” but, hey this is the New York Times. Details are for the little people.)

So was it? Was this wet-behind-the-ears minor factotum the fons et origo of the Russian inquiry? Nope. “In truth,” as McCarthy notes in his book, “by then it had been going on for several months—since at least the latter half of 2015, not long after Donald Trump entered the GOP nomination chase and before most anyone had ever heard of George Papadopoulos.”

Ball of Collusion is a herculean investigatory effort. But McCarthy sadly concludes that both the origins and the exact nature of the inquiry remain shrouded in mystery. “When did the investigation start?” he asks. “Why did it start? What kind of investigation was it? It has proved impossible to get straight answers to these questions.”

With Flynn Revelations, We’re Getting Warmer

Think about how odd this situation is. Several writers have compiled timelines of the investigation. The one by Sharyl Attkisson is one of the best. But at the end of the day, we are left with sodden black swampiness where answers should be. When did the inquiry start? Why did it start? Who started it? The public does not have answers to these questions, but recent revelations about the concerted efforts to entrap General Michael Flynn, President Trump’s first national security advisor, have transported us all back to the children’s game of find-the-treasure.

We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting warmer, we’re getting warmer.

I suspect that John Brennan is a key player in this story. As journalist Lee Smith noted in February 2018, it was Brennan who first leaned on James Comey to take an interest in the salacious dossier compiled by Christopher Steele from July through December 2016. Indeed, Brennan once took credit for starting the inquiry. “I was aware,” Brennan said on “Meet the Press,” “of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion—cooperation occurred. . . . I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the bureau.” Smith parses this:

In other words, the FBI investigation didn’t start when the Australians, according to the Times—or the Brits, according to Brennan’s most recent version of the story—contacted the FBI after the Papadopoulos-Downer meeting. No, it started when the director of the CIA decided to start an investigation, when Brennan passed on information and intelligence to the FBI, and signaled that the bureau better act on it.

Brennan’s nudge worked. In the summer of 2016, the FBI sent counterintelligence agents, one of whom was Peter Strzok—remember him?—to London to meet with Downer to describe his meeting with Papadopoulos.

So where are we? Over the last week or two, we have learned that the FBI set a perjury trap for Flynn. They induced him to plead guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI by threatening to charge his son with a process crime. When Flynn’s then-lawyers objected that they thought him innocent, the FBI threatened to make them part of the case. We know all this partly because of the heroic efforts of Flynn’s new lawyer, Sidney Powell, who managed to get the Department of Justice to disgorge various documents damaging to the FBI.

The pièce de la résistance were the notes of a meeting taken by senior FBI official Bill Priestap. “What is our goal?” Priestap asked, “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Or maybe they should just “get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ + have them decide.”

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

That gun was still smoking when Richard Grenell, acting director of national intelligence, released the names of 39 top Obama officials who made 53 requests to “unmask” Flynn’s name from intelligence reports between Election Day 2016 and the end of January 2017. Among the requestors were Joe Biden, James Clapper (then director of national intelligence), Samantha Power (then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations), and Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of Staff.

Andrew McCarthy has shown how the most significant thing about these unmaskings may be the dog that didn’t bark—there was no unmasking request for December 29, 2016, the date that Flynn, then on holiday in the Dominican Republic, made his famous call to Sergei Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States. McCarthy speculates that the call was intercepted by “an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service.”

Several days later, on January 5, Obama met with Susan Rice, his national security advisor, Biden, Comey, Clapper, Sally Yates, and—yep—John Brennan to discuss the Russian inquiry in general and Flynn in particular.

On January 20, 2017, the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, just moments before leaving her position, Susan Rice took the unusual step of writing an email for the file summarizing that January 5 meeting:

President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book.’ From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.

Let’s have an instant replay of that last bit: “Obama said he wants to be sure that . . . we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”

Again: The outgoing president tells his senior intelligence staff to think about whether to tell the incoming administration the truth about a major national security issue.

It’s almost as if they didn’t believe there had been an election on November 8, 2016. Not a real election anyway, because, after all, the American people had chosen the wrong person. Fortunately, there they were to save the day by keeping the incoming fellow in the dark.

Undoing a Free and Fair Election

And they had reasons, lots of them. It’s true that Obama scoffed at Mitt Romney when he said during the 2012 campaign that Russia was the single biggest geopolitical security threat. “The 1980s are now calling,” he said, “to ask for their foreign policy back.”

But that was before the advent of Donald Trump. No one really took Trump seriously at first, but still. He was saying alarming things about Obama’s deal with Iran, alarming things about NATO, alarming things about wanting to get along with Vladimir Putin, not to mention all the alarming things he said about immigration, trade deals, federal judges, regulation, Islamic terrorism, and taxes.

Again, it’s true that it was Obama who told Putin’s stand-in Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” after the election. But now there seemed to be Russian meddling in our politics: maybe it involved Trump? We know now that Brennan suppressed intelligence indicating that Russia wanted Hillary, a known quantity, to win, not Trump. That went against The Narrative.

A recent article by Margot Cleveland in The Federalist asks the essential question: “Why did Obama tell the FBI to hide its activities from the Trump administration?” Answer: because those activities amounted to an effort to undo the results of a free open and democratic election.

Mollie Hemingway is right: what we are coming to see is “not just a typical battle between political foes, nor merely an example of media bias against political enemies. Instead, this entire operation was a deliberate and direct attack on the foundation of American governance.” That’s why I have repeatedly called it “the biggest political scandal in our nation’s history.” It was an effort to overturn the results of an election by stealth.

It’s not, I think, that the central figures in this drama—Comey and Clapper, Page and Strzok, Brennan, McCabe, Rice, and Obama himself—it’s not as if they said: “Let’s mount a coup d’état against Donald Trump.” No, it was less straightforward and more discreditable. They said to themselves, “Donald Trump is impossible. The people made a mistake. We know better. Let’s mobilize the police and intelligence power of the state to make sure that virtue—that is, our political agenda—prevails.”

That way lies tyranny, which is always more palatable when swaddled in the conviction of its own virtue. I am uncertain to what extent the chief actors in this malignant farce understand the extent of their culpability. I hope that Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham will be on hand to enlighten them. This must never be allowed to happen again.

If we are able to get all the facts about what actually happened in 2016 and 2017, this could very well be the biggest political scandal in American history. What if the previous president and senior officials in his administration decided to use the power of the state to spy on and “take out” the incoming president and his administration? And they did this on the basis of what? Policy differences?. There was no Russia collusion or any collusion of any type. Smart people knew that years ago.

This likely comes down to Obama and his administration trying to preserve their policy agenda, very specifically their terrible Iran nuclear deal; don’t forget Obama fired General Flynn over Flynn’s strong disagreement regarding the Iran deal and, of course, Trump’s campaign promise to undo that deal. It means, simply put, that the outgoing administration, unhappy with the election results, was trying to undo them.

You cannot think for a moment that Obama and, for that matter, Sleepy Creepy Uncle Joe Biden weren’t involved in the Justice Department, FBI, CIA and other elements of the intelligence community’s plans to take out Trump. The only real question in my mind is whether Obama merely greenlighted the plan or was, in fact, playing quarterback. Either way, as more and more evidence comes to light, it’s becoming clear this was the weaponizing of our government against a political opponent over policy differences. This was truly a case of collusion between the adherents of big government statism: powerful actors at the Justice Department with Rod Rosenstein, the leaders of the FBI with James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the CIA with John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, all working with the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign, aided and abetted by their propagandists in the media.

It’s ironic to hear Obama talk about the “overturning of the rule of law” in his clearly coordinated leak to Michael “Fusion” Isikoff. Typical of leftists, he seems to think the law is whatever he says it is, completely dismissing the notion of transcendent law and natural rights. Despite the Left’s confusion, any man-made law or concept of law that is at odds with natural rights and transcendent law is no law at all.

This is what is at stake right now in this country: what do we believe about the law and the power of the state? Because ultimately it’s about what the American people believe and what they accept and what they trust.

It comes down to trust. What do we do when we don’t trust the institutions meant to protect us? What happens when you don’t trust your government and the people running it? When you think about it, everything is based on trust: our law enforcement regime, our surveillance state, our government.

The social contract theory on which our Founding Fathers based this constitutional republic holds that since men are not angels, we come into voluntary associations to establish order in society. We entrust our elected officials to be stewards of the money and power given them to establish that ordered society, and out of that entrusted power those officials have created a government limited by the constitution that embodies our consent. Every institution, in theory, should be dedicated to advancing and protecting the people’s constitutional rights. This partnership between the people and their officials is based on trust; trust that those elected will form a government that will see to the needs of its citizens, will protect them from attack, and will not infringe on their inalienable rights.

So what happens with that trust has been shattered? Everything starts to spin slowly off its axis. Perhaps the change is imperceptible at first, but over time, it becomes more obvious. We’ve now reached the obvious point. It is very hard to deny what we’re seeing: a complete and horrifying abuse of entrusted power.

So what is to be done? You can only restore trust by establishing consequences for breaking it. Painful, hard, and devastating consequences so that people watching can understand that breaking our trust results in punishment and that anyone doing such things in the future will face the same punishment.

If everything is as it seems, the Obama Administration officials, from Obama and Biden to Comey, Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, Strzok, Page, and others, were traitors to the Constitution.

By their actions, they placed themselves above our constitutional order and demonstrated that they thought they were a power unto themselves. So they must pay the consequences for it: jail time, permanent revocation of security clearances, public shaming to make examples of the players who did such damage to our republic.

To be clear, those who refuse to demand and enforce consequences are themselves guilty. They become part and parcel to the dismantling of the republic. The question is whether those in the position to enforce consequences will have the courage to push forward with those efforts. We will find out soon enough. If they do not then we will know they are complicit in the destruction of our trust because of their lack of action.

Sometimes the truth is like mythical kryptonite. It radiates power and yet promises great destruction. And so reality is to be left alone, encased in lead, and kept at bay.

Take the Chinese genesis of the COVID-19 epidemic. We started in February with the usual Chinese deceptions about their role in the birth, transmission, and worldwide spread of the virus.

No one, apparently except Mike Bloomberg and Bill Gates, was surprised by the accustomed politically correct prevarications of the Chinese-purchased World Health Organization, whose transparent lies were passed off as truth—and led to tens of thousands of deaths.

On cue, our own obsequious media accepted Chinese and globalist myths—their shared antipathy for President Trump meant whatever he is for or says, they are against and deny.

But by late March the bits and pieces of the truth had emerged. All that gobbledygook talk of a Chinese wet market, of patient-zero bats, snakes, pangolins and such, were likely ruses to deflect attention from a conveniently nearby level-4 Chinese virology lab.

China’s patient zero almost weekly was backdated by communist party officials from late January to mid-November. When the lying is exhausted, we may well learn the virus was known to the Chinese even earlier.

In addition, we learned that China variously threatened to cut off medical supplies in transit to the United States. It stopped all flights in and out of Wuhan on January 23, but called America racist for waiting a week until January 31 to issue a travel ban on China—including, but not limited to, ending direct flights to the United States from Wuhan. Consider the Chinese communist logic: running-dog American capitalists mimicked Beijing in forbidding Chinese from flying—but only after a week-long interlude of bourgeoise debate and puerile reflection.

Were the Chinese embarrassed that they had accused Washington of being racist for belatedly doing exactly what they had done earlier? Of course not. In their eyes, weak decadent Westerners welcome such help in aiding their own self-abnegation and debasement.

Unbearable American Weakness

in the Face of a Growing Chinese Lie

China went on to spin lies that the U.S. military deliberately had created the virus to harm the poor noble Chinese. They seemed intent on peddling to the Trump-hating leftist media the talking points that China as the victimized “other” served as a convenient object of racial hatred by the deplorables and clingers, who, of course, nurse their racism on “conspiracy theories” about viral labs.

China destroyed the original data concerning the discovery of the virus. Brave, gullible and naïve scientists who were willing early on to speak up about the existential danger of an epidemic ended up “disappeared” or were silenced. News censorship stopped critical early foreign knowledge of the Chinese epidemic. On various online metrics, China’s case numbers and fatalities from the virus calcified, as if the country with the most cases magically now had suffered among the least. If it was good to lie about the Wuhan virus’s birth, then all the better to lie about its adolescent spread and mature lethality.

China’s behavior follows years of patent and copyright theft, forced technological appropriation, dumping, currency manipulation, crackdowns on Hong Kong democracy, and sophisticated espionage within the United States. It now threatens sovereign nations in Asia and the Pacific, if they dare blame China for the pandemic. Its military embarks on more aggression in the South China Sea, as rumors swirl of its stealthy violations of nuclear proliferation agreements.

Americans began grumbling that China almost seemed to have made war against the United States, in a peremptory fashion that dwarfed Pearl Harbor. At least it seems so when tallying up the over 80,000 dead, the trillions in destroyed market equity and GDP, and, most importantly, the likely larger human toll from suicides, family and substance abuse, lapsed medical procedures and tests, and wrecked businesses and lives from the lockdown.

So that was an unbearable truth. But what to do?

Cancel U.S. debt held by China? That is likely a terrible idea that would undermine the world’s entire financial system.

Cut off all relations? Embargos, sanctions, social distancing on a transnational scale? Expel all Chinese students? Bring home every American business in China? Seems unlikely.

The truth is that Americans know that to restore deterrence they must do something. But that “something” is equally difficult in the case of a 1.4-billion-person nuclear nation, which has systematically leveraged and compromised many of America’s own corporate, entertainment, media, and academic elite.

The result is that everyone from Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates to the CNN/MSNBC crowd know the truth that China despises the United States, feels that America is a spent and increasingly toxic society, and is ever more emboldened to humiliate its rival. Yet Beijing wagers that we will not do much, even if we could. It sees that weakness as laxity to be exploited, not at all magnanimity to be appreciated, much less reciprocated. So, for a while longer we know the truth, but apparently it is unbearable and preferably should not be known and just go away. And it probably will.

The Unbearable Democrat Hypocrisy on #MeToo

Consider also Joe Biden. Most Democrats have long known that Biden was a blowhard, a plagiarist, and a serial fabricator. Take Bernie Sanders out of the race, and Biden would have offered little utility, and his candidacy likely would have sputtered to an end.

“Handsy” Joe Biden was also creepy. Most prudent associates in his social and business circles kept their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters as far away from his breathing, probes, and squeezes as possible.

The truth is not that any complainant, such as Tara Reade, who makes a career-ending accusation—fraught with contradictions and well beyond any fair notion of a statute of limitations—should be believed automatically. She shouldn’t at all ruin a life without compelling evidence.

Nor is the Democratic dilemma just that the progressive write-off of Tara Reade has essentially destroyed the #MeToo movement, and exposed left-wing feminism as a cynical method of obtaining power, unconcerned with gender justice for the oppressed.

The point instead is that Joe Biden’s accuser should be believed—but according to Joe Biden’s prior own standards, statements and sermonizing. Tara Reade, playing a stronger hand than Christine Blasey Ford, has lodged a sexual assault charge against a far more likely suspect offender than Brett Kavanaugh. Biden, in most other circumstances, would be cheering her on to pursue her charges and pursue her truth were it not against himself.

The Democrats know all this, but the truth too is unbearable. In other words, so what?

What is the remedy? Have a long inquiry in which women come out of the woodwork to describe Biden’s squeezing, sniffing, breathing, and whispering with dozens of victimized young and teenage girls? There are many.

Does the donor class abort Biden’s candidacy to avoid hypocrisy and save its feminist credentials—so buffeted by Harvey Weinstein and fallen liberal media superstars?

Or do they appoint investigators, as they did for months in the manner of the Mueller investigation, to examine and to leak to the media Reade’s accusations and supporting testimonies, as Joe Biden daily bleeds out, nicked by a thousand cuts as a sexual pariah?

So, the truth is again intolerable. The fact is that Reade could be privately believable, given what one knows of Joe Biden’s wayward hands and unbridled narcissism. But such a reality certainly is publicly unpalatable.

So watch as Tara Reade disappears into a media decompression chamber, designed to let her vent to mute walls, and thus be contained until she is recalibrated, exhausted and inert and the danger passes.

The Unbearable Truth of Biden’s Cognitive Impairment

There is another unendurable truth: Joe Biden himself is not cognitively able to run a presidential campaign. Even if successful, he is not prepared to serve as president.

Biden proved more exhausted in seclusion at home than in public on the campaign trail. He is neither seen nor heard much anymore.

His planned series of fireside snarky critiques of the president’s handling of the virus imploded when he could speak neither with or without notes, nor with or without the teleprompter, nor with or without friendly media prompts from his progressive interlocutors, nor with or without his wife’s encouragement at his side.

His party pros know that if turned loose on the campaign trail, Biden will give us another spooky squeeze, one more bizarre Corn Pop or hairy legs story, still more biographical myths and plagiarisms, and daily lying dog-faced pony soldier incoherence.

Names, dates, places, things?

They have become shapeless ripples in Biden’s mental river of Lethe, flowing by and changing shape, before finally disappearing in a nothing stream of forgetfulness.

The Democratic Party also knows that Biden cannot schedule a rendezvous with Dr. Bandy X. Lee and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, given the result would terrify his handlers.

On any given day, at any given moment Biden can say something not just controversial in the manner of Donald Trump, but something that simply cannot be deciphered or translated into any known language.

So, what does one do with kryptonitic truth?

Nothing.

What would one instead suggest? Hand the nomination over to the runner-up and, in theory, most deserving candidate Bernie Sanders—and see the Democrats lose the presidency, the House, and the Supreme Court for a generation?

Or do they keep Joe in the basement, outsource his campaign to future cabinet picks, his vice-presidential candidate and his family? Do they cancel the debates, seek to postpone the election or do it all by mail—and thereby confirm the albatross around their necks?

Or still again, do they have a therapeutic “intervention” and tell Joe to take one for the team, stand aside and allow non-candidate free-riders like Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, or Michelle Obama to usurp his delegates? Do they simply shaft the runner-up, nutty socialist Bernie Sanders and his legions of true believers?

No, of course, not. The truth is simply too foreboding even to contemplate.

Instead, we will hear that Joe is fine, in the manner that FDR was in great shape in November 1944. He will run not against Trump and his record, but against a fantasy who, they will say, fiddled while an unfettered and non-quarantined America was consumed by viral fires, and yet somehow as Herbert Hoover incarnate also fiddled while America ossified in an amber lockdown.

When the legend of a hale Biden is belied by the fact of his impairment, print the legend—but first get the necessary holograms, photoshopping, and testimonials to get him across the November 3 finish line.

A Final Thought on Obama

Add up Michael Horowitz’s inspector general’s report. Review the wreckage of the Mueller investigation. Collate the evidence that Christopher Steele was an utter fraud and dupe. Remember that Hillary Clinton destroyed her hard drives and communication devices, that the FBI liquidated hundreds of text messages of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, and that Christopher Steele destroyed all his emails and data about “Russian sources.”

Compute in the new discoveries that all the principles who fueled the “collusion” hoax had long ago, when pressed in secret and under congressional oath, confessed they had no evidence for the lies they spread in the media. Recall the pseudo-summaries of Susan Rice to whitewash an Oval Office session. Then, finish off these revelations with the reality that Barack Obama was always privy at best, and at worst orchestrating the effort to destroy a presidential campaign and transition. And where does it all lead?

To the unendurable truth that a sitting president unleashed his intelligence agencies to warp an election, feigned ignorance of his central role, and yet finally was so furious about the winner that he sought to sabotage his successor’s transition and, by association, his presidency.

How could the media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the bureaucratic state, academia, and entertainment ever process that reality: that a deity was likely the most corrupt president in a generation?

The presidential edifice has come down in two episodes, and the dust has not yet settled from either one. The first wrecked President Obama’s most consequential policies: the Affordable Care Act and the Iran nuclear deal. The second, happening now, is crushing its reputation for integrity, for following the most basic rules for conducting free and fair elections.

Consider Barack Obama’s biggest policy achievements. Trump campaigned on overturning both Obamacare and the Iran deal. And that’s what he’s done as president. For Democrats, these were bitter losses. Liberals and progressives alike were determined to defend them, even after losing the House and Senate in 2016. On those and other touchstone issues, such as immigration and judicial appointments, they were not looking for compromise solutions.

Neither was Donald Trump. As the new president, his most fundamental decision was to obliterate those Obama policies, not modify them at the margins. He wanted to erase the Affordable Care Act before it became an indelible feature of American life. Although the Republican Congress fell just short of repealing it and the Supreme Court didn’t do the job for them, Trump did manage to eliminate its essential funding mechanism (the “individual mandate”) and to lop off as much else as he could. (He and his party still haven’t figured out how to replace it. Obama’s lasting achievement is that even conservative Republicans realize they must do more than repeal it. They must deliver a replacement.)

Trump did not run as a moderate Republican. His populist, nationalist agenda posed an obvious threat to everything President Obama and his party had accomplished, as well as establishment interests within the Republican Party. The good news for Democrats (and their allies in Washington’s law firms, lobbying shops, and government bureaucracies) was that candidate Trump had only a remote chance of winning. Still, he needed to be watched closely.

Now we know just how closely. We are learning just how many laws, regulations, and procedures the Obama administration trampled in the process. Each new tranche of declassified documents adds to the disturbing picture. All would have remained hidden if Hillary Clinton had won.

The documents put the lie to Obama’s famous declaration that his administration was not tarnished by “even a smidgen of corruption.” Now, it seems, there are smidgen droppings all over the place.

Obama’s FBI, CIA, Department of Justice, director of national intelligence, and White House national security team were all involved in extensive, illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign and presidential transition. The spying continued after Trump took office, thanks to holdover officials and anti-Trump bureaucrats. The inescapable conclusion is that law enforcement and intelligence agencies were politicized under Obama and used to target the opposition party.

The partisan dimension is crucial to the scandal. This wasn’t just spying on American citizens; this was spying on political opponents. That should be clear from the “Steele dossier,” a series of fabulist tales commissioned by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign. None of Steele’s major claims have been verified. Some are now believed to be Russian disinformation. The rest are little more than gossip, as Steele’s own source admitted. Yet Democratic operatives trickled this sludge back into the FBI. Instead of rejecting it as false and unverified, the FBI presented it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to secure warrants on Trump aides. FBI Director James Comey and his DoJ partners renewed the warrant three times, relying on the same bogus material.

This project wasn’t carried out by one or two rogue agents. Top officials at the FBI and DoJ were directly involved. So was the Obama White House, according to secret text messages between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Even without the text messages or declassified documents, we can infer the White House must have been deeply engaged. Only very senior officials could (1) authorize spying on an opposition presidential candidate and (2) coordinate the efforts of so many powerful agencies across the government.

Could Trump have stopped all this once he took office? Could he have discovered the full scope of earlier surveillance? Not without trusted aides who understood counterintelligence. He had only one: Gen. Michael Flynn. His new national security adviser had run the Defense Intelligence Agency.

As a seasoned intelligence officer, Flynn posed a real danger to those spying on Trump and trying to undermine his presidency. That’s why they acted so quickly to remove him. The documents released last week show how they did it. We learned that Flynn was investigated for Russian ties after he left the DIA. He was cleared by the investigating agents. They were ready to close the file but were overruled by Comey and his second-in-command, Andrew McCabe. The bosses wanted to keep the file open as they searched for some way to remove Flynn.

They found it when acting Attorney General Sally Yates mentioned that Flynn might have violated an obscure law, the Logan Act, by speaking to the Russian ambassador during the transition. Flynn’s call was common practice and perfectly legal. The Logan Act “violation” simply a pretext. It had never been used to convict anyone. Still, Comey used it to justify an FBI interview with Flynn, disguised as a friendly meeting but actually designed to entrap him. The agents who interviewed Flynn said he seemed truthful and cooperative. Again, FBI leaders overruled them. They reworded the agents’ description of the interview, said Flynn lied, and prepared the case for prosecution. When news of Flynn’s “lying” leaked (illegally), he was forced to resign. The next step was to press him to incriminate Trump and others around him. That’s where Robert Mueller’s Office of Special Counsel came in.

Mueller’s office was established after Comey, who was fired in May 2017, leaked documents to the New York Times. His goal was to force the appointment of a special counsel, who would prove Trump won the presidency by colluding with Russia.

There was a snag, though. Trump had not colluded with Russia, and neither had his campaign. Mueller’s final report made that apparent, though it did everything possible to avoid saying so plainly. What the new documents tell us is that the FBI and DoJ knew that before Mueller was appointed. Mueller’s team must have learned it quickly since they had all the underlying documents on Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and others. The key links in the collusion story were all cleared, early on.

But the Mueller team had no intention of aborting their mission. Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s number two, hired a team of virulently anti-Trump prosecutors and kept the investigation going for more than two years. Their relentless pursuit hobbled the Trump presidency, but they never managed to indict a single American for working with the Russians.

They did manage to break Flynn financially, though, and they threatened to break his family by indicting his son unless the general pleaded guilty to lying. Flynn took the deal. The whole case unraveled last week, thanks to Attorney General Bill Barr. It was Barr who asked U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen to review the documents with fresh eyes. Jensen found that when Comey sent agents to interrogate Flynn, he was not pursuing a legitimate investigation. It was all a ruse. The case was worthless, despite Flynn’s guilty plea.

Egregious as the Flynn case is, it represents something much larger than injustice for one man or innocent mistakes by fallible officials. It was part of a broader effort to spy on political opponents, turn law enforcement and intelligence agencies into partisan instruments, and undermine a duly elected president by illegitimate (and likely illegal) means. If the effort really was that pervasive, if the means really were illegal, if the leaders really were senior officials, this would be the biggest political scandal in American history. We cannot say yet that it is. We won’t know until we see more documents and U.S. Attorney John Durham completes his criminal investigation. But we have already seen very serious malfeasance by very high officials, coordinated across multiple departments. Amid this swirling debris, the Obama legacy is imploding.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.