We can agree that few things anger people more than when they learn they have been lied to, especially about things that are really important to their lives. But, that is what the mainstream media has been doing for a great number of year now -- systematically lying to the American people, deliberately omitting key information from its reportage, peddling false information, often working with government officials in that fabrication to air it publicly, and minimize the harmful effects of their corruption.
This doesn't come as news to many people, who tuned out the mainstream media to the point now where their collective ratings and subscriptions have tanked to a dangerously low level. Already, sizeable loans from wealthy liberal people appear to be all that's sustaining most of the media in America.
Yet, when huge stories are nearly entirely ignored, the media fraud cannot be ignored. On Friday, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, formally pled guilty to the charge of falsification of government records used to obtain a search warrant. Now, that may not sound like much, but it's a huge story, filled with impact on the American people.
Clinesmith received an email from officials of the Central Intelligence Agency. That email was the CIA's effort to clear up what they felt was a terrible misconception about Carter Page. The FBI was investigating Page as part of their Crossfire Hurricane probe into illicit coordination between the Russian government and the Trump Presidential campaign.
The FBI was spinning a false narrative to the FISA court that Page was a willing Russian agent. In truth, Page was an undercover operative for the CIA, a graduate of Annapolis, and a former Marine officer. Most critically, Page used his business ties to help the CIA learn about events taking place in Russia. Page wasn't a spy, he was simply a reliable source, who went well beyond the basic requirement of a former military officer to notify the feds of foreign contacts. What Page was doing for our government is risky. People in Russia are known to have been killed in shady circumstances for doing what Page did for many years.
The CIA's email explained to the FBI that Page was an "operational contact for the CIA," who regularly informed the agency of all of the details of his business contacts with Russian officials and citizens. Clinesmith doctored that email, to reverse the meaning of what the CIA wrote. Clinesmith's alterations turned the CIA's information from a clear statement that Page was a valuable CIA operative, to instead fraudulently saying that Page was a Russian agent, suspected of illegally coordinating the actions of the Trump team with Russian officials.
Police states are dangerous instruments, and no one is safe from their capricious and arbitrary vengeance. In fact, the same media shills who deliberately cover for these criminals, would do well to remember, that a police state will come after them as swiftly as any person who dares to think for himself. When useful idiots are no longer useful, they become very expendable, very quickly, and the honorable people who would have protected them are no longer around, having been exterminated by the very police state the lying media once supported.
The lie was carried out to advance the FISA wiretap warrants that allowed the FBI to illegally spy on the entire Trump campaign. Page was used as the crowbar to pry open the entire Trump campaign to a domestic espionage campaign.
Four FISA warrants were obtained from late 2015 until 2018, using this deliberately altered information. As the DOJ IG's report concluded, the three renewals used the doctored email even after the FBI received protests from the CIA, expressing outrage that Carter Page was still being accused of being a Russian agent, when the truth is he was an operative for the CIA. The falsification is clear criminal contempt of court, obstruction of justice, and deprivation of rights under color of law. These are very serious criminal actions. So, Clinesmith's indictment, and now subsequent guilty plea to the Department of Justice, is a bombshell development.
But, if one chooses to get his news from MSNBC or CNN, he would know absolutely nothing about this very important development. These media outlets, and others, have chosen to totally ignore it. This is the first of what many believe will be a series of vital prosecutions of former Obama officials in the DOJ, all likely guilty of criminal actions to defraud the court and obtain illegal search warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and administration, and then falsely use this phony information as the basis for the Mueller special counsel, and then the contemptible impeachment debacle that played itself out in late 2019.
Even media outlets that passingly cover the story insert falsehoods into their reporting. The New York Times brazenly lied to its readers by asserting that Clinesmith's actions did not show "evidence of a broad anti-Trump conspiracy among law enforcement officials." That's simply a lie. Clinesmith's alteration of that email was a leading crime that facilitated multiple follow on criminal deceptions against the court, resulting in violations of Constitutional rights against illegal search and seizure. Those actions are absolutely, in every sense, "a broad anti-Trump conspiracy."
The entire ongoing Michael Flynn travesty is a direct byproduct of these illegal wiretaps, who's information was used to carry out a punitive and entirely unjust prosecution against Flynn. Despite eavesdropping on Flynn's phone conversations with the Russian ambassador, as part of Flynn's official duties with the Trump transition team, the FBI carried out an interview with Flynn seeking information about those phone calls, information that the FBI already had a word-for-word transcript written from the wiretaps. There was no legal reason for the interviews. It was a perjury trap, and when the two agents who interviewed Flynn maintained Flynn did not lie, the upper leadership of the FBI reversed their recommendation to drop Crossfire Razor entirely. Instead, the FBI charged ahead with the investigation, and used it to bankrupt Flynn, conspire with his initial defense team to hid vital exculpatory information, and then coerced a guilty plea from Flynn, using a fabricated threat of launching an investigation of Flynn's son.
Thanks to Sidney Powell, Flynn's second lawyer, we now know the full extent of the FBI's illegal activities. We also know better how corrupt our judicial system has become, seeing federal judge Emmet Sullivan trying to turn the American courts into a different system, where the court has the power to prosecute their own cases, where a judge gets to add jury and executioner to his job description. Sullivan has ignored even an appeals court ruling against him.
What the Obama team in the DOJ, including the FBI, conspired to do, was nothing less than turning America into a police state. Find the man, and invent the crime against him. Anger an influential person, in Flynn's case Barack Obama, and see the DOJ used as an instrument of tyranny to destroy that person. Sadly, that's no longer just a Soviet style system. It has been co-opted by certain American officials, who took oaths of office to the Constitution. It likely went beyond just the DOJ, and also included senior officials with the Defense Intelligence Agency and even the CIA. That CIA email was an effort by the rank and file to right an injustice, never supported by the senior CIA leaders who's influence would have ended the travesties.
Clinesmith's is just the first shoe to drop. Many believe his plea deal included damming testimony against the other agents at the DOJ and FBI. If true, we can expect to see multiple follow-on announcements. Grand juries have already been convened, and likely returned true bills of criminal indictment. The good news about criminal conspirators, is that their basic immorality sees them turn on each other in desperation to remain afloat the longest.
These many criminal agents, who violated their basic public oaths, are hoping for an election result that sees a Democrat victory, as a last ditch avenue to destroy the John Durham investigation, and sweep all of this criminality under the rug. They also count on a complicit media to hype the lies and cover up the truth. The expanding list of reasons to vote for Donald Trump in this 2020 election grows with the knowledge, that if Americans want justice against criminal conspirators in our government, it must not vote for those who would cover it up.
Police states are dangerous instruments, and no one is safe from their capricious and arbitrary vengeance. In fact, the same media shills who deliberately cover for these criminals, would do well to remember, that a police state will come after them as swiftly as any person who dares to think for himself. When useful idiots are no longer useful, they become very expendable, very quickly, and the honorable people who would have protected them are no longer around, having been exterminated by the very police state the lying media once supported.
-- Ken Stallings
This column is copyrighted under provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and all rights are reserved. Please do not re-transmit, host, or download these columns without my written permission.