"Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, the possibility should be horrifying that the world’s oldest continuous democratic constitution might be subverted by a cabal of spies with the support of the major media."

In PJ Media, Spengler reviews Andrew McCarthy's book entitled Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. Spengler writes,

...Donald Trump has one quality for which the rest of the world should be grateful: He really does not care how China, Russia, or any other country manages its affairs. By “America First,” he simply means that he cares about what happens in America, and is incurious about what happens outside America unless it affects his country directly. That stands in sharp contrast to view of all the wings of America’s political Establishment – progressive, “realist” and neoconservative – who believe that America should bring about the millenarian End of History by bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, by expanding NATO into a giant social-engineering project, by pressing China to transform itself into a Western-style democracy, and so forth.

(Andy) McCarthy reports in persuasive detail how the spooks set up the president. There is more to be said, though, about why they did it. I will summarize McCarthy’s findings, and afterward discuss the motivation.

The FBI’s investigation of alleged Russian links to the Trump campaign required the FBI to present evidence of foreign intelligence activity to a secret court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The sole evidence the Federal Bureau of Investigation brought to bear was a concoction paid for by the Clinton campaign and assembled by a Washington consulting firm, Fusion GPS.

...As McCarthy explains on the strength of his direct knowledge of FISA procedure, then-president Barack Obama and his top aides had to know about this.

...In short, Trump’s enemies did all the things they accused Trump of doing. They conspired with foreign countries to influence the outcome of a US presidential election. The story seems improbable and outrageous, but in McCarthy’s masterful account, it’s something that one could put before a jury in a court of law.

...The Petraeus surge was one of the most destructive things any military leader ever undertook, but it stands as a symbol of the Establishment’s collective reputation. The Republican Establishment had hailed Petraeus as the savior of George W Bush’s failed Iraq policy, and they are sticking to their story. When Bush took office in January 2001, the United States was the world’s sole hyperpower. Russia had defaulted on its foreign debt in July 1998, and China was a small dark cloud in the geopolitical sky. US government debt was a manageable 55% of GDP, compared with more than 100% of GDP today. America had more than 17 million manufacturing workers, vs only 12 million today. It still dominated high-tech manufacturing, including computer chips and telecommunications equipment. Fast-forward to 2019: China is challenging American pre-eminence in a range of civilian and military technologies, while Russia has returned to the world stage as a major power, notably in the Middle East.

Donald Trump was obnoxious enough to declare that the emperor had no clothes. Breaking with the iron discipline of the Republican Establishment, he told voters that the United States had wasted $7 trillion, thousands of dead, and millions of lives disrupted in the disastrous nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The only other Republican candidate to repudiate the “Bush Freedom Agenda” was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. That is why the 2016 Republican primary became a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. The whole of the American Establishment had signed on to a utopian crusade to impose the liberal world order on the Muslim world. After nine years of frustration in Iraq, it saw in the so-called “Arab Spring” demonstrations of 2011 a second chance to bring its agenda to fruition. The result of this was the near-collapse of Egypt and an eight-year civil war in Syria that killed half a million people and displaced 10 million refugees.

...That is what makes the case of Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn so central to the mutiny against Trump. As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.

McCarthy reviews evidence that is still before the courts showing that the FBI set Flynn up in a White House interview, in order to claim that the distinguished general had lied to federal investigators about his contacts with Russians. Flynn’s lawyers have now produced evidence that the charges against him stemmed from an FBI forgery – FBI officials appear to have altered the interview report to put his remarks in an incriminating light. I have written about the CIA’s witch-hunt against Flynn here and in other locations. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell claims that the CIA sandbagged him to stop an audit of its operations – the first audit since its founding.

Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, the possibility should be horrifying that the world’s oldest continuous democratic constitution might be subverted by a cabal of spies with the support of the major media.

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