It ought to be difficult to write a book about current affairs, since the news changes every day. But with the Resistance, it’s actually surprisingly easy, because it’s the same stories over and over and over again. You feel like a time traveler on an endless loop. Time passes, but it’s always the same “breaking news.” Liberals allow no one who disagrees with them to come on their networks, so there’s never anyone on the panel to point out that they are building an enormous edifice, with balustrades, cupolas, and gables, on a faulty assumption. The networks can’t find a single Trump supporter to put on their airwaves—and, to be fair, there were barely enough of us to elect him president.
It’s wall-to-wall Trump haters, so the Resistance is free to create fantasy scenarios, until a fact appears contradicting their theory. Then they say: TRUMP LIED TO US! No, he didn’t lie. You’ve been analyzing a story that existed only in your heads. Any sane person could have told you that at the time, but putting sane people on your shows would be a buzzkill for the viewers.
Not only is there, so far, zero evidence that the Russian government tried to meddle in our election to help Trump, but all the “collusion” parts of the story have collapsed spectacularly.
The basic problem the Russia conspiracy theorists keep running up against is that Trump didn’t really have a campaign. Trump’s game plan: Fly all over the country giving stem-winder speeches to ten-thousand-person crowds every day for eighteen months. You’d probably have to go back to the Johnson administration to find a president who spent less money getting to the White House. Trump’s devious strategy was to propose ideas that were wildly popular. (Something about a wall?) How could Russia collude with an organization that didn’t exist?
It would be harebrained enough to accuse Marco Rubio of collaborating with a foreign power to steal the election. But at least Rubio had a real campaign, with strategists, pollsters, and consultants. Trump didn’t have any of those things and was annoyed when he was forced to start hiring them. He didn’t even have a “campaign manager” in any traditional sense of the word. The “campaign” was Trump. He was his own counsel. The press might remember that: they endlessly mocked him for it.
That’s why the media keep fixating on this or that campaign “adviser” as the secret Russian link, and then come back a week later admitting that the “adviser” never actually talked to Trump. Of all the contrived crimes, the idea that a nonexistent campaign plotted with the Russians has to be the most preposterous conspiracy Hillary has ever concocted. But that’s the one she was pushing, so the Resistance complied.
Early on, the media settled on the key members of the Russian conspiracy. They were: Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Roger Stone, and Jeff Sessions. (The Resistance didn’t discover poor George Papadopoulos until August 2017.) It was “odd,” “strange,” “bad judgment” that all these men had some connection to Russia.
In March 2017, that was all we heard. On CNN, for example, Representative Eric Swalwell said it was “just bad judgment that you would have so many connections as Russia is attacking us”—citing “Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Michael Flynn.”1 Representative Jim Himes explained at a committee hearing on Russia, “The people around the President, Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions, Rick Gates, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, have an odd connection to Russia.”2 MSNBC’s Chris Hayes described the “widening circle of associates of President Donald J. Trump” mixed up in the Russian investigation—Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Jeff Sessions.3
These were the hordes of people around Trump who had mysterious connections with Russia—except, oops, they didn’t. The so-called odd connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians turned out not to be odd at all. On closer examination, scratch the part about it being odd; that was not remotely true. In fact, it was kind of the opposite of the truth. The Russian connections could more aptly be described as “drearily ordinary.”
There were heated accusations against attorney general Jeff Sessions, but this turned out to be another liberal brain aneurism. The Resistance ended up having to pretend they’d never said anything about the attorney general being a felon. The slanders of Sessions were so spectacular, they’ll get their own chapter. Papadopoulos got drunk and claimed to have secret inside information about something known to every newspaper reader in the world. He eventually pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. We’ll get to him in another chapter, too. Periodically, longtime Trump friend Roger Stone pops up as the mastermind of treasonous collusion with the Red Menace, but Stone is practically begging to testify, dampening the Democrats’ enthusiasm.
That leaves Flynn, Manafort, Gates, and Page as the evil geniuses of the Trump campaign’s criminal collusion with Russia.
Trump’s short-lived national security adviser Michael Flynn was treated like Alger Hiss—assuming liberals had been upset about a Soviet spy sitting at FDR’s elbow at Yalta, which they weren’t. Flynn was investigated for a phone call with the Russian ambassador during the transition. This allegedly violated the Logan Act, a 218-year-old law that has never been enforced.4 For months, we heard about the beloved Logan Act—as soon as journalists had looked it up on Wikipedia.
The never-enforced Logan Act prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. In the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, Senator Teddy Kennedy was wildly trying to conspire with Soviet leader Yuri Andropov against the sitting president of the United States, Ronald Reagan. In his mash notes to Andropov, Kennedy belittled Reagan and asked for the Communist leader’s help in undermining America’s “belligerent” president. The senator proposed setting up a U.S. media tour for Andropov, including interviews with Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters.5 Thirty years later, when the Soviet Union was no more—despite Kennedy’s best efforts!—General Flynn talked to the Russian ambassador on behalf of the incoming administration. Liberals think Flynn should go to prison, but Teddy was the “conscience of the Democratic Party.”
Soon there were darks rumors that, in his private-sector work, Flynn had registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, instead of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA is a law so important that (1) compliance is “voluntary”; (2) it doesn’t apply to the media; and (3) criminal charges have been pursued under the law only seven times in the past half-century.6 (Some media outlets, such as Russia’s RT network, are required to register under FARA—but only since the inception of the modern Red Scare.)
Eventually, it was determined that Flynn had committed no crime, so he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his perfectly legitimate conversation with the Russian ambassador. In an act of mercy, Mueller dropped the count of “failing to offer an FBI agent a beverage during the interview.”
Paul Manafort and his fellow political consultant Rick Gates may or may not have committed crimes. But so far, none of their alleged crimes has anything to do with Trump. The original charges against them were under the same unenforced lobbying registration law that Flynn was initially charged with violating. Since then, Manafort has been charged with setting up offshore accounts to avoid taxes, which is fantastic news. Surely this means Mueller will soon be getting around to George Soros’s offshore accounts. His tax shelters have more to do with Russian interference in our election and undoubtedly contain a lot more loot.7
To people outside of Washington, Manafort’s and Gates’s work in foreign countries sounds shady. Washingtonians must be laughing their heads off. You can’t throw a rock in that town without hitting someone who is—as Freedom House puts it—“willing to argue the case for just about any aspiring dictator.”8 American political consultants have advised campaigns in more than half of the countries in the world.9 Domestic campaigns provide status and name recognition, but the money is in foreign campaigns. As James Carville says, “Why go to New Jersey and lose for 100 grand when you [can] go to Peru and lose for a million?”10
Lanny J. Davis, chief counsel to President Clinton, and Mike Espy, Clinton’s agriculture secretary, represented Laurent Gbagbo, president of Côte d’Ivoire, who was later tried by the International Criminal Court for murder, rape, persecution, and “other inhuman acts.”11 Another valued client was Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo—described in The New York Times as “the ruthless, longtime dictator of Equatorial Guinea.”12
Tony Podesta—brother of Hillary’s campaign chairman—has represented Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.13 In 2008, White & Case, a prominent New York law firm, was so eager for Qaddafi’s business that it offered him “a special 15 percent discount off of our standard rates.”14
Israel’s 2015 general election was chockablock with former Obama campaign advisers—David Axelrod, Jim Messina, and Jeremy Bird, as well as Democratic pollster Mark Mellman.15 A few years earlier, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran an article about American political consultants Arthur Finkelstein and Stanley Greenberg’s work on that year’s election, titled “Forget About Bibi and Shelley, It’s Really Finkelstein vs. Greenberg.”16
Former representative and Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt has lobbied American officials on Middle Eastern policy on behalf of Turkey.17 Top aides to both Obama and Howard Dean, David Axelrod and Joe Trippi, had clients in the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria.18 That was probably much cleaner than an election in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian election Manafort and Gates worked on was bristling with American political consultants—including Obama pollsters Joel Benenson and John Anzalone. Tad Devine, chief strategist for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, worked for the same candidate as Manafort and Gates. Is he being investigated? Are any of them? In October 2017, this headline ran in Politico: “I’ve Covered Foreign Lobbying for 20 Years and I’m Amazed Manafort Got Busted.” The author, Washington reporter Ken Silverstein, wrote, “I can say with certainty that the law, which Manafort is accused of violating, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a complete joke.”19
Imagine—as you are reading this paragraph, there could be men walking our streets who registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act instead of the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Or was it the Lobbying Disclosure Act instead of the Foreign Agents Registration Act?
For most of Trump’s first year in office, Carter Page was the central figure in the Russia conspiracy theory.
Page’s importance to the Trump campaign was dubious from the start. The only reason the candidate felt compelled to blurt out Page’s name was that the “foreign policy community” was threatening to anathematize anyone who went near Trump. As Danielle Pletka, of the “conservative” American Enterprise Institute, snootily informed The New York Times, “It’s always surprising when a member of our relatively tightly knit community is willing to sacrifice their reputation to stand with someone like Donald Trump.”20
The blacklisting worked! Trump attracted no big names, allowing the media to chuckle about the absence of foreign policy advisers on his campaign. In response, he told The Washington Post in March 2016, “If you want, I could give you some of the names . . . Carter Page, Ph.D”—reading Page’s name off a piece of paper. It was perfectly obvious that Trump had thrown out Page’s name not to get through the end of the week, or even through the end of the interview, but just to get through the end of his sentence.
The next day, The New York Times ran an article titled “Top Experts Confounded by Advisers to Trump,” noting that “even Google offered little but outdated biographies of Mr. Trump’s new cast of experts.” None, the Times reported, had spoken to Trump.21
But with nothing else to back up the Russian collusion story, the media went with Carter Page. On April 11, 2017, The Washington Post broke the news that the FBI had gotten a FISA warrant on Page, as “part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign.”22
The FISA warrant against Page was doted on, speculated about, lovingly presented as the Fabergé egg of Russian collusion for most of 2017.
The news was not that the U.S. government was spying on Americans—but the ultimate, slam-dunk, smoking-gun proof that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia.
Senator Mark Warner explained that “if a FISA warrant has been issued, it is a very, very serious matter.”23 On MSNBC, intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance said the existence of the FISA warrant meant they “must have had some significant intelligence about Carter Page and his links to Russian intelligence.”24 MSNBC’s favorite Republican, Rick Wilson, said, “Obviously, Page is now—he’s now dead to rights.”25
If Alfred Dreyfus has been accused of treason, they must have some very significant intelligence. Obviously, Dreyfus is now—he’s dead to rights.
While it’s wonderful to see liberals become such staunch defenders of our boys in blue, I notice that their vaunted concern for the rights of the accused vanished pretty quickly. I hope they apply the new rules next time a cop shoots a black kid. He wouldn’t have shot him if he didn’t have a darn good reason!
This went on all year, with the FISA warrant against Page cited as Exhibit A in the case against Trump for colluding with Russia.
The Resistance positively reveled in the government’s spying on an American citizen. Here’s MSNBC’s Nance issuing a warning to Page back in March 2017:
“I have a message for him, all right? U.S. intelligence is not going to be coming at him like a lawyer, right? We will turn on the entire power of the U.S. collection system. And if he is lying, it is going to become very well known very quickly . . . If there’s a FISA warrant out there . . . we have the ability to collect anything on him, including all of his finances and every relationship he has with anybody in this world.”26
I don’t remember this attitude when Ken Starr was wiretapping Monica Lewinsky. In fact, I don’t remember this attitude when the FBI was investigating actual Soviet spies.
To the contrary, one of the left’s most celebrated victories in the twentieth century was the Church Committee, exposing the government’s espionage against American citizens. As a result of the hearings, led by Idaho senator Frank Church, severe restrictions were imposed on our spying agencies. When some of these constraints were lifted after 9/11, The New York Times sounded the alarm, warning that a failure to respect the rights of international terrorists would “do enormous damage to what is left of America’s standing in world opinion.”27
Yes, the 9/11 attack had harmed our nation. But think of the damage Carter Page could do!
The Times has gleefully exposed perfectly legitimate government surveillance programs just for fun. One Bush administration program silently tracked terrorists’ finances. No American’s civil liberties were at stake. The government was peeking at the banking records of entirely foreign suspects. It was nonviolent. There was no possibility of collateral damage, no starving Iraqi women and children, no innocent Afghan civilians being droned. The Bush administration begged the Times not to run the story and destroy the usefulness of the program. Other media outlets had the same information but they complied. Only the Times refused. Exposing government surveillance was too important! But when it comes to harassing Trump’s campaign aides, no undercover operation goes too far. No government black ops raise any civil liberties concerns.
After nearly a year of feverish speculation about Carter Page, the House Intelligence Committee released a memo in early 2018 (the “Nunes memo”), revealing that the basis for the FISA warrant against Page had been the Hillary-funded Russia dossier, uncorroborated to this day.
I have no illusion that the government’s maniacal pursuit of Page, Flynn, Manafort, and Gates will give pause to the Goebbels-like liars, determined to expel Trump and his supporters from the body politic at any cost. But it ought to make a fair-minded person wonder why we have an FBI and Department of Justice in the first place. We know what we want them to be doing: arresting drug dealers, terrorists, gangsters, bank robbers, kidnappers, and so on. If, instead, what federal law enforcement does is spy on political opponents and convene star chambers to bring petty prosecutions against the left’s political enemies, it’s not clear why taxpayers should be paying for it.