Victor Davis Hanson
15. The Corruption of the Intelligence, Investigative, and Intelligence Agencies. In 2016, Hillary Clinton hired FBI informant and contractor British subject Christopher Steele and hid her payments to him through the DNC, Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS paywalls. His job was to invent dirt on Donald Trump, tapping disreputable Russian sources, and to pass off a fake dossier as proof of Trump–Russian collusion—all designed to ensure a Trump defeat. She destroyed thousands of emails and devices under federal subpoenas with complete exemption.
As part of the dossier ruse, an FBI lawyer feloniously altered a court document. The interim FBI director Andrew McCabe lied under oath on four occasions to federal investigators. FBI Director James Comey pled amnesia 245 times while under oath when questioned by a congressional committee over his role in hiring and disseminating the dirt of Christopher Steele.
FBI agents ambushed Trump’s designated national security advisor Michael Flynn on spurious charges he was violating the ossified Logan Act and succeeded in ruining an illustrious officer’s career.
In 2020, the FBI again intervened in the election and once more in efforts to ensure the defeat of Donald Trump. FBI agents partnered with social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to suppress accurate news stories about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
More disturbing, the FBI systematically turned into a partisan police agency at the beck and call of the Biden administration.
Thus, in a first, it conducted a performance-act, media-activated, swat-like raid of the home of Donald Trump, turning a normal archival dispute over presidential papers into a violent felony-like offense. The FBI asymmetrically went after anti-abortion protestors, but not so violent pro-abortion activists. It used its agents to monitor parents at school board meetings, but only on the prompt of a national teacher union.
The FBI became a personal retrieval service for the wayward first son, Hunter Biden, intimidating ambush journalist James O’Keefe on false information that he had in his possession the lurid Biden diary. It confiscated the scandalous Hunter Biden incriminating laptop and suppressed the truth of its authenticity until Joe Biden was safely elected. It along with the Secret Service retrieved from a dumpster the illegally obtained but discarded handgun of Hunter Biden.
FBI agents Peter Strozk and Lisa Page, in text communications, exposed the levels of partisanship within the FBI and their mutual determination to use the offices of the FBI to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2016 election.
The CIA was likewise involved in the promulgation of the phony Steele dossier. Director John Brennan lied twice under oath to Congress, as did once Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
Both helped to organize, along with former CIA director Leon Panetta and interim director Michael Morell, “51 intelligence authorities” to lie to the public on the eve of the last 2020 Biden–Trump debate, a few days before Election Day, that the authentic, and authentically embarrassing, Hunter Biden laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation (i.e., a supposed disinformation attempt), designed to supposedly hurt Biden’s election chances.
In truth, the intelligence operatives knowingly were lying to the public in an effort to warp a U.S. election—and succeeded. In some cases, the signees were not retired as claimed, but still being paid by U.S. intelligence agencies as contractors and thus reacting to the wishes of their former employers.
The Department of Justice deliberately rigged a plea deal to nearly exempt the tax-cheating Hunter Biden—until an outraged federal judge canceled the sweetheart deal. During the 2016 Russian collusion hoax, attorneys for the DOJ were knee-deep in spreading the fake dossier among the highest echelons of the Washington, D.C. political and media nexus.
The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, as a supposed psychiatrist, diagnosed his commander-in-chief Donald Trump as demented and then called his Chinese communist counterpart to warn him that in case of existential tensions, Milley would call him and warn him that the military was not following his own president’s orders. Milley further violated the chain-of-command, by assuming powers not his own when he ordered theater commanders to report to him directly rather than as legally required to the Secretary of Defense in times of national crises. In normal times, such behavior bordered on the treasonous.
Under the Obama and Biden administrations, the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and DOD all shed their thin veneers of nonpartisanship and joined two administrations in an often-illegal manner to further their aims of destroying a rival political candidate.
The examples could be multiplied endlessly but reflect the terrifying notion that the Washington, D.C. hierarchies of our major intelligence, investigative, and legal bureaucracies are not just compromised but actively and stealthily seeking to interfere with U.S. elections and to sue their offices to become partisan actors.
If you collate these 15 examples and look at the U.S. in a disinterested fashion, a fair-minded person could conclude that the progressive Left has so undermined our institutions, traditions, and Constitution that the will of the people has been smothered and subordinated to the whims and wishes of a bicoastal government-corporate elite.
Discussion (5)
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These nine articles with 15 core examples of the broad national crisis are both thorough, brief, and to-the-point all at the same time. Thank you very much for your summary of the situation. I'm never left disappointed by your thoughtful insight and commentary, Victor. I'm glad I finally paid for your Ultra articles after hearing Jack Fouler promote it over and over. I'm reading this after the election, and I feel a mix of great optimism and balanced perspective of the great task ahead: the successful (hopefully) draining of the swamp. Keep up the good work.
Although I have heard Victor articulate many of these sobering points in his weekly podcast with Jack and Sami, reading all nine parts beginning to end is frightening. This reads like a fantastic fictional drama only someone with an amazing imagination could conjure up. It is truly sobering that it is happening right before our eyes in real time and we are not really very effective in even slowing it down. Our leaders have lost their way and all that was great that the founding fathers had the foresight to create is now just something to manipulate for a select group of misguided wealthy and warped individuals. God bless Victor for keeping us attached to reality...
Thanks you Victor for the exhaustive yet necessary compilation of the progressive left’s unceasing attempts to destroy Donald Trump and our great country. I am a New Testament person but fully understand why there had to be an Old Testament first. May God help us in our time of need!
Yes, it's crucial for Trump-Vance to win; maybe Musk could not only cut costs but even help drain the (shockingly foul) swamp.
VDH – Your “Part 9” essay is very sobering and at the same time a little depressing. I went to the local post office the day after I turned 18 and registered as a proud Republican. Then promptly voted (for the very first time) for Ronald Reagan in November 1980 and every election since. I must admit that I’ve lost some faith in our democratic process and sometimes wonder if I’m wasting my time going to the polls. I already mailed in my ballot for the current election and I’m waiting to see what happens next Tuesday. BUT, if we have to deal with another four years of the radical left-wing Marxist agenda, then I feel I might have to make a new life in Bolivia…like Butch and Sundance.