The tables have turned now that the special counsel has exonerated President Donald Trump of collusion with Russia, and Senate Republicans want to take a closer look at the Obama-era officials who inappropriately used the FBI and Justice Department to take down a political rival.
Investigating the investigators
With oversight over the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Senate Judiciary Committee is gearing up to determine if senior administration officials from the Obama White House sought to sabotage the Trump campaign and transition team. The head of that committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), said partisan bureaucrats like James Comey will be subpoenaed and “will answer for [his] time as FBI director.”
“Republicans believe that the FBI and [Department of Justice] — the top people — took the law in their own hands because they wanted [Hillary] Clinton to win and Trump to lose,” Graham told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto following the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.
Although Mueller’s full, nearly 400-page report isn’t expected until mid-April, Attorney General William Barr published and distributed a summary of the special counsel’s findings last week. Quoting the report directly, Barr wrote: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
But if Trump wasn’t acting in league with Moscow during his presidential campaign, were investigators justified in spying on his campaign? Certainly, Senate Republicans will seek the answer to this question, but the evidence points to a politically-motivated smear campaign engineered by senior members of the Obama administration.
Questionable beginnings
“How did this start?” Trump recently asked during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “How did it start? You had dirty cops. You had people that are about FBI folks. I know so many. They are incredible people. But at the top, they were not clean, to put it mildly. And what they did to our country was a terrible, terrible thing.”
From the very beginning, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia was mired in controversy. The investigation was triggered by the thinnest of pretenses: “wine-fueled” gossip shared between Trump aide George Papadopoulos and an Australian ambassador, wherein the former official suggested that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Even more troubling, however, was the agent that Comey placed in charge of this early inquiry. Obama’s spy operation was initiated by none other than Peter Strzok, the adulterous FBI section chief who was later kicked off of the special counsel’s team for sending hundreds of disparaging anti-Trump text messages to his FBI mistress and co-conspirator, Lisa Page. Strzok promised to “stop” Trump from getting elected, or use an “insurance policy” to ruin him in the event that Clinton lost.
At around the same time that the FBI’s Trump investigation was starting, the bureau was wrapping up another political probe with national implications. Comey cleared Clinton for mishandling classified information via a homebrew server months before interviewing her and more than a dozen other key witnesses, and federal investigators treated her with kid gloves throughout their inquiry. Who was the senior agent-in-charge if the Clinton investigation? Once again, Peter Strzok.
Obviously, Papadopoulos’s drunken conversation wouldn’t provide enough suspicion to keep the Trump collusion theory alive, so the FBI and DOJ would use unverified rumors supplied by Russian sources to keep the investigation going. Former British spy Christopher Steele compiled a wrong-headed dossier that was funded by the Clinton campaign and served as evidentiary fodder to apply for secret warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
“We need every ounce of information about the people at the very top of our intelligence community that were promoting the inclusion of this fake dossier,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said. “We based this investigation on a lie. We should investigate who the liars were.”
From the top
Like many other Republicans, Paul wants to publicly subpoena every Obama official’s communications related to the early days of the Russia probe. He wants former CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to testify under oath.
During an interview with Fox & Friends Thursday morning, Paul talked about these officials’ controversial ties to the Russia investigation. “My source tells me that the intelligence community, Obama’s intelligence community, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, they were frustrated because they had this Russian dossier but nobody believed it was real,” Paul said.
“It wasn’t verifiable, they couldn’t get anything out of it,” Paul continued. “So they sent spies into the Trump campaign, they tried to entrap Trump officials to admit they were working with Russia. That wasn’t working, so they were frustrated.”
Now, Senate Republicans want Obama officials to answer for this extremely partisan investigation, and they have the blessing of party leaders. “I think it’s not inappropriate for the chairman of the Judiciary Committee with jurisdiction over the Justice Department to investigate possible misbehavior,” Senate Majority Leader McConnell told reporters during a weekly press conference. “The House is not going to miss an opportunity in…the coming months to look at what they perceive to be things that require oversight. The Senate is involved in the oversight business just like the House is.”
While House Democrats continue their endless search for criminal activity from the Trump campaign, it’s time for the GOP to go on the offensive. And unlike their colleagues in the lower chamber, Senate Republicans have more than just blind rumors and innuendo driving their investigation into the Obama White House forward.
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