Russia Collusion or Deep State Coup?

                                       

By Reginald Johnson

    For over a year now, the American public has been bombarded with stories raising questions about whether Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to win the presidential election in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.

  Claims were made first in the fall of 2016 that Russian agents had hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee and revealed information damaging to the Clinton campaign, allegedly aimed at benefitting Trump. Later, the contents of a salacious “Russian dossier” were leaked to the press, with a former British intelligence agent, using second and third hand sources, alleging that officials of the Trump campaign had close ties to the Kremlin and that the Russians had a compromising videotape of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.

  In the spring, Trump, who has steadfastly denied any collusion with the Russians, fired FBI Director James Comey while his agency was investigating Russia ties. The President said he took the action after the Justice Department recommended the director’s dismissal because Comey had bungled the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server to handle classified information.

   But the Comey firing sparked a furor in Congress and in the media, with Democrats and others claiming obstruction of justice by Trump.  Congress moved to set up a Special Counsel to probe the questions of possible Russia collusion and former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed for that job.

  For the last nine months, Mueller’s investigation has been ongoing. Some indictments have been brought against people previously tied to Trump, such as former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.  But none of charges brought so far, including money laundering by Manafort,  relate to the original claim of collusion between Trump and Russia.

   In recent weeks however, evidence has begun to emerge which contradicts the narrative that Russia fixed the election to help Trump.

  In fact, the contents of thousands of cell phone text messages by FBI agents involved in both the Trump investigation and the Clinton email probe ---  released by the Justice Department Inspector General ---  would appear to confirm what some (including this reporter) had suspected last year when the Russia election interference story was first breaking ---- that what had taken place was not a plot by Russia to help Trump win the election, but a plot by U.S. intelligence officials to block Trump from winning the presidency and ensure the election of the more hawkish candidate, Hillary Clinton.

  That scheme turned into a coup attempt after Trump’s surprising victory and the storyline of Russian hacking and a tainted election was gathering steam. First, there was an unsuccessful move to have Electoral College electors switch their votes from Trump and move to install Colin Powell as President. Later, the focus turned to impeachment --- create adverse publicity, with dark talk of collusion with the enemy and even treason, so that Congress would have no choice but to throw Trump out.

 So far, impeachment talk is just that, talk. But should Mueller bring obstruction charges against Trump, impeachment would become a real possibility.. Mueller's team is seeking to interview Trump in the near future.

The White House

  The text messages were between former top FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.  The two, who were having an extra-marital affair, exchanged messages over a number of months in 2016 and 2017, at a time when Strzok was first leading the Clinton email investigation ( which concluded with Comey declaring there were insufficient grounds to charge Clinton) and then later serving on Mueller’s special counsel team.

   The two FBI officials show a thorough disdain for Trump, often using profanities to describe him.

   But more pertinently, they make references to what might be an illegal attempt to undermine Trump.

   In one message to Page in August of 2016,  Strzok comments on a meeting which took place in FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s office, during which the election chances of Donald Trump were apparently discussed.

      “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office --- that there’s no way he gets elected --- but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,”  Strzok wrote.

  What was meant by an ‘insurance policy?’  A campaign of leaks designed to smear Trump by implying he was colluding with the Russians perhaps?

  “We suddenly have documentary proof that key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process.  And that puts in a new and dark context the year-long promotion of Russia-gate. It now appears that it was not the Russians trying to rig the outcome of the U.S. election, but leading officials of the U.S. intelligence community, shadowy characters sometimes called the Deep State,” wrote former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in Consortium News on January 11.

  Strzok also led the investigation into the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a personal email server for classified information.

  In his piece called “The FBI Hand Behind Russia- gate,”  McGovern wrote that Strzok reportedly  “changed the words ‘grossly negligent’ (which could have triggered legal prosecution) to the far less serious ‘extremely careless’ in FBI Director James Comey’s depiction of Clinton’s actions. This semantic shift cleared the way for Comey to conclude just 20 days before the Democratic National Convention began in July 2016 that ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring charges against Mrs. Clinton.

    From May to August of 2017, Strzok was the top FBI official working on Mueller’s investigation into possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, but was taken off that job when the inspector general learned of the Strzok-Page text message exchanges and told Mueller.

  Both Strzok and Page have been reassigned to different positions in the FBI.

  Another revealing message between Strzok and Page showed Strzok had some doubts about whether there really was anything to the Russia collusion claims. He told Page in May prior to his joining the Special Counsel team that he had a "gut sense and concern, there's no big 'there' there."

  McGovern and others have raised the possibility recently that some of the claims in the Russian dossier --- and much of that information has been discredited --- was used to obtain a critical FISA court warrant to allow the FBI to spy on members of the Trump team.

  If false information was presented to a FISA court judge to obtain the warrant, then officials engaged in that action could be held criminally liable.

   Currently there is a push on by Republican members of Congress to release a memo compiled by the staff of the House intelligence committee which outlines possible abuses by the FBI, CIA and other government officials of surveillance guidelines and other legal procedures during the Trump investigation. The memo contains classified information, and the Justice Department has asked that the document not be released. But a number of congressmen said they will vote to make it public this week.

    Also thousands more phone text messages are expected to be released involving the communications of the FBI officials.