Vincent J. Curtis
6 Apr 2017
Today, Devin Nunes stepped away from the investigation of
the House Intelligence Committee into alleged collusion between the Trump
campaign and “Russia.” He did not,
however, recuse himself from the investigation into the surveillance of the
Trump campaign by the Obama administration.
His Democrat counterpart, Adam Schiff, is hot on the case of
the Trump-Russia collusion angle and has made extreme assertions of such
without providing evidence. After viewing
for himself the same material that convinced Nunes of surveillance of the Trump
campaign and transition team, Schiff has fallen silent on that score.
Republican interests have nothing to fear from Nunes’s
recusing himself on the Russian collusion angle. As was reported here previously, Nunes could
see that there was no evidence, and that if there were, Obama’s spy chief,
Susan Rice, would have found it. Besides
this, the heads of the three agencies who were in a position to know, John
Brennan (CIA), Adm Mike Rogers (NSA), James Comey (FBI), as well as James
Clapper (Director of National Intelligence), all said publically that they
found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and “Russia.” There is no evidence of collusion because there
was none.
The Russian collusion by Trump story is a straightforward disinformation
campaign intended to discredit Trump, with his surprise win over Hillary
Clinton. The single piece of evidence
offered as collusion led to the Michael Flynn affair, which exposed the surveillance
of the Trump transition. There is no other
evidence that Adam Schiff can exploit to the detriment of Republican interests. That is why Nunes can step away from the
Russian collusion story and leave the field open to the Democrat partisan. There is nothing to fear.
Schiff has nothing left to talk about except the search for
evidence of collusion, and he will have to explain why he keeps coming up
empty-handed. Sooner or later, people
are going to get tired of his saying that he has nothing to show for all his
dire claims. They will conclude
themselves that the Trump campaign had no connection whatever with “Russia.” Schiff, an unflinching Democrat partisan,
will never cease to impute collusion and he will eventually be made to look
like a 9/11 truther if questioned about it enough. Look for the anti-Trump MSM stop asking about
it, and letting the matter drop.
The story with truth behind it is the one Nunes is
following. We do not yet know the extent
to which Susan Rice exploited the SIGINT capabilities of the US government to
spy on Trump, but it was enough to alarm Nunes and silence Schiff. The Flynn affair established the modus
operandi: Rice found something embarrassing, circulated the unmasked information
to NSA Director of Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, who leaked it to
friendly media. The entire Russian
collusion story began to distract attention from the embarrassing and authentic
emails released by WikiLeaks first about the DNC and then of John Podesta. The direct collusion between Trump and “Russia”
story could gain traction in the MSM after the election, when it ceased to
matter, by intervention by senior intelligence officials in the Obama
administration, whom the media would assume to be in the know. A powerful member of the NSA like Ben Rhodes
would be assumed to be in the know.
Embarrassing leaks of the Trump transition came thick and fast soon
after the election.
It is hard to imagine the Susan Rice could be running her
own surveillance program and disinformation campaign without President Obama
coming to know about it. He would have
to be on the distribution list of any intercepts that his NSA Director
considered important enough to have the names of Americans in it unmasked. That all these unmasked names were those of
Trump campaign people, and that the intercepts had nothing apparently to do
with national security, as Nunes has said, it ought to have occurred to Obama
sooner or later what Rice was up to, if it had been going on without his
knowledge and consent. It was his
responsibility to know if his NSA Director was abusing her powers and spying on
the Trump campaign for political purposes.
I am not going to get into here an analysis of the
self-exculpatory statements Rice has made on this matter that have turned out
to be false. They point directly at her
guilt.
Devin Nunes made a shrewd political move by recusing himself
from the investigation into the Russian collusion story. His presence on the committee would only lead
to false charges by Schiff that Nunes was obstructing the investigation. With Nunes out of the way, Schiff is going to
have to come up with other excuses his failure to find anything. Meanwhile, Nunes is going to follow the story
that is real and is significant: the spying on the Trump campaign by Susan
Rice. This unravelling of this story may
also expose that the Russian collusion story is a disinformation campaign
invented out of whole cloth to try to discredit the Trump administration.
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