Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President

I’m on Newt Gingrich’s e-mailing list, but his column is also online here.

Lee Smith has written a book so important and so revealing that every American who cares about the future of our Republic should read it.

The Plot Against the President is a remarkable history of our times. It captures what historian Edward Luttwak called “the paper coup.”

Luttwak is a famous historian who wrote an authoritative study of governments being overturned by coups. Entitled Coup d’etat a Practical Handbook, it established Luttwak’s credentials when he analyzed the post-election war against President Trump.

As Smith reported: “The ‘anti-Trump operation,’ says Luttwak today, ‘was a very American coup, with TV denunciations by seemingly authoritative figures as a key instrument.’ The plot against Trump was a bureaucratic insurgency waged almost entirely through the printed word. It was the ‘Paper Coup.’"

Smith’s book is built around the courageous hard work of Congressman Devin Nunes and his team of Republicans at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Living through the last four years, it has been easy to confuse what was going on and who to trust and distrust.

Smith captures it all in one clear sentence: “Without the big titles and the national security bureaucracy’s legalistic self-defense mechanisms, the story was pretty straightforward: The Clintons hired a bunch of con men who got their dirty cop friends to frame Trump. The press and a corrupt prosecutor handled the cover-up."

Throughout all the confusion, Nunes and the courageous group he assembled kept pursuing the truth through what was an ocean of lies, obstruction, and resistance. In his book, Smith describes a pattern of senior US intelligence officials systematically undermining and targeting people seeking the truth – even one of Nunes’s own investigators, who was a former Department of Justice lawyer.

At the same time, instead of upholding the law, Mueller perverted it. The clear signal Americans got from the spectacle around the Mueller investigation was that the elites in this country were determined to smear the President, even though he’d done nothing wrong.

In fact, Smith writes that the Mueller investigation in fact just became an extension of the larger effort to oust the elected president, and Mueller was a “fixer” to cover-up that the effort was happening.

Nunes understood how Mueller had perverted his role. Smith explains: “Nunes had described ...Mueller produced a perfect feedback loop: intelligence leakers spin a false story to the media, the media publishes the story, Mueller cites the story, and the media and the Democrats then fake outrage at Mueller’s findings. It was as if Nunes were guiding a tour of the underworld."

The news media was so dedicated to the anti-Trump coup attempt that it was impossible to deal with them. Smith describes how Jack Langer, Nunes’s communications director, slowly realized that talking to the mainstream media was actually hurting the truth-finding effort rather than helping inform the public. It didn’t matter what Langer would tell the press because reporters, editors, and producers had already made up their minds about the substance of the story. Talking to Republicans was just a ploy to retain a whiff of objectivity.

At the same time that much of the media was skirting its traditional role, the very nature of the FBI-intelligence community war against Trump made it even harder for legitimate news media to be neutral. In order to get scoops, reporters had to agree to protect anonymous sources – and print what they were told. If they didn’t, they would lose access.

Smith describes the cumulative effect of the bureaucratic corruption and news media collusion (the real collusion story), and it is devastating.

Sadly, we had seen this kind of bureaucratic-news media corruption before, in 2003. It involved some of the same players – including former FBI Director Jim Comey. That time, they tried to destroy Vice President Dick Cheney by framing his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and forcing Libby to bargain for his freedom by selling out his boss.

However, Libby refused to lie about the Vice President and accepted a totally framed punishment. President George W. Bush commuted his sentence. The Washington Bar Association reinstated him for having been the victim of prosecutorial malpractice. President Donald Trump pardoned him completely.

As Smith writes: "the Libby case had been a baseless media-driven scandal, a press frenzy that had resulted in a miscarriage of justice. Mueller 2017 was a replay of Fitzgerald 2003. The latter went after Cheney, the former Trump.”

The current sickness in the Justice Department is deeply rooted. In addition to Smith’s book, informed citizens should read Sidney Powell’s Licensed to Lie. Powell is currently defending General Mike Flynn and challenging the entire case against him as an illegal frame by willfully dishonest prosecutors.

When you read The Plot Against the President, you will realize there is a lot more going on – and a lot of people may end up in jail for having attempted to destroy an elected president.

Every citizen should read it to understand how sick the system has become.

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