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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