Combine that lack of enthusiasm with a media that had an insatiable desire to take down Trump and it was not a good scenario in which to make progress. I became disillusioned and deeply frustrated that Congress could not do its job. If we couldn’t find the wherewithal to defend our power under these most favorable circumstances, when would we? These challenges contributed to my decision weeks later to leave Congress.
As of June 2018, Fast and Furious documents still aren’t in the hands of the House Oversight Committee, despite seven years and a long court battle to obtain them. The Justice Department declined to prosecute EPA’s head of the Chemical Safety Board, Rafael Moure-Eraso, whose case was a slam dunk. They never did prosecute Bryan Pagliano for a clear failure to comply with a congressional subpoena—a decision I believe will come back to haunt both parties in this Congress.
Remember, I was elected to Congress in 2008, the same year Barack Obama became president. I can tell you that the contrast between Obama’s Washington and Trump’s Washington is dramatic.
Although Donald Trump is a Republican, the fact is that he ran against both the Republican and Democratic establishments. His mission was to disrupt business as usual, and his nature is to keep everyone—allies and adversaries—guessing. Nobody can argue that he hasn’t done that.
Perhaps this is one reason the president is treated completely differently than anything I saw in the previous eight years. For the Deep State, all the rules have changed. The constitutional priority to enforce the law seems to have been replaced with a prerogative to sabotage and undermine the duly elected president of the United States.
A Flood of Partisan Leaks
Washington has always had a leaking problem, but with the election of Trump the leaks became a deluge.
The leaking of classified or sensitive information intended to promote a political narrative is a problem that has dogged the Trump administration even before day one. Whereas the Deep State had seemed to function in lockstep with the prior administration, it became immediately clear there would be no such support for President Trump.
One of the most obvious examples of deliberate sabotage took place before he was even sworn in. FBI director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appear to have colluded with CNN to release information that would provide a pretext for the dissemination of the Trump “dossier.” The dossier, filled with salacious and unverified gossip about Donald Trump and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, fueled the political narrative that Trump had colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Despite breathless coverage of that conspiracy theory by CNN and other Democrat-friendly outlets, hard evidence has been sparse.
The release of the dossier in January 2017 ignited endless speculation, but the Deep State set up by Obama holdovers Comey and Clapper would not be known until Comey’s book was released in April 2018, long after the damage was done. Comey admitted in his book that he told the president-elect that CNN had the dossier and was looking for a news hook. With the leaking of Comey’s meeting with the president-elect, they got their news hook.
Subsequent leaks, designed to damage the president, targeted his appointees and casually compromised the safety and security of the United States and its allies.
Within a day of the firing of White House national security advisor Michael Flynn, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Obama loyalists had been plotting to take down Flynn to prevent him from revealing secret agreements that had been part of the Iran nuclear deal. One anonymous source told the Free Beacon, “It’s undeniable that the campaign to discredit Flynn was well underway before Inauguration Day, with a very troublesome and politicized series of leaks designed to undermine him.” One White House advisor who was also a member of President Trump’s National Security Council at the time told the Free Beacon, “The larger issue that should trouble the American people is the far-reaching power of unknown, unelected apparatchiks in the Intelligence Community deciding for themselves both who serves in government and what is an acceptable policy they will allow the elected representatives of the people to pursue.”
Some leaks have posed serious threats to national security. For example, last year an unidentified leaker revealed sensitive Israeli intelligence to the New York Times, which the Times reported in June 2017. In the haste to exploit any potential mistake by the new administration and hoping to embarrass the president for allegedly sharing the intelligence with the Russians, the leaker released and the Times published the classified secrets for all to read. An opinion piece on the English-language site (YnetNews.com) of Israel’s biggest newspaper called the leak “an intelligence catastrophe.” The author, Alex Fishman, wrote, “If there is even a grain of truth in the recent reports, it means someone is waging their war on Trump at Israel’s expense, intentionally causing serious damage to America’s ally—verging on treason.”
Admittedly, we do not know whether current government officials or past Obama appointees are behind such leaks. The finger-pointing goes in every direction. However, we know the twenty-seven anti-leaking investigations currently under way by this administration are important and justified.
These leaks should never be mistaken for legitimate whistleblower activity that is intended to correct mismanagement.
In my work on the House Oversight Committee, I have come to value government whistleblowers. Many of them are patriots who want mismanagement to be dealt with in a system that tends to reward it. With two million federal employees, there’s always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. Any federal worker with a legitimate complaint can bring their concerns to the Office of the Inspector General or Congress and receive protection from retaliation. We have a network of seventy inspectors general with a total staff of 13,500 whose job is to investigate wrongdoing within federal agencies. Whistleblowers can follow the proper procedure for addressing mismanagement.
Premature Calls for Investigations
When allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government first began to appear, many angry Clinton voters turned to the House Oversight Committee to demand investigations. The scripted calls poured in as well-funded and well-organized leftist groups targeted the committee. They wanted the Trump administration to get the same treatment they perceived Hillary Clinton had gotten. (I presume they weren’t requesting that Trump be exonerated in a faux investigation with a predetermined outcome in which targets of the investigation get to pose as his lawyers and all interviews are off the record—a standard the DOJ reserves only for Hillary Clinton.)
Alas, the improbable election of Donald J. Trump was not probable cause for an investigation. Unlike the Clinton investigation, where we had a report from the inspector general for the intelligence community indicating there was evidence of classified information being housed in a nonclassified setting, no such evidence or investigation existed in the case of then President-elect Trump.
Before any congressional investigation could take place, the executive branch needed to investigate. Congressional committees are not law enforcement. They are oversight. The constitutional responsibility to enforce the law rightly belongs to the executive branch. We typically come in behind to oversee the executive branch actions or inactions.
The DOJ has 110,000 people to enforce the law. The House Oversight Committee has sixty to conduct oversight. We were not equipped with the resources to be the tip of the spear on potential international manipulation. Nor should we be. We can make sure the investigation is thorough, complete, professional, and unbiased. But at that point in December 2016–January 2017, even before the inauguration, there was no investigation to oversee. There was no evidence to weigh. On the other hand, in the Hillary Clinton case there was already evidence. We had probable cause. Hillary Clinton had used her personal server to bypass the Federal Records Act. We knew which laws had been broken.
Furthermore, the classified nature of much of the information
involved in an investigation of a foreign state actor precluded my committee from taking the lead on the collusion allegations. Only the House Intelligence Committee had the necessary security clearances to do a thorough investigation of executive branch activities.
Since I left Congress, both the executive branch and the House Intelligence Committee have investigated the Russia collusion allegations. A special counsel has been authorized. Most significant, a host of investigators have been exposed for inappropriate bias.
In a March 8, 2018, letter from House Oversight Committee chairman Trey Gowdy and House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, the two cite the following among their reasons for requesting a second special counsel: “There is evidence of bias, trending toward animus,” they wrote, “among those charged with investigating serious cases. There is evidence political opposition research was used in court filings. There is evidence this political opposition research was neither vetted before it was used nor fully revealed to the relevant tribunal.”
As this book goes to print, we are learning even more from Inspector General Michael Horowitz about the bias and animus toward Donald Trump by the DOJ. His report provides irrefutable evidence of that bias, even though explicit admissions of guilt were not found in the records kept on official devices.
The selective use of facts, deliberate withholding of relevant evidence, and toleration of politically motivated “unmaskings” of private conversations of Trump campaign officials have come to define the investigations of the Trump administration.
The most obvious example of the biases with the intelligence community is available in the voluminous record of more than fifty thousand text messages exchanged between FBI special agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page around the time of Trump’s election. The texts are a rare window into the personal conversations of members of the intelligence community.
Before the election, the two are unambiguous in their support for Clinton, with Strzok writing, “God Hillary should win. 100,000,000–0,” and Page responding of Trump, “The man cannot be president.” Even more telling is the exchange revealed in the June 2018 OIG Report. We already knew of Page’s text to Strzok: “[Trump’s] never going to be president, right? Right?” The OIG, after extensive effort, recovered Strzok’s telling response to that text message: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” Who is we? We is the Deep State.
Curiously, an August 15, 2016, text from Page refers to a mysterious “insurance policy” in the unlikely event Trump is elected. The message, which many believe is a reference to fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, reads, “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.”
In the month before the election, the two exchanged a series of texts indicating they may have leaked information to major media publications. Shortly after the election, none other than Strzok himself was tapped to be part of the Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign. His text messages indicated he was reluctant to take the appointment because his gut told him there was “no big there there.” In his investigative capacity, he was involved in interviewing National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Although Strzok was later removed from the Mueller investigation, later texts between the two show them discussing how to evade federal message-archiving requirements in their communications.
While this one example may not reflect the views of everyone in the intelligence community, many of whom are dedicated and patriotic, the volume of leaking indicates Strzok and Page were not alone in their desire to undermine this president.
Since the election of Donald Trump, the intelligence community has become a lot less covert in its attempts to sabotage the president. We have seen leaks, both classified and unclassified, at the highest levels. Everything from the president’s conversation with the prime minister of Australia to telephone conversations between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak has been released to the media by high-ranking Deep State operatives.
The intelligence community was not nearly so forthcoming when Hillary Clinton put our nation’s secrets at risk by illegally housing them on an unsecured server located in her New York home. The rules were different for Obama administration officials.
Democratic Double Standards
In addition to the energetic vigor with which leaks and investigations unfavorable to the new administration were pursued, there were other changes I noticed in political, administrative, and legislative interactions.
After Trump was elected, I regularly got peppered with questions from the media about whether I was working with the White House. Always there was this implication of sinister wrongdoing if I spoke to anyone there.
Prior to the 2016 election, Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings gave me the impression he was regularly talking to advisor Valerie Jarrett at the Obama White House.
When Cummings and I were united in the need for changes, I would leave it to him. He would coordinate directly with the White House. He was the Democrat! It was no problem. That happened on the Secret Service, problems with the Chemical Safety Board, the DEA investigation, and many more.
I never saw it directly, but I got the sense he was picking up the phone and calling them routinely, if not daily. I don’t think there was necessarily anything wrong with the coordination. He would get back to me and say, “They’re going to take care of it,” or “They understand.” It was just a given that he was coordinating directly with the White House.
Sometimes during those years I would call Neil Eggleston, White House general counsel, and talk some things through. But that wasn’t happening week in and week out, like Cummings’s communication appeared to be. It was benign.
But when President Trump took office, the rules changed. The media and the Democrats viewed with suspicion any coordination between congressional Republicans and his appointees. What had been commonplace for the Obama administration was now depicted as a form of corruption in the Trump administration.
An obvious double standard developed in the expectations of the relationship between the president and his attorney general. Democrats and media had no problem with President Obama overseeing the DOJ. The tight relationship between Eric Holder and President Obama had been unquestioned and well known. Loretta Lynch was viewed as nothing if not a loyal soldier to President Obama. Not so with President Trump and Attorney General Sessions.
Today the media would have you believe the Department of Justice functions independently from the president—that any coordination is somehow obstruction of justice. Media reports cited Trump’s efforts to stop the recusal of AG Sessions from the Russia investigation as grounds for obstruction. Other reports cite Trump’s dismissal of FBI director James Comey as obstruction.
In a classic case of projection, Democrats unwittingly exposed this double standard in an exchange during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s June 18, 2018, questioning of DOJ inspector general Horowitz. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked Horowitz who else was shown the damning OIG report of the Clinton email investigation in advance. “Did you provide it to the White House?” He responded they had not. But then he added, “We’ve had instances, as I could testify to in terms of, for example, Fast and Furious, there was disclosures to the White House about it for various reasons that can be, there can be a basis to do it. . . . I think it is something you would have to direct the department for an answer.”
What if the Trump White House had been shown the OIG report ahead of time as the Obama White House was during Fast and Furious? Per the Constitution, Donald J. Trump is the leader of the executive branch, including the DOJ. He is the president of the United States, and he is rightfully the one in charge of the DOJ.
While Trump is accused of obstruction for managing the DOJ, President Obama freely commented on open investigations without mainstream news outlets
mentioning obstruction. That happened in the IRS case when Obama, in an interview with Bill O’Reilly on Super Bowl Sunday, was asked about the IRS scandal.
The president said there wasn’t even a smidgen of corruption, yet there were five open investigations! House Oversight, House Ways and Means, Senate Finance, Senate Judiciary, and the inspector general all had open investigations, and none had been completed. President Obama had the gall to say there wasn’t “even a smidgen of corruption.”
He reached a similar conclusion in the Hillary Clinton scandal. He told Fox News’ Chris Wallace in October 2016, “I can tell you that this is not a situation in which national security was in danger.” “Here’s what I know. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy . . . she has not jeopardized America’s national security.” How did he know that? Few outside conservative media even questioned it.
Even James Comey later admitted that the comments to Fox News, 60 Minutes, and others were inappropriate.
Now President Trump is asked direct questions about his campaign, and the Democrats are all too excited to yell “obstruction of justice!” And the national media is willing to write stories about obstruction of justice at every whim by a Democrat. They never wrote these stories about President Obama’s interference with Justice Department investigations. Some of my former colleagues went so far as to suggest he should be impeached for the very things President Obama had done on a regular basis.
Ungoverned and Ungovernable
The rules by which cabinet secretaries must live have also changed. Not only is the confirmation process longer, but once the appointees take office, they are often undermined by their staffs.
The Senate has confirmed President Trump’s nominees at a snail’s pace, particularly when compared to the rate at which Senate Republicans confirmed Obama nominees eight years earlier. Fifteen months into the Trump presidency, 40 percent of his nominees still awaited action. Although a recent rule change eliminated the minority party’s ability to block a confirmation vote, Senate Democrats have used the cloture rule to delay confirmation votes at least eighty-nine times. Cloture votes require thirty hours of debate per nominee. Senate Republicans used that procedure on confirmation votes only eleven times during the eight years Obama was in office. These tactics are being used even when the nominee has stellar credentials, such as the case of Richard Grenell. Trump nominated Grenell to be ambassador to Germany in September 2017. Democrats successfully blocked his confirmation until April 2018 despite Grenell’s valuable United Nations experience and foreign policy background.
The Deep State Page 15
