Tricky, Indeed: An Open Letter From Dick Nixon

 Dear President Trump,

I am enclosing a generous donation to your re-election campaign, just like you asked for...on one condition.

Whoever your opponent is, I insist that you wiretap and frame them. All the BestestPeople(tm) assure me that it is okay. And not just okay, but patriotic and even heroic.

Since these are the New Rules in Fundamentally Transformed America, I must insist that you abide by them. And don't worry; the Washington Post and the New York Times will back you up. They're using all the same arguments that Dick Nixon once used on them to keep his dirty Government secrets out of sight. So they've got your back.

I think I speak for all journalists, bureaucrats and right-thinking people everywhere when I say wiretapping your political enemies and framing them for invented crimes is your sacred Constitutional duty, sir.

Don't let us down.



With warmest wiretap wishes,


"We've come full circle. I finally got those hosers at the Post to see it my way.
Democracy Dies In Disclosure, eh, boys?"  

Worse Than Watergate-UPDATE: "The memo shows interference in the 2016 presidential election by hostile elements within a United States intelligence agency. It wasn’t the Russians we had to worry about—it was rogue actors at the highest levels of the FBI and Department of Justice. Left unanswered is to what extent the West Wing knew about or was complicit in this gross abuse of power.

What we now know:

1. The FBI’s case to the FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court was based almost entirely upon a partisan hit-job bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. Christopher Steele, the source of the dossier, had “financial and ideological motivations” to undermine Donald Trump according to the Nunes memo. In fact, the FBI’s file records that Steele told Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr that “he was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”
2. Ohr’s wife was one of just seven employees at FusionGPS, the firm that was paying Christopher Steele. The personal financial relationship between the Ohrs and the dossier was concealed from the court.
3. The FBI could not corroborate the information in the Steele dossier, calling it only “minimally corroborated” but did not disclose this fact to the FISA Court thus leading it to believe that the information in the dossier was either FBI work-product or that it had been independently corroborated by the FBI. Neither was true.
4.  The FBI did not disclose that the source of the information which formed the basis of their FISA application was a paid political operative of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.
5.  The FBI and the Department of Justice intentionally misled the FISA court in their applications to obtain authority to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. They did this not once, but on four separate occasions over the course of a year, including after Donald Trump was in office. The misleading applications were signed off by James Comey (three times), Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, and Rosenstein. This certainly casts the actions of each of them in a much different light. Recall that Yates was briefly the acting attorney general under Trump before the president fired her when she refused to defend the administration’s travel moratorium in court. At the time she was lionized in the media and claimed that she had to defend “this institution’s solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right.” Likewise, Rosenstein’s nearly yearlong failure to fulfill his legal obligation to produce a lawful charter as a predicate for the Mueller investigation which now appears, in context, to be nothing more than the continuation of the Democrat’s campaign against Trump using the FBI as willing collaborators.
6.  Comey lied to the president about the investigation while he was FBI director.
7.  FBI agent Peter Strozk and his mistress FBI attorney Lisa Page met with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to discuss an “insurance policy” against Trump being elected president. We don’t yet know the names of all of those who attended the meeting.
8.  The texts between Peter Strozk and Lisa Page contain, “extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an ‘insurance policy’ against Trump’s election.”
9.   The Nunes memo is just the beginning. There is more to come.

Nearly 50 years ago, the Watergate scandal forced a president from office. The Left thought it could do it again. But the Nunes memo—and the millions of documents and hundreds of hours of interviews behind it—makes clear that rogue elements within the FBI and Justice Department broke the law in an attempt to use the police power of the United States government first to throw the election to Hillary Clinton and then to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump.

This cannot stand. There must be consequences. And they must be swift, public, and severe.".......