The same shill media that for months described opposition research bought by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as an “intelligence dossier” now describes Tulsi Gabbard’s unraveling of that tangled web the Obama administration helped weave as a “conspiracy theory.”
That’s rich. The people who acted as uncritical boosters of one of the most widely believed, and most damaging, conspiracy theories in American history call the woman who shined sunlight on squirreled-away government documents about all that the conspiracy theorist.
I like to think that one man laughs heartily in his grave over all this.
George Neumayr, a happy warrior, exposed within the first weeks of the first Trump administration so much of what Gabbard so recently confirmed. One of the great reporters in the history of The American Spectator died in Africa before he got to cover a second Trump administration — and see his reporting from 2017 vindicated.
“What we know is that intelligence agencies taped [Michael] Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador,” Neumayr reported in February 2017, “and we know that the contents of the call were leaked to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who is a de facto stenographer for political liberals at the CIA.”
It turns out the truth was even worse than Neumayr reported. Obama, who disliked Flynn, knew about the conversations between the incoming national security adviser and the Russian ambassador, upon which his Justice Department had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant to eavesdrop.
In other words, one administration spied on the incoming administration of another party and then shamelessly accused that incoming administration of skullduggery.
In March of 2017, Neumayr cited a report that “a deeply worried [Christopher] Steele was shoveling his phony intelligence to John Brennan and British spies, as well as trying to prod FBI director James Comey into accelerating his investigation into Trump (the same investigation that the American press now pretends never happened).”
He describes Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, as using his office as a weapon on behalf of the Clinton campaign in part to curry favor. “John Brennan’s CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign,” he wrote in April, “leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump.” The other motive? Neumayr writes that Brennan wished to remain in his perch when Clinton became the 45th president of the United States.
Throughout, Neumayr placed Brennan at the center of the action and called it all by its name: “a thwarted coup.” He wondered how anyone could take a person with his background, or with Steele’s background, seriously because these were the type of backgrounds of so many attracted to coups and other antidemocratic action.
“What a perversely appropriate duo for this appalling fiasco: Steele, a ‘confirmed socialist’ before he entered MI6, according to the British press, and Brennan, a supporter of the American Communist Party during the Cold War (by his own admission), before entering the CIA,” Neumayr wrote. “The details of their mischief are still coming into focus, but when they do the ‘relationship’ between the two countries will look less special than sour.”
Now Brennan, confronted with contradictions in the documents that Gabbard released and what he told Congress and others, appears the subject of a criminal investigation. Brennan, for instance, testified that his CIA was “very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment,” but Gabbard’s material clearly indicates he pushed for the very thing he claims his agency opposed.
George knew a liar when he saw one.
By the end of May 2017, Neumayer reflected: “A future Edward Gibbon will surely appreciate the spectacular lie at the heart of Obamagate: that those crying loudest about a ‘government trying to tip the election’ were corruptly presiding over the only one that actually was.”
That future Gibbon could add that those who advanced a vicious conspiracy theory tarnishing a free and fair election with the Russian taint now decry the people who exposed their lie as conspiracy theorists.
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