The skies are growing dark and increasingly
ominous for dirty officials at the top of Obama-era law enforcement and
intelligence agencies. Leading the “I’m
really worried” list are James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta
Lynch, and their senior aides, all political appointees. They expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016
and bury any traces of malfeasance, just as they had buried hers. It didn’t work out that way.
This assault on democracy has not
been proven, but the evidence emerging in dribs and drabs strongly suggests
the possibility. If it is proven, and if the Obama White House was directly
involved, as some FBI texts plainly say, the scandal would be one of the
biggest in American history.
How big? Big enough that major news
organizations, which always favor transparency (“Democracy Dies in
Darkness”), are now deeply troubled by the release of any secret documents.
They know the stakes are too high and transparency too dangerous for their
side, politically.
Right now, we don’t know how big the
scandal is, how extensive the coordination was, and how far up it went. But we
certainly need to know, just as we needed to know if Donald Trump won the
presidency by cooperating with a hostile foreign power. He did not, according
to the Mueller report. Now, we need to know if the U.S. government itself
worked secretly and illegally to prevent his election and, when that failed, to
damage his new presidency. That conspiracy would be equally serious, and for
the same reasons. It needs to be rooted out, exposed, and punished.
The fundamental problem was
identified by James Madison, who led the drafting of our constitution. “In
framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” he wrote in
Federalist Paper 51, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable
the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to
control itself." Under Comey, Lynch, Brennan, and Clapper, under Obama and
Biden, it failed to control itself.
Over the next few months, we will
learn the extent of that failure. We will see if top officials misused their
agencies to investigate and crush their political opponents. Constitutional
democracies cannot permit that. They cannot wave it off as yesterday’s news and
expect to survive unscathed. If undetected and unpunished, it will happen again
to another party, another candidate.
This assault on democracy has not
been proven, but the evidence emerging in dribs and drabs strongly suggests
the possibility. If it is proven, and if the Obama White House was directly
involved, as some FBI texts plainly say, the scandal would be one of the
biggest in American history.
How big? Big enough that major news
organizations, which always favor transparency (“Democracy Dies in
Darkness”), are now deeply troubled by the release of any secret documents.
They know the stakes are too high and transparency too dangerous for their
side, politically.
Right now, we don’t know how big the
scandal is, how extensive the coordination was, and how far up it went. But we
certainly need to know, just as we needed to know if Donald Trump won the
presidency by cooperating with a hostile foreign power. He did not, according
to the Mueller report. Now, we need to know if the U.S. government itself
worked secretly and illegally to prevent his election and, when that failed, to
damage his new presidency. That conspiracy would be equally serious, and for
the same reasons. It needs to be rooted out, exposed, and punished.
The fundamental problem was
identified by James Madison, who led the drafting of our constitution. “In
framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,” he wrote in
Federalist Paper 51, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable
the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to
control itself." Under Comey, Lynch, Brennan, and Clapper, under Obama and
Biden, it failed to control itself.
Over the next few months, we will
learn the extent of that failure. We will see if top officials misused their
agencies to investigate and crush their political opponents. Constitutional
democracies cannot permit that. They cannot wave it off as yesterday’s news and
expect to survive unscathed. If undetected and unpunished, it will happen again
to another party, another candidate.
You can read the
entire column here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/28/a_hard_rains_gonna_fall_on_obamas_bad_cops_and_spies_140429.html?fbclid=IwAR1BzhqrMQKDYpxhSvUBX8gJiScabaZNCw8teSudsBuGcaGT_s0HFvsQ9Cc
