By Jed Babbin
The Democrats, stumbling down the road to impeachment, were stunned by President Trump’s executive order on Thursday.
The order is in two parts. First, it directs
the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s
investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence
investigation that was the vehicle used to spy on candidate Trump’s campaign
and President Trump’s administration when it was new.
The second part of the order delegates
to Barr the president’s authority to declassify — or reduce the level of
classification of — anything that the intelligence agencies will give him.
Leaving on his trip to Japan on Friday,
Trump said “We want to be very transparent, so as you know, I declassified
everything. We are exposing everything.” He specifically mentioned that Barr
would be looking at the involvement of several nations including the UK,
Australia, and Ukraine.
Trump let the dogs out. The necessity
for this action has been comprehensively clear for more than a year, and I have
been advocating it for that long.
While he was chairman of the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Devin Nunes tried to get the
FBI to testify truthfully and provide him the documents that show how it abused
its law enforcement powers to investigate Trump. Nunes’s January 2018
memorandum — of which the FBI fought declassification as long as it could —
revealed enormous abuses of power by the FBI in seeking and obtaining — on
false grounds — surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act from the FISA Court.
As I wrote last year (here
and here), Nunes demonstrated that what the FBI did
in the Trump investigation was worse than Watergate. Nunes also demonstrated
conclusively that nothing other than a presidential order to declassify the
documents and testimony the FBI was concealing could overcome the FBI’s
stonewalling.........To Read More....
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