Are the People at CNN From Another Planet?

By Robin Siskel

On July 30, 2020, Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's Chief Legal Analyst, posted this piece, EXCLUSIVE: Fearing Trump interference, FBI agents hid copies of Russia investigation docs, saying:

In the hours after President Donald Trump suddenly fired FBI Director James Comey, on May 9, 2017, his former subordinates in the J. Edgar Hoover Building wondered if there would be more shoes to drop... Would the President demand that the Bureau cease its investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump's onetime national security adviser? In response to these concerns, the FBI took extraordinary -- and previously undisclosed -- steps to protect its investigations.

From Comey's first meetings with Trump, shortly after he won the presidency, the FBI director developed misgivings about his new boss' behavior -- about Trump's demands for "loyalty," and even more unnerving, his request that the Bureau drop its investigation of Flynn. Comey's conversations with Trump had been so distressing that the director started writing up contemporaneous summaries of their interactions and sharing them with a handful of top officials at the Bureau. Now, suddenly, Comey was out -- and the question arose of what to do with his memos about his conversations with the President.

This is laughable "reporting" - disgusting actually, and downright disingenuous. It's already been clearly shown that the FBI knew beyond a doubt they had zero justification for the investigation as far back at least as early as Feb. 2017 - possibly even Dec 2016 or sooner. - and yet they started the entire Special Counsel investigation while knowing full well there was no "there," there. They knew for a fact they had zero justification to investigate Flynn before they started too - it's gross prosecutorial misconduct to open an investigation without probable cause, and they had none.

Funny how this CNN "report" fails to note those key facts right at the very beginning. Two excellent articles which are well worth reading, and include the timing on these issues, are: Meet the Steele Dossier's 'Primary Subsource": Fabulist Russian From Democrat Think Tank Whose Boozy Past the FBI Ignored, and A Put-Up Job, noting:

Growing evidence that officials involved in the Russia collusion investigation knowingly acted without cause is undermining our governing institutions.

It was also shown quite some time ago that the FBI failed to turn over quite a few exculpatory documents in the Flynn case, even lied to the judge about it and violated court orders. These fact aren't new (although I don't recall offhand exactly which federal players were already implicated prior to this CNN article, only that a number were). Similarly, it was reported long ago that the FBI kept key information about the whole "Russia Collusion" investigation from Trump and his people.

The idea that the FBI would hide investigative documents from a duly elected president is utterly gobsmacking - but, again, not new information. It was reported long ago that key information was withheld during Trump's briefings - for example, the FBI purposefully refused to tell Trump that the Steele dossier was entirely unverified. Of course, the only reason they bothered to brief him on it at all was so that they could leak to the press that the President had been briefed on the Steele Dossier.

They had shopped the dossier to the media countless times before, but the media refused to report on something so obviously absurd which had no corroborating sources or evidence. Once it had been in a presidential brief, however, that simple fact made it news! very devious way for the FBI to scam the president and the entire nation, get the dossier publicized, and thus trigger off the grossly fraudulent travesty of a special prosecutor investigation by Mueller - which allowed the FBI and Mueller to do lots of spying on the President and his staff, hobble his administration and his policies, turn the public against him with the help of a lapdog mainstream media, and so on.

Withholding key information from a duly elected president in a clear attempt to hinder his ability to function and launch an unfounded massive investigation of him and his administration is utterly unconscionable. It's gross insubordination at the very least, if not blatantly illegal - an attempted soft coup. In fact, this entire FUBAR'd fiasco should have every American up in arms, and those involved ought to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Each person who was directly involved in this skulduggery ought to lose their pensions at the very least. If any are still working for the government, they ought to be fired, ASAP. This makes Watergate look like child's play.

Plenty of other early parts of this absurd CNN article could be easily shredded, but this particularly ridiculous bit caught my eye:

Mueller's team ultimately took possession of Comey's memos, and they proved to be important evidence in the report Mueller filed two years later. As Mueller later learned, and included in his report, Trump seriously contemplated firing the special counsel on several occasions -- so the initial suspicions at the FBI, about the President's real intentions, were well-grounded.

There was zero value to those memos. They were a he said/he said" claim that Trump immediately disputed once aware of the contents, written by someone with clearly biased ulterior motives, which ultimately added nothing to the case, and resulted in nothing either as there was no case to be made. As a result, the claim is downright stupid. It gets even more insane after that, going so far as to claim that Trump is somehow supposedly wrong to investigate the investigators, regardless of the fact that they have been shown to be so blatantly corrupt!

When an article has nothing but false claims, presents old information while trying to take credit as if it's new, utterly fails to present key facts early on... well, what's the point - it has no credibility and one has to assume it's just more mainstream media gaslighting. This CNN article seems to be nothing more than blatant lies and massive left wing spin - "orange man bad!" It's a pretty pathetic attempt too, for anyone who's been paying even a shred of attention to what's been going on.