The time for an accounting has arrived for former senior members of the FBI and Intelligence Community. They aided and abetted in propagating a false narrative about the Trump campaign colluding with Russians, accused the President of the United States of being a “traitor,” and misled the American people. They made Donald J. Trump the Alfred Dreyfus of the 21st century: a completely innocent man, framed by his own government because of who he was (Dreyfus, a Jew, was the victim of French anti-Semitism) and not what he did.
Dreyfus was framed of spying for the Germans based on a forged document. Trump was framed by a fraudulent dossier.
Worse, the framing
was done as a distraction to cover up for those
who weaponized our law enforcement and
intelligence tools against a political opponent.
President Trump deserves an apology from them
all.
Punishment for the
former FBI and intel officials should include
removal from boards, sinecures, speaking gigs,
and TV. They denied this country a
president-in-full for two years, not just as a
political vendetta but also to conceal what some
of them had done. Their offense was compounded
by the fact that they used the uniqueness of
their law enforcement and intelligence community
former high-level positions to make it appear
they knew more than they did. They besmirched
themselves as well as their agencies’ decent,
dedicated personnel.
After his May 2017
firing, former FBI Director James Comey joined
former DCIs John Brennan, Michael Hayden, and
Michael Morrell, and former DNI James Clapper,
who had been hurling false accusations at the
president, his family and aides since the
November 2016 election.
These folks cast guilty
aspersions without any basis, as evidenced by
the fact that after two years, $25 million, and
many threats by Mueller’s team to get witnesses
to testify falsely, no “conspir[acy] or
“coordinat[ion]” could be “establish[ed].”
(“Collusion” is not in the U.S. criminal code.)
If these former heads of intelligence could be
so wrong, what kind of intelligence product did
they produce for the presidents they served?
These “formers” pleaded
with Americans to join in their craven
quest. Numerous law professors did so. Former
U.S. Department of Justice appointees did so as
well. These lawyers committed a grave disservice
to our profession by pretending that they were
rendering legal opinions when in fact they were
rendering political opinions about Russian
collusion facts.
Why did President Obama
do next to nothing about the Russian
interference in the 2016 election? Why did
information about the 12 Russian intelligence
officers (GRU) who were indicted by Mueller in
2018 not come to the attention of Director
Brennan and DNI Clapper, who appear to have
missed all the signs of actual Russia
interference in the election? To hear them
opine on NBC and CNN, they could see Russian
collusion from their front porches.
How do Brennan and
Clapper respond to the special counsel’s finding
that there was no evidence of conspiracy or
coordination between the Trump campaign and the
Russians? They do not apologize. They
double down.
Brennan claimed that he
must have received “bad information” about the
Russian conspiracy but he was certain there had
been “inappropriate conversations” with
Russians. Inappropriate is not a
basis for prosecution under the U.S. criminal
code. Shortly before the Mueller report was made
public, Brennan confidently predicted on MSNBC
that he “smell[s] more indictments” of a number
of people whose names are quite familiar.
Apparently, his nose was congested.
Clapper claimed if there
was not “active collusion” then there was
“passive collusion,” a meaningless,
contradictory term because it takes action to
collude.
These people led the
charge to misinform the American people and sew
discord in our country. It is not President
Trump who has acted treacherously, it is they.
Some of these “formers”
helped activate and perpetuate the scheme
against the president. Others glommed onto the
narrative because they supported Hillary and,
more significantly, were anti-Trump. It will be
up to Attorney General Bill Barr to distinguish
between the two in his investigation of how the
false scenario began. In the meantime, why do
any of them have any credibility to opine on the
issues of the day?
It took Dreyfus 12 years
to get exoneration and an apology from the
French government. How long will it take Donald
Trump?
Victoria Toensing is a former deputy assistant
attorney general in the Department of Justice
and former chief counsel to the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence. Joseph diGenova is a
former U.S. Attorney for the District of
Columbia and a former independent counsel for
the Justice Department. They are married and
founding partners in the Washington law firm of
diGenova & Toensing.