“During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.” —Thomas Jefferson (1805)
This week, I revisited a 2020 CBS “60 Minutes” interview with Donald Trump, which aired a week before the election. The interview became contentious when Trump mentioned the “Russia collusion” conspiracy. It was a remarkable case study of how the Demos’ Leftmedia publicists covered up the coup d’état by deep state actors endeavoring to take down Trump.
In retrospect, given the conclusion of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation a year before that interview, which completely debunked the conspiracy, it’s clear that CBS and every other Leftmedia platform were still avoiding the truth in order to support Joe Biden’s candidacy — much as they did with the Hunter Biden laptop “disinformation” charade.
For context, there have been some fast-moving events this month regarding the CIA’s role in seeding the “Russia collusion” investigation ahead of the 2016 election, and the political weaponization of both the CIA and FBI by small but high-level cadres to fabricate a premise on which to influence the 2020 election outcome. Nobody has been prosecuted for that … yet.
On 2 July, significant information was declassified, information that could result in the prosecution of key players in the Russian-collusion “grand conspiracy” cabal. CIA Director John Ratcliffe released the declassified report on a comprehensive review he ordered regarding the CIA’s role in the Russia collusion investigation ahead of the 2016 election. The review exposed the collaboration between the CIA and FBI to fabricate a premise on which to investigate Trump, which would then besiege Trump’s administration for the next four years — as intended. The conclusion of the review is a stunning indictment of all those involved.
That report opens the perjury door — the first step in prosecuting then-CIA Director John Brennan and then-FBI Director James Comey. Moreover, those prosecutions could, by extension, lead to charges against their handlers, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
However, the 2024 SCOTUS decision in Trump v. United States affirmed presidential immunity from prosecution for official acts, and that would likely preclude any successful prosecution of Obama or Biden.
Inexplicably, after the release of information verifying a government conspiracy that is far more dangerous to our Republic than Watergate, Attorney General Pam Bondi decided to announce that there is no Epstein black-book client list.
That was followed by far more important bombshell evidence dropped by DNI Tulsi Gabbard connecting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton directly to the players in the grand conspiracy cabal.
Unfortunately, that also got eclipsed by Bondi’s Epstein file fail.
It is perplexing, to put it kindly, why Bondi sandwiched her “nothing to see here; move along” reveal between the Russian collusion “grand conspiracy” announcement and Gabbard’s evidence connecting the dots with Obama and Clinton. But if Bondi estimated the Epstein story would get buried under those much bigger stories, that was a bad assumption.
That notwithstanding, after reviewing Gabbard’s report, two House Oversight Committee members, Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and Byron Donalds (R-FL), called for arrests, and that may be the outcome after the DOJ review. Luna noted, “This is not a Democrat or Republican thing, this is about the health and the sanctity of our constitutional republic, and so there needs to be arrests. This is not partisan, this is simply illegal what they did, and we’re simply upholding the law.”
Donalds was critical of the “big media organizations” that did not do any fact-checking and instead “followed and toed the company line.” He added, “This is not about one president, it is about the presidency and the continuation of our country.”
Clearly, the declassified documents expose the abject — and I would say intentional — negligence by CBS and the rest of the MSM and social media platforms, all of which censored and suppressed the truth about this conspiracy with the objective of ensuring Biden would defeat Trump in 2020.
The irony is that while those platforms were promoting the BIG Lie about Trump/Russia election collusion, they were actually guilty of colluding to influence the election of the next president, as they have done for decades — but never before on such a grand scale of duplicity and deceit.
To that point, the CBS interview I revisited was scheduled to air on 26 October 2020, just days ahead of the 3 November election. The interview was on the network’s flagship investigative program, “60 Minutes,” and conducted by its most distinguished “journalist,” Lesley Stahl, who has been doing such interviews since 1991.
Stahl demonstrated her mastery of deflection when Trump insisted on what we all knew at the time — that the CIA and FBI had conspired to undermine his presidency. She shut down Trump when he declared there was a deep state coup to support Biden.
What follows are excerpts from that interview, before Trump refused to continue with Stahl’s sandbagging.
Stahl: Are you ready for some tough questions?
Trump: You’re gonna be fair.
Stahl: I’m gonna be fair.
Trump: Just be fair.
Fast-forwarding to the point at which Trump declared that deep state actors were spying on his campaign…
Trump: The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign. They spied on my campaign, Lesley—
Stahl: Well, there’s no — real evidence of that.
Trump: Of course there is. It’s all over the place.
Stahl: No—
Trump: Lesley, they—
Stahl: Sir—
Trump: —spied on my campaign and they got caught—
Stahl: Can I, can I say something? You know, this is “60 Minutes.” And we can’t put on things we can’t verify—
Trump: No, you won’t put it on because it’s bad for Biden. Look, let me tell you—
Stahl: We can’t put on things we can’t verify—
Trump: Lesley, they spied on my campaign.
Stahl: Well, we can’t verify that—
Trump: It’s been totally verified.
Stahl: No.
Trump: It’s been— just go down and get the papers. They spied on my campaign, they got caught.
Stahl: No.
Trump: And then they went much further than that and they got caught. And you will see that, Lesley. And you know that. But you just don’t wanna put it on the air—
Stahl: No, as a matter of fact, I don’t know that.
A few belligerent questions later, Trump ended the interview and released the unedited recording of it ahead of the CBS airing to ensure his claims about spying would not be cut.
It was truly a broadcast journalism case study in media bias and negligence.
Notably, Stahl also propagated the John Brennan fabricated lie that the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden could not be verified as belonging to Hunter Biden. Trump demanded an apology from CBS, but, of course, he did not get it.
In 2022, Special Counsel John Durham dropped his 306-page report on the desk of Biden’s hyper-partisan attorney general, Merrick Garland. It was a scathing indictment detailing how a lawless cadre of high-level deep state partisans within the FBI conspired with their counterparts at CIA against Trump. At the time, Trump concluded what we all knew to be true: that Durham’s filing “provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.”
Still no apology from CBS. And nobody has been sent to prison. Maybe “60 Minutes” should consider some investigative reporting on that.
For the record, despite Leslie Stahl’s repeated insistence about “verification,” implying a high bar for journalistic integrity, CBS spent years propagating the lies about Trump/Russia collusion. This story got its Leftmedia launch in the now-defunct Buzzfeed News tabloid. Buzzfeed first published the fake Steele dossier, a Clinton political prop, to justify the entire investigation into Trump and his campaign and thereby plague his presidency. It worked.
In March of this year, The New York Times was still defending the Russia collusion lie, three years after the Durham findings. The Times “fact-checked” Trump for saying: “They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people. They spied on my campaign, launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another, broke the law on a colossal scale, persecuted my family, staff, and supporters, raided my home Mar-a-Lago, and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States.”
Just as Stahl claimed, the Times declared, “This lacks evidence.”
If the current investigation of Brennan and Comey demonstrates that, beneath the smoke, there is fire and there are prosecutable offenses, that is a remarkable indictment of Joe Biden’s DoJ, suggesting any prosecutable offense was suppressed.
We will see if a “grand conspiracy” investigation emerges, but I regret to state the obvious, as I have previously: It may end up in the same file containing Epstein’s blackmail dossier.
If Ratcliffe and Gabbard, with the help of congressional investigators, can get grand jury indictments on Brennan and Comey, it would substantially increase the chances of indicting Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, her tag-team conspirators, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, whose fingerprints are all over this crime scene, will be untouchable because of the aforementioned 2024 SCOTUS decision affirming presidential immunity.
For his part, regarding the assessments by Ratcliffe and Gabbard, Trump said, “This was treason. Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader. Hillary Clinton was right there with him, and so was Sleepy Joe Biden, and so were the rest of them: [former FBI Director James] Comey, [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, the whole group. They tried to rig an election, and they got caught. And then they did rig the election in 2020. This is like proof, irrefutable proof, that Obama was seditious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup.”
Obama responded through his spokesperson, demonstrating the unmitigated arrogance that is his trademark: “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
Finally, regarding Clinton, keep an eye on this: AG Pam Bondi has released details regarding Comey’s fixed investigative conclusions about Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, a case study in DoJ double standards. The documents expose how Comey manipulated information to end the investigation. The duplicity and double standards were affirmed in a 2018 DoJ IG report, and while the media is suggesting Comey “botched the investigation” by not reviewing key evidence, that suggests the omissions were unintentional.
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
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