By Bruce Bawer
It all began on September 11. Not September 11, 2001, although a word about that day would not be out of place in this connection. Only days after the attack on New York and Washington, a fool of a president told the American people that Islam is a religion of peace – a perverse formulation that no one on earth had ever encountered before. And this whitewash was reinforced by his successor in the Oval Office, a man who, not foolish but wily, had been fathered by a Kenyan Muslim and grown up in Islamic Indonesia, and hence believed, as Drew Thomas Allen writes in Clinton Hoax, Obama Coup: The Declassified Story of the Trump-Russia Delusion – a spectacular account based on “newly declassified intelligence, memos, and testimonies” – that Islam is “a peaceful religion to be revered.”
Hence not only was Obama incapable of taking seriously the Islamic terrorist threat; “he governed as if defending the image of Islam was a central obligation of his presidency,” and in carrying out this sacred task he was prepared to “alter the course of American history…politiciz[ing] the intelligence agencies, weaponiz[ing] the Pentagon, and corrupt[ing] the machinery of government to shield Islam and prop up his own delusional worldview.” This readiness to exceed the constitutional limits on his executive powers, and to prioritize Islam’s image over America’s security, brings us to the other September 11 – namely, September 11, 2012.
It was on that date that members of Ansar al-Sharia murdered four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi. It didn’t have to happen. It was already known that terrorists were operating in the region and that the mission was a prime target. Stevens and others had urged Hillary Clinton’s State Department to beef up security there. The blood of the dead, then, was on her hands, and on those of Obama, who had engineered the transformation of Libya from a secular dictatorship under Qaddafi to a haven for terrorism. But instead of accepting blame, Obama concocted a totally fraudulent narrative: the attack, he claimed, had been a “spontaneous protest” inspired by an anti-Islamic YouTube video, “Innocence of Muslims,” by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian living in America. The ruse worked: two months after the Benghazi disaster, Obama easily won re-election.
I say that the ruse worked. But only in the short term. For, as Allen notes, the FBI’s Benghazi probe would lead to the exposure of Hillary’s email server, and thereby “set in motion a chain of events that ushered in an era of political depravity and destruction from which America has yet to recover.” It “gave birth to entire galaxies of corruption.” And it bound Obama and Hillary Clinton “in a political suicide pact, each clutching secrets that could destroy them both.” In the spring of 2016, then, even as Hillary was campaigning to be America’s first female president, “the FBI’s investigation into her secret server was closing in.” What to do? To distract from her own corruption, Hillary “signed off on a plan to paint Trump as a Russian asset.” And Obama went along, working with Hillary “to end the FBI investigation into her” and replace it with “an investigation into Trump.” This nefarious operation was managed by a lawyer, Marc Elias, who answered to the president.
The specifics came together quickly: in April, the Clinton campaign hired Fusion GPS to carry out opposition research; soon British spy Christopher Steele was on board, and on June 20 he presented Clinton’s campaign with the nonsensical tale of Trump’s “golden showers” at a hotel in Moscow; and on June 27, Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a plane on a tarmac in Phoenix, “just days before Hillary Clinton herself was scheduled to sit down with the FBI” to answer questions about her server. When news of the Phoenix meeting — which was meant to be clandestine – was reported on local TV news, and then worldwide, both Bill and Lynch prevaricated shamelessly, saying they’d exchanged only small talk. Indeed, memos show that Lynch “was keeping Clinton’s political director Amanda Renteria apprised of the FBI’s investigation” and that even as the Clinton camp was amping up the Russia hoax with Obama’s help, the president himself was leaning on Justice to wind up that investigation.
How quickly the switcheroo was carried out! On March 31, FBI leaders met to discuss the plan to frame Trump. On July 5, FBI director James Comey made the instantly infamous public announcement in which he laid out Hillary’s crimes, which were eminently prosecutable, and ended by making the brazenly preposterous declaration that “no reasonable prosecutor” would charge her with anything. And on July 31, Comey’s FBI launched a probe into the Trump campaign based on material that he – and Obama – knew to be pure contrivance.
The Trump camp knew it was being targeted with outright falsehoods, but it had no idea “that Clinton and her allies wouldn’t just say anything; they would do anything, including bankrolling an opposition research firm, hiring a foreign spy, feeding fabricated intelligence to the FBI, and colluding with the press to brand Trump a Russian asset.” The effort was immense, and involved some of the most powerful people in Washington as well as almost the entire legacy media. But, rather remarkably, it fizzled, it flopped, it floundered. “In one sense,” Allen suggests, it was “the most prolific failure in modern political history.”
But Trump’s unexpected Election Day win wasn’t the end of Obama and Hillary’s villainy. From seeking to sabotage Trump’s candidacy, they shifted to trying to undermine his presidency. Throughout, it was Obama who ran the show. On December 9, 2016, “Obama ordered the intelligence community to produce the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment—the document that would claim, with ‘high confidence,’ that Putin interfered to help Trump.” With this order, Obama transformed election interference by a political campaign into a government project run from the White House. Even after Trump took office, his entire intelligence community was still working with his predecessor on what was nothing less than an Obama coup.
It was James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who in January 2017 “oversaw the Intelligence Community Assessment,” telling the public that he and his team had “concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Putin interfered in the election to help Trump.” The ICA purported to express “the unanimous view of the entire intelligence community”; but it didn’t: while CIA director Jim Brennan was all in on the big lie, and Comey was willing and eager to weaponize the FBI in its service, NSA boss Mike Rodgers agreed to go only partway, claiming to have “moderate confidence” in the Trump-Russia story. On the other hand, Adam Schiff spent all of 2017 working overtime “to convince the American public that Donald Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia.” Schiff told any journalist who would listen that “he had personally seen ‘more than circumstantial evidence’ of collusion.” But there was no such evidence to be seen.
And yes, it was a coup. “It wasn’t tanks in the streets or generals seizing TV stations,” writes Allen, “but it was just as insidious. It was America’s own intelligence agencies, top law enforcement officials, and the political establishment working together to nullify the will of the voters. Instead of respecting an election, they weaponized investigations, surveillance, and leaks to delegitimize a sitting president.” And Allen underscores one key point: “Behind every step of the plan was Obama. Clinton’s plan to smear Trump as a Russian asset would never have been possible without Obama’s administration” – his FBI, his CIA, his NSA. With Russiagate in 2016 and afterward, as with Benghazi in 2012, “the hand at the center was the same: Barack Obama.”
He has yet, however, to be punished for any of it. Nor have any of his co-conspirators. On the contrary, most of them have been rewarded with book deals and cable news contracts. Their systematic mendacity weakened Trump’s power during his first term and made Americans more deeply cynical than ever about their government. Yet to this day, roughly half of Americans buy into at least some of the Clinton-Obama fictions, casting Trump as the bad guy and speaking of Obama’s presidency as “scandal-free.” In fact, Obama and all of his collaborators are guilty of high crimes and should be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced appropriately. Do I imagine for a moment that this will happen? Of course not. Still, it’s good to have, in Clinton Hoax, Obama Coup, the whole ugly tale spelled out in detail, in the hopes that someday, truth and sanity will reassert themselves in mainstream American society and make possible the publication of textbooks that actually reflect the facts of this appalling chapter in American political history.
First published in Front Page Magazine
