
Andrew C. McCarthy lays out three clear measures the Trump administration and Congress must take in order to expose Russian collusion for what it is, not what Democrats and the media want it to be:
He writes:
Merely calling Democrats out on this farce is not going to end it. Thanks to President Trump’s unruliness, it is working too well. So, I have three suggestions.
First, the Justice Department should appoint a special counsel to investigate the potential abuse of government surveillance powers for the purposes of political spying and leaks to the media. The investigation should scrutinize all unmasking of Americans to determine whether it conformed to court-ordered restrictions. The president should immediately announce that he is ordering U.S. intelligence agencies to cooperate fully. He should add that he is willing to declassify forthwith relevant reports and the identities of officials involved in the unmasking of Americans — with the caveat that important intelligence secrets will be safeguarded. It should be made clear that any official who had access to classified information that was leaked to the media should expect to be summoned for grand-jury testimony about his or her handling of it.
Second, the appropriate committees of Congress should convene hearings on whether the Obama Justice Department sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, and whether it colluded with the Clinton campaign toward that end. The committees should examine, compare, and contrast the Justice Department’s treatment of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and destruction of tens of thousands of government files, versus its treatment of the investigation of suspected collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The review should include such matters as whether an effort was made by Obama-administration departments and agencies to downgrade the significance of classified information found on Mrs. Clinton’s servers, while a simultaneous effort was being made to inflate the significance of suspected Trump ties to Russia.
Third, the appropriate committees of Congress should convene hearings on collusion between the Clinton Foundation and Russia, focusing especially on payments by Russian interests to Bill Clinton and to the foundation, and actions taken by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton that benefited Russia (including approval of the sale to a Kremlin-tied energy company of major U.S. uranium assets). The committees should compare and contrast the concrete evidence of Clinton Foundation collusion with Russia versus unproved suspicions of Trump campaign collusion with Russia.
Democrats are not fighting for advantage. They are fighting to annihilate their opposition — not just the Trump administration but the Republican Congress. It is not enough to say they are not fighting fair. Everyone knows that. Look at John Brennan: as a national-security official throughout the Obama years, his principal job was to appease Islamist regimes and organizations. He wanted to engage the “moderate elements” of Iran and Hezbollah, while airbrushing the concept of jihad (“a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community”) and purging agent training materials of background information of sharia-supremacist ideology. Yet, we’re to believe Brennan suspected that the nation was truly imperiled by the Trump campaign due to suspected collusion with Russia? Collusion that he can’t even describe, much less prove?
You either fight back against this sort of thing or you get rolled over by it.