The results are in after the congressional testimony of former FBI Director James Comey and the winner is the Russians. The losers are the citizens of the United States.
Comey did massive bipartisan damage to his reputation in regard to his integrity and professionalism.
Comey’s pre-election comment on Hillary Clinton, “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” initiated his fall because any other government employee would have gone to prison.
Two of the revelations from the Comey testimony were that congressional Democrats knew all along that President Trump was not the subject of the Russian investigation and that Comey himself was guilty of leaking what amounts to government work product, possibly of a classified nature. Comey has refused to turn over the documents he created on his secure government computer.
The Russians have certainly attempted to hack into our federal government systems over the years, but they are mere amateurs compared to the damage inflicted by the Chinese. The Chinese have volumes of federal documents, including government personnel files and classified information.
Congressional Democrats created contrived scenarios involving the Russians to whip the national news media into a frenzy on whether or not President Trump was being investigated.
Then a bombshell ruling was dropped by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that offered severe condemnation of the National Security Agency (NSA) activities from the Obama administration prior to the 2016 presidential election, revealing the judge’s concern that the NSA “continuously” and “systematically” violated the limits placed on the program monitoring the email and Internet data of American citizens.
You will recall that top officials at the Justice Department and the FBI, including James Comey, threatened to resign in 2004 over such suspect activity against American citizens. Likewise, the legality of the bulk phone records collection by the government was later widely criticized and challenged after the exposure given to the snooping on Americans by Edward Snowden.
It has been reported that “the National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community,” (Circa.com, May 24, 2017)
The Obama administration violated internal constraints, Section 702, and self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26, 2016, before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off the alarm just two weeks before Trump was elected.
Now investigations focus on former President Obama, former Intelligence Director James Clapper, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and others to determine if they used the illegal spying efforts in an attempt to ruin the Trump presidential campaign and future administration.
The court censured Obama administration officials, stating an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” (Unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017, https://www.scribd.com/document/349261099/2016-Cert-FISC-Memo-Opin-Order-Apr-2017-4#from_embed).
Forget about the Russians and the Chinese. The worst threat to our republic and our future security is our own federal government.
The politically motivated leaking of highly classified documents to undermine the current administration has taken partisan politics to a whole new level.
Wikileaks revealed the “Weeping Angel” technology, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones in our homes.
The CIA has been severely hacked. It is possible that our cyber warfare programs may already be in the hands of hostile nations.
As the Obama administration demonstrated, this extremely powerful spying technology can be used beyond the legal constraints, possibly against private U.S. citizens and domestic political opposition, and the public would be none the wiser.
There is a very real threat of malicious factions within the intelligence community using the sophisticated technology and their authority to further shady political agendas in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Meanwhile, the hysterical national news media reports on all the rumor and innuendo that Congress feeds it, making Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy look a lot smarter than reality.
Steve Brown, Commissioner
Fayette County Board of Commissioners
Peachtree City, Ga.
