— @amuse (@amuse) June 28, 2026
Consider what it takes to lie to a free people at scale. A private liar can deceive a neighbor. A campaign can deceive a district. But to deceive an entire nation, and to do it durably, you need something rarer. You need an institution the public has been trained to trust, and you need to borrow its authority. The intelligence community is that institution. When career officers say a thing is so, citizens reasonably assume the judgment rests on secret evidence too sensitive to share. That trust is precisely what makes the apparatus so dangerous when it is turned, because a borrowed badge of credibility can launder a falsehood into a fact. This is the heart of the matter, and it is why the events of 2016 through 2020 deserve a stark description. The coordinated politicization of US intelligence by the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and an interlocking network of operatives was the single greatest disinformation campaign in American history.
I want to be careful with that claim, because careless conservatives have squandered credibility by overreaching, and the fact-checkers are waiting. So let me say plainly what I am not arguing. This was not treason in the strict constitutional sense, which requires levying war against the US or adhering to its enemies, proven by two witnesses to an overt act. That high bar is not met here, and pretending otherwise only hands critics an easy rebuttal. What I am arguing is more precise and, in some ways, more damning. The conduct fits the ordinary legal definition of conspiracy, a secret agreement to achieve unlawful ends through unlawful means, and it carries the unmistakable character of sedition, the deliberate poisoning of public perception against a lawful government. The aim was to subvert an election and, having failed at that, to cripple the presidency the voters chose.
Begin with the money, because money leaves a paper trail, and the trail here is not seriously contested. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee routed roughly $1.02 million to the law firm Perkins Coie for what they would later report to regulators as legal services. Perkins Coie retained the research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, paying his firm roughly $168,000. The product of this arrangement was the now-infamous Steele dossier, a collection of unverified and largely uncorroborated allegations. The political origin of that document is not a matter of conjecture. In 2022 the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for misreporting these payments as legal expenses rather than the opposition research they were. A campaign paid for a smear, mislabeled it, and then the smear migrated into the machinery of federal law enforcement.
That migration is the crucial step, and it is where ordinary dirty politics became something far worse. On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened a full investigation, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Clinton-funded dossier quickly became central to the government's applications for surveillance authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, targeting Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Here the nonpartisan record is devastating. The Justice Department's own Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions across the four FISA applications and renewals. Notice the pattern, because the pattern is the proof of intent. These were not random clerical mistakes scattered in both directions. Every one of them cut the same way, strengthening the appearance of probable cause while burying exculpatory facts. The applications failed to tell the court that Page had been a cooperative contact for another US government agency, that he had supplied information on Russian intelligence officers, and that he had been assessed as candid. They failed to update the court on the collapsing reliability of Steele's own primary source. As Horowitz testified, the applications made it appear that the evidence was far stronger than it actually was. When error runs in one direction 17 times, the kind word is recklessness and the accurate word is design.
If the FISA abuse was the operation's sword, the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017 was its seal. And it is here that the most recent disclosures matter most. According to a tradecraft review conducted by career CIA analysts and made public by Director John Ratcliffe in 2025, the assessment that branded the incoming president with the Russia narrative was corrupted from the top. There was no statutory requirement to produce it before the transition. Ratcliffe stated bluntly that Barack Obama commissioned the assessment, that there was no basis requiring it to be finished before the Obama administration ended, and that the instruction was, in effect, that the president wanted it done. The review documents a production process that no honest analyst would defend. Drafters had less than a week. Coordination was crammed into a holiday week, leaving participants feeling jammed. Brennan hand-selected the analysts. Thirteen of the then 17 intelligence agencies were excluded. Most telling of all, when the CIA's two senior Russia experts warned that the Steele dossier did not meet even basic tradecraft standards and risked the credibility of the entire paper, Brennan pushed to include it anyway. It landed in an annex with a disclaimer, then was quietly referenced in the main text, lending unearned weight to the judgment it was supposedly walled off from. Ratcliffe's summary is the one to remember. This, he said, was Obama, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan deciding to screw Trump, stamping it as Russian collusion, and then classifying it so nobody could see it.
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