"A Deeply Rooted Political Infection"

The FBI twice interfered in the 2020 election.

The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 @ColumbiaBugle

Tucker Carlson's Monologue Providing An Update On The Trial Of The Governor Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Hoax, The FBI's Involvement And Questions That Remain About January 6th "What country is this?"

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Let’s start with a subject matter that I’ve written about a couple of times in the past, and which should be getting far more attention than it is: The FBI-fabricated conspiracy to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. It’s a topic that I feel very strongly about, and which I’ve closely followed because the accused are from my home state of Michigan, not far from where I grew up. If you’re not caught up on this episode, I encourage you to watch the Tucker Carlson clip above; it really illustrates how dishonorable and wholly infected with political bias the FBI is.

In late July, Representative Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) questioned Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, about the decision to arrest several men for supposedly conspiring to abduct and assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.

“The alleged Whitmer plot was announced on October 7, 2020 within a month of the U.S. presidential election,” Bishop asked Olsen. “How come that [was the] timing for the FBI’s announcement of this plot?”

“I can tell you that in every case we follow the facts and the evidence and the law and we do so without regard to politics or ideology,” Olsen assured the House Judiciary Committee. He refused to actually answer the question, insisting that the Justice Department, which has been fixated on prosecuting Americans who partook in the 1/6 fracas and now has its sights trained on indicting Trump, turns a blind eye to politics despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Bishop’s question demands an answer, especially considering two of the accused conspirators were acquitted in April after defense attorneys convinced a Michigan jury that the FBI entrapped their clients (the jury deadlocked on the two other defendants; the new trial recently started). Despite Olsen’s evasiveness, we already know the answer: Just as they did with the Russiagate hoax, the FBI interfered in the 2020 election by contriving a scandal intended to undermine Trump’s re-election chances, and they attempted to duplicate the effort in Virginia against Governor Ralph Northam.¹

“We have a saying in my office. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

The above quote was said by FBI supervisory agent Henrik Impola to one of the FBI informants working the engineered plot to kidnap Whitmer before the election. Not only should it make you question the entirety of the Whitmer case, it should make you extremely skeptical of all the Trump-related stories generated by an agency that’s spent the past six years portraying him as a unique threat to democracy.

It’s important to understand something: No plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer existed before the FBI, with approval from Washington, used at least 12 (!) informants to actualize the operation. In fact, the men criminally charged did not even know each other before the FBI began methodically piecing together this charade in March 2020.

“Last night, the FBI and Michigan State Police arrested six individuals charged in a criminal complaint with conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer,” explained Andrew Birge, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, the day that federal authorities made the announcement. The defendants, Birge claimed, plotted to kidnap Whitmer from her vacation cottage “before the November election.”

The timing of the plot’s revelation was not a matter of chance, nor was it predetermined by the accused. Rather, it was another instance of the FBI interfering in a presidential election. Hundreds of hours of secret recordings and thousands of texts failed to prove what the FBI claimed when it dramatically announced the plot; there was no evidence to support the claim that the defendants wanted to “kidnap” Whitmer before election day. If an actual kidnapping plan was introduced and developed only because of FBI involvement, then it stands to reason there was never a NLT date specified by the accused.

Both Whitmer and Biden made the most of the FBI’s announcement, blaming Trump for inspiring the alleged kidnappers, elevating rhetoric focused on convincing the American people that the president was encouraging the much talked about but rarely seen gun-toting far-Right white supremacist domestic terrorists who are Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™.²

“There is a throughline from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one,” Biden said in a statement released on October 8, 2020. “He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country.” At a campaign stop with Kamala Harris in Arizona later that day, Biden condemned Trump for his alleged coddling of “white supremacists” and accused the president of “breath[ing] oxygen to those who are filled with hate and danger.” A week later, at another campaign event in Michigan, Biden was briefly overcome by apoplexy while talking about the Whitmer conspiracy. “All President Trump does is fan the flames of hatred and division in this country! What the hell’s the matter with this guy? When the president tweeted ‘Liberate Michigan, Liberate Michigan,’ that’s the call that was heard. That was the dog whistle.”

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

Is Gretchen Whitmer mad at the FBI for creating, organizing, financing and overseeing a plot to kidnap her?

Whitmer, meanwhile, played the role of victim very well despite the fact that she knew of the plot the entire time and was never in any danger. In a Washington Post op-ed published on October 9, 2020, Whitmer accused Trump of encouraging “domestic terrorists.” When a sympathetic Chuck Todd interviewed Whitmer on “Meet the Press” several days later and asked how she was personally coping with the pretend threat against her, Whitmer condemned the president for continuing to criticize her lockdown policies³ “after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial and execute me,” was uncovered. She again accused Trump of inciting “domestic terrorism" during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on October 21, 2020.

The mainstream media dutifully did its part, and Trump and his team spent the final stretch of the campaign denying the unfounded allegations that he was responsible. Recall that Trump walked out of an interview with 60 Minutes host Lesley Stahl in late October 2020 after she wouldn’t stop accusing him of inciting violence against one of his most public political foes. CNN even had on disgraced former FBI chief Andrew McCabe, an inside promoter of the Russiagate hoax, mind you, who said Trump was responsible for “fomenting this kind of unrest, this sort of division, this sort of violence.”

Wall-to-wall headlines blaming Trump for the Whitmer plot coincided with early voting across the country, which included an unprecedented volume of mail-in ballots. It’s impossible to know how the coverage, including Whitmer’s nonstop publicity tour and Biden’s campaign temper tantrums on the subject, influenced voters in swing states such as her own, but I feel like it’s safe to say the impact was significant. Polls showed a steep drop for Trump in Michigan after mid-October (the FBI held its first press conference, with much fanfare, on October 8).

Professional Obscurantists

President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden depart from Holy Spirit Catholic Church after attending Mass on St. Johns Island, S.C., August 13, 2022. (Joshua Roberts | Reuters)

A few weeks ago, Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that multiple FBI whistleblowers had come forward regarding evidence of a “deeply rooted political infection” within the agency. According to the whistleblowers, senior FBI and Justice Department officials tampered with “politically sensitive investigations ranging from election and campaign finance probes across multiple election cycles to investigative activity involving derogatory information on Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities.”

And so but yes this malfeasance includes the deliberate suppression of any investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial activities, including his ties to Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that paid him $83,333 per month between 2014 and 2019 for serving on its board, according to invoices found on the infamous laptop. Washington Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and Director of Election Crimes Branch Richard Pilger, the whistleblowers alleged, coordinated to amplify defamatory information against Trump while giving cover to Hunter Biden, dismissing Biden intelligence as disinformation. The agency reportedly knew of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop full of incriminating information on the first family as early as 2019.

Some dude named Brian Auten — the same Brian Auten who was apparently a key FBI figure in the Russiagate hoax — opened an assessment in August 2020 that was used by FBI headquarters to improperly discredit accurate information about President Joe Biden’s son. Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson were then briefed that any information related to a Senate investigation was the product of a “foreign disinformation” campaign against the Bidens. Auten subsequently put his assessment findings “in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation.”

Not at all shockingly, the details of that briefing were leaked to the Washington Post on August 5, 2020. We all know what happened after that. The entire axis of corporate media came running to the rescue to dismiss any and all reporting on Hunter Biden as the work of those dastardly Russian scoundrels in the Kremlin, and the reports published in the New York Post just a few weeks before the election were promptly censored by Big Tech. Then, the laundry list of former intelligence officials working at such estimable mainstream media venues like CNN and MSNBC — including former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whose fingerprints were all over the Russiagate hoax — got together to bring their totally honorable and decidedly non-partisan intelligence authority to bear on what they described as propaganda with “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” (As of this March, all 51 former intelligence officials who contended that the story was Russian misinformation have either declined to comment or insisted that their assessment was reasonable.)

So, not only do we have a clear-cut example here of the FBI burying evidence of what could very well be serious crimes committed by Hunter and Joe Biden in order to protect the Democratic ticket, we also have an example of the agency fabricating a complex fednapping plot that sure as hell seems like a flagrant attempt to damage Trump's shot at re-election by tying him to supposed far-Right extremism. The latter includes collateral damage: Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris, the men found not guilty, spent 18 months in jail despite their innocence and now struggle to put their lives back together; meanwhile, Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr. are currently in the middle of their re-trial, which began on August 9th.

1. Recall that Trump took aim at both Whitmer and Northam for their draconian lockdown policies during the pandemic.

2. Dozens of pro-life centers have been firebombed and vandalized by Leftists over the past couple months, and the “mostly peaceful protests” in the summer of 2020 caused some $2 billion in insured damage (75% of U.S. businesses are under-insured and about 40% of small businesses have no insurance at all), but tell me more about how “White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States.”

3. This Tuesday, August 16th, it was revealed in the ongoing re-trial of the two remaining defendants for the Whitmer kidnapping plot that the FBI instructed Michigan State Police to stand down and allow protesters into the state capital building on the day that an anti-lockdown rally took place, which the defendants were present for. This incident resulted in some very bad optics for Trump after he tweeted, “Liberate Michigan!” To give one example of how the mainstream media framed this, Vox’s perpetually overwrought Aaron Rupar wrote, “One shudders to contemplate what sorts of actions right-wing protesters might take if they interpret Trump’s call for them to ‘LIBERATE’ their states seriously.”