Hanson on president’s Russia-colluding accusers: ‘They felt they had a higher duty’

by WorldTribune Staff, April 22, 2019

The constant drumbeat of Trump-Russia collusion by the Deep State, Democrats and their messengers in the corporate media was “a call for insurrection,” historian Victor Davis Hanson said.

Hanson, a Hoover Institution fellow and author of “The Case for Trump”, pointed to “the greatest irony in Trump’s presidency: when he was falsely accused of colluding with Russia by people who were actually colluding with Russia.”

From left, James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan

“I think these unelected bureaucrats, call them what you want – Deep State, members of the administrative state – they were analogous to people in history that worked in the Byzantine court, or the El Escorial in the Spanish Empire, or the people at Versailles.”

In an April 18 interview with The Epoch Times, Hanson said: “You see, because you’ve got to remember the dialectic would have been ‘President Clinton, look at all I did for you. I should be rewarded. I went beyond the call of duty.’ And now the mentality went ‘My gosh, I’ve got legal exposure. So we’ve got to press further.’ So then it was a methodology of getting more FISA requests and disrupting the transition. And then finally the act that resulted in the Mueller commission, and then to dethrone.”

“There were people within the United States government – the director of the FBI, James Comey; the director of the CIA, John Brennan; the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper; the deputy director; and an array of others; and then NSC and the DOJ who felt A: that Hillary Clinton was going to win. They had followed the analytics and the polls – 90 percent surety. But they felt as an insurance policy that Donald Trump for a variety of reasons – culturally, politically, socially – was unacceptable as president,” Hanson said.

“And the very thought that he could be president was so foreign and disruptive that they felt they had a higher duty, a higher loyalty to stop that. So what did they do? They started to surveil his campaign, and they put informants we know into his campaign. In October of 2016 they went to a Federal Surveillance Court – FISA court–and deluded that court by not telling the true nature of opposition research from Hillary Clinton’s campaign which was unverified. And then they used that to surveil Carter Page who had work for Trump, but they were able to go back in time to a time when he was actively in surveils communications and then reverse target that by tapping all the people that he had talked to.”

In the case of the National Security Council, Hanson noted, “they requested names that came up in these surveillance that be unmasked and then they leaked them. How did this translate in real terms? If you and I were reading newspapers in September, October 2016 – Mother Jones, Yahoo News – they were printing things that Trump was involved with the Russians, and that permeated the press. We forget that now. Then when Trump did the unthinkable, he won both in anger at that fact but also as a pre-emptive defense of their behavior.”

Hanson continued: “The larger context of this was when he was elected there was an effort to sue three states for the voting machines and nullify the election. There was a sustained effort to give the Steele dossier to the electors and to persuade the electors not to vote according to their constitutional mandates. Then there was almost immediately 60 representatives that voted for impeachment the week he was inaugurated. Then there was an effort to sue on the emoluments clause of the constitution to remove him. Then there was the 25th Amendment psychodrama that went on for … And then finally there was Rob Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe meeting to see if they could pull cabinet members to remove him.”

Hanson continued: “This is in addition to the Stormy Daniels psychodrama, the Michael Cohen, the tax returns – so there’s been a sustained effort not to wait until 2020, but to remove the president of the United States under the idea that we are so moral and anointed unelected officials, we have a duty to somebody higher than the American people. And boil that down and it was a coup attempt to destroy the presidency before its tenure had expired.”

Unelected bureaucrats, Hanson noted, “felt that the liberal progressive project under Obama would be continued for a 16-year interlude. And that somebody who didn’t deserve to be nominated under no circumstances should have been president and when he was elected should fail. That was not happening. So they called upon themselves to remove him. And I’m not trying to be over dramatic. Because remember on September 5 of 2018 we had an anonymous op-ed in The New York Times that was geared, by the way, to come out at the same time of the Bob Woodward book. … is a one-two punch in which a person said, ‘I am a Republican Deep State bureaucratic appointee within the administration, and I’m trying to stop what I think are wrong decisions by the president. I’m a member of the resistance.’ That’s what he said. That was — trim away the imprimatur of the New York Times — it was basically a call for insurrection.”

That’s “where we are in the United States now,” Hanson told The Epoch Times. “The idea is that progressivism has taken over the Democratic Party, and progressivism itself has transmogrified into socialism. And under that ideology the law is flexible and malleable, and it’s defined by what our ideas of morality are. The laws can be good or bad depending whether it serves our egalitarian agendas, which are basically equality of result. And a French revolutionary value system, and to the degree that you want to advance at, then the law makes the necessary adjustments. And that’s what we’ve seen since Trump was elected.”

The media, Hanson noted, “has always been left of center. But in the old days of Walter Cronkite or John Chancellor, when I was growing up, there was a sort of professional protocol that you weren’t overt. You were implicit but not overt. With the election of Trump we’ve had people actually state – Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour at CNN – that Trump poses such a danger to the republic that reporters have a higher duty to become partisan.”

Hanson continued: “And then this term ‘fake news’ is not just a rhetorical smear by Donald Trump. I mean if you look at CNN, just to take one network, they reported that the bust of Martin Luther King was removed. It was not. They reported that James Comey would testify that he told Trump that he was under investigation. He did not do that. They said the Trump Tower meeting – Trump knew in advance. He did not know in advance. They said that Donald Trump was tipped off by [WikiLeaks]. They admit they didn’t know that. Anderson Cooper had to apologize for using some really crude language on the air about Trump. Reza Aslan, the religious editor, had to resign for using a smear. Two CNN reporters joked on a hot mike about Trump crashing. Remember, Kathy Griffin held up the decapitated head of the CNN. That’s just one network. And so, again, they become a fusion party of the media and the Progressive Democratic Party, they’re together.”

Hanson continued: “And you can see that with the WikiLeaks when the Podesta trove was released to the public you had people like Dana Milbank or Glenn Thrush. These are more key reporters that were writing to John Podesta and says, ‘I’m really a hack, but I want you to proofread this and you object and I’ll make any changes you want,’ as if the media has to have the Clinton campaign approval. I can’t remember of that happening in the United States. So this is all juxtaposed to the idea that Donald Trump hasn’t done anything illegal to reporters. He may have talked about fake news and the media is the enemy the people, but he hasn’t surveilled people like Barack Obama did with the Associated Press reporters or with Fox News James Rosen where they actually broke into their accounts and surveilled their communication.”


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