Table Of Content

Dedication TO CATE, GRACE AND LIV, FOR YOUR LOVE AND ENCOURAGEMENT Epigraph This was the greatest hoax in the history of our country. And the biggest witch hunt ever. —PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, JUNE 25, 2019, OVAL OFFICE, WHITE HOUSE Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Preface: A Malignant Force Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Cases Chapter 2: Clinton Collusion Chapter 3: Lying and Spying Chapter 4: The Attempted Coup Chapter 5: The Folly of Mueller’s Magnum Opus Chapter 6: The Media Witch Hunt Chapter 7: Crooked Cohen Cops a Plea Chapter 8: Collateral Damage Chapter 9: Targeted Intimidation Afterword: The Reckoning Appendix A: List of Major Characters Appendix B: Timeline Acknowledgments Notes About the Author Also by Gregg Jarrett Copyright About the Publisher Preface A Malignant Force If you are somebody who’s being falsely accused of something, you would tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt. —ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR, SENATE TESTIMONY, APRIL 10, 2019 I nventing a lie is easy. Spreading a lie is even easier. Uncovering the truth is hard. The truth will always have enemies. It is the inherent vice of corrupt men. Nothing is more dangerous to the public good than a lie contrived to usurp the reins of power. Witch Hunt is the story of a pernicious lie that was invented and spread in a collusive effort to sabotage the election of Donald Trump. When the plot failed, the objective shifted. Newly aggressive tactics were deployed to destroy his presidency, undo his election, and drive him from office. There was never any credible evidence that Trump was a Russian agent. There were no seditious acts that he cooked up with the Kremlin. It was a damning fiction that constitutes what is surely the dirtiest political trick ever perpetrated in politics. The most amazing part, now that the truth has been revealed, is how widely the lie was believed. How did a handful of government officials create the greatest mass delusion in American political history? What people tend to forget about “witch hunts” is that there are no real witches, but the hunt persists because of an overwhelming and irrational desire to believe there must be witches. The absolute, unshakable faith in the impossible is what makes a witch hunt possible. Trump’s enemies, blinded by their own bias and hatred, argued that he could not possibly have won the presidency absent some nefarious cabal to steal the 2016 election. To them, no other explanation made sense. They could not conceive that voters had legitimately placed him in office. There had to be witches flying about. The lie justified their hunch. In each chapter of this book, the reader will discover people who bent the rules or broke the law because they knew in their hearts that witches would eventually drop out of the sky to prove their thesis. Surely the tangible evidence was there. It was simply a matter of waiting for the apparition. An astonishing array of theoretically smart people convinced themselves, based on nothing, that Trump had committed the most noxious crime in America: a treasonous conspiracy with Russia. At the heart of the witch hunt were rogue government operators determined to stop Trump. They were tenacious and unrelenting. The peril to democracy today is not a foreign force but a malignant force of unelected officials here at home. Armed with immense power and often lurking in the shadows, they have revealed themselves capable of uncommon corruption. Their allegiance is not to the Constitution and the rule of law but to themselves. Personal animus and a voracious appetite for authority are what motivates their zeal. Anyone like Trump, who might jeopardize their hold on power, must be immobilized by any means and at any cost. To neutralize this threat and achieve their desired ambitions, they politicized their agencies, weaponized law enforcement, and persecuted people without respect for law or process. There is little doubt that top Obama administration officials at the FBI, CIA, Department of Justice, and other federal agencies abused their authority for political purposes. James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, James Clapper, and John Brennan all regarded themselves as above the law and accountable to no one. Supremely confident in their arrogance that they were smarter than the American people, who are empowered to choose a president, their actions would serve a higher moral purpose. Or so they persuaded themselves. Audaciously, they sought to incriminate Trump for crimes he did not commit. Witch Hunt unravels the plot hatched by these enemies of truth, their insipid deceptions, and the extraordinary actions they took to cover up their malevolent acts. The mainstream media, riven with bias and easily exploited, enabled the hoax and became witting accessories to the witch hunt. Their disdain for Trump, both the man and his policies, influenced their adversarial reporting on a daily basis. Their methods failed them as they covered every twist and turn in the search for wrongdoing, instead of investigating ostensible wrongdoing. Whatever position Trump adopted or action he took was reflexively opposed by the liberal intellectual quotient that inhabits newsrooms almost everywhere. Trump was their nemesis. Even the few striving for fairness in their reporting frequently tweeted only the most partisan articles to their influential followers. Television commentators set a new standard for bloviating, simply making things up, and manufacturing all manner of falsehoods. They were all thirsting to gulp the Kool-Aid. Their reporting led many Americans to swallow the big lie. Now, of course, the country can see the last two years clearly. The illicit scheme originated during the campaign season of 2016. It was secretly financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Democrats, conceived by a foreign agent with a checkered past in espionage, and then brokered to solicitous collaborators at the FBI, the Justice Department, and elsewhere in government.1 The premise of the ruse was as outlandish as the actions of those who advanced it: they posited that Trump was a covert Russian asset who had spent many years “colluding” with the Kremlin to win the White House. This was contrary to all reason or common sense; it was utterly preposterous. As with most mendacious smears, it was bereft of any proof to support it. There was nothing in the way of probable cause or reasonable suspicion to indicate that Trump had coordinated or collaborated with Moscow. There was no hard evidence; indeed, there was no soft evidence. The narrative patiently constructed on MSNBC and CNN for months—Trump would get a good deal on building a Russian hotel, Trump hires Russians to hack the DNC, and then the Russians secretly control our foreign policy—doesn’t even make sense. Trump did not conspire or, if you like, “collude” with Russia to influence the election. Others were colluding to frame him. The first seeds of the canard appear to have been planted by the CIA under the partisan stewardship of Director John Brennan, who loathed Trump.2 The idea slowly germinated as Clinton sprinkled her campaign speeches with tenebrous references to her opponent’s patriotism, suggesting a veiled fealty to Russian president Vladimir Putin. It was rubbish, of course, but it tended to arouse the kind of suspicion that only political bombast during an election can engender. Clinton then took it a step further, fertilizing and harvesting the idea. Through a series of discreetly disguised transactions that served as firewalls, her campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired a former British spy by the name of Christopher Steele who conjured up an anti-Trump document known as the “dossier.” In a series of seventeen successive memos penned over a six-month period in 2016, these specious documents spun a fantastic tale of how Trump associates and the candidate himself had consorted with sinister Kremlin officials in an elaborate effort to pervert the election.3 As Steele disseminated his scribble, he confided to a high Justice Department official by the name of Bruce Ohr that he detested the Republican nominee and was desperate to prevent him from ascending to the presidency.4 The end would justify the means, even if that included falsifying or fabricating evidence against the candidate he despised. Over several months and with remarkable stealth, Ohr propagated the information to the FBI, which was already working secretly with Steele, who had been on the Bureau payroll since early 2016. At its core, Steele’s “dossier” was based on little more than multiple hearsays from supposed Russian sources who were largely anonymous. It is quite possible that those unidentified sources never existed at all or, in the alternative, the ex-spy was fed Russian disinformation to the amusement of the Kremlin. Senior FBI officials well knew the sketchy provenance of the “dossier” and the mutable character of its author. Indeed, they had been warned.5 They didn’t care. They also knew that the accusations contained therein were so dubious and unverified that they could never be used in court or to initiate a formal investigation of its target. Yet, undeterred by the constraints of law, the FBI used them anyway. Top officials exploited the “dossier” as a pretext to launch their investigation of Trump in direct violation of the regulations that govern initiating such a probe.6 In essence, the outlandish rumors fueled by the partisan enemies of Trump and the lawlessness of the FBI created the biggest political “con” of all time: a deliberate deception that managed to dominate and, to some extent, disable the Trump presidency. The FBI first got its hands on the “dossier” on July 5, 2016, the very day that Director Comey stood in front of television cameras to absolve Clinton of various crimes for mishandling classified documents. As he twisted the facts and distorted the law, one of his agents was furtively meeting with Steele in London. When the agent read the document, he was stunned and remarked, “I have to report this to headquarters.”7 Thus, on the same day Comey cleared Clinton, the “witch hunt” began in earnest. The formal investigation was opened three weeks later on July 31, 2016. That day, rogue FBI agent Peter Strzok texted his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, admitting that the Clinton case had never really mattered, but the Trump case was “momentous” and did “MATTER.”8 During my interview of President Trump at the White House in June 2019, I showed him that text. He shook his head in disgust and said, “That text tells me it was all rigged from the very beginning, and it tells me that it is the worst scandal to hit the FBI.”9 Steele did not work alone. His carefully cultivated false narrative of Trump-Russia “collusion” was engineered by hired surrogates of Clinton’s campaign and the Democrats, namely Glenn Simpson, the founder of a company called Fusion GPS, which marketed itself as an opposition research firm. Simpson was aptly described by a major publication as “a mercenary for hire by anyone with fat stacks of bitcoins.”10 With clever calculation, Simpson and Steele hustled their “dossier” to the media and Clinton allies in the upper echelons of government, with the FBI as the ultimate receptacle of all phony information.11 Simpson would later clam up by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when subpoenaed to testify before Congress. None of that impeded the FBI or President Obama’s Justice Department. Weeks before the presidential election, they misused the unverified “dossier” as the basis of a “verified” warrant application from a secret surveillance court to wiretap a onetime Trump campaign adviser, boldly asserting that he was a Russian spy.12 He was not. Vital evidence was concealed, the judges were deceived, and the court was defrauded. The strategy to dismantle Trump’s bid for the highest office was dependent on proliferating the erroneous and lurid story that he was a modern-day “Manchurian Candidate” or “Putin’s puppet.”13 When it did not gain the desired traction and the Republican nominee was elected, his enemies doubled down on the scheme to portray him as a Russian stooge who would betray his nation once he set foot in the Oval Office. The complicit media were all too willing to convict Trump in the court of public opinion by perpetuating those calumnies without bothering to honestly examine the reliability of their sources or the ridiculousness of the narrative they were