A top intelligence official in the administration of former President Barack Obama may have accidentally spilled the beans on the true origins of the Russia witch hunt.
It wasn’t, as Democrats insist, an independent law enforcement decision based on unbiased evidence against President Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign.
It was a political decision made at the highest levels of government… by none other than Obama himself.
And that means this probe wasn’t an attempt at seeking justice.
It was a partisan hit job aimed at helping a political friend – Hillary Clinton – and targeting their rival, Trump.
James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, pointed the finger straight at his old boss in a recent interview on CNN as he complained about criticism of his actions from Republicans.
He said:
The message I’m getting from all of this is apparently what we were supposed to have done was to ignore the Russian interference, ignore the Russian meddling and the threat that it poses to us – and oh, by the way, blown off what the then commander-in-chief, President Obama, told us to do, which was to assemble all of the reporting we could.
Clapper also claimed they were supposed to declassify as much as possible and make it public – and insists he did so.
But much of that info… including the politically motivated origins of the investigation… remains hidden from the public.
Then, Clapper pointed the finger directly and explicitly at Obama.
“It’s kind of disconcerting now to be investigated for, you know having done our duty and done what we were told to do by the president,” he said.
What makes Clapper’s comments so unusual is that it seems he may have revealed far more than he intended.
But radio host Rush Limbaugh last week caught the unusual line, calling it a “bombshell” revelation.
“Folks, this is a gigantic deal,” he said on his radio show. “This is a big deal. This is James Clapper admitting that what happened during the Trump-Russia collusion thing was ordered by Barack Obama.”
Clapper and other ex-Obama aides have turned Trump criticism into a form of celebrity, allowing them to appear on TV all the time slamming the president, his administration and his policies.
In the past, this level of deep, intense and constant criticism from previous administration insiders was almost unheard of.
Today, it’s a career move – one that may pay well for some of them, especially someone like Clapper whose reputation was in shambles after he was accused of perjury for lying during congressional testimony about the NSA’s secret surveillance program.
But that criticism hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Many former top officials maintain security clearance as historically they have been consulted on ongoing issues by future administrations.
Clapper even claimed on CNN last year that unnamed members of the Trump administration had asked for his input, but did not elaborate.
That seemed to end last summer when Trump announced he was revoking security clearances for former administration officials including ex-CIA Director John Brennan who were actively working against him in the media.
“As the head of the executive branch and the commander in chief, I have a unique constitutional responsibility to protect the nation’s classified information, including by controlling access to it,” Trump said in a prepared statement at the time.
Clapper by some accounts may have been among them – but asked last year, he said he wasn’t sure.
“Well, I guess I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything,” he said on CNN at the time.
“Last I read in the media is the White House was trying to come up with reasons to revoke the eligibility of others on his [Trump’s] list.”
Given the slip of the tongue exposed this week by Limbaugh, maybe he never should’ve been on the list in the first place.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”