As Democrats advanced their witch hunt against President Donald Trump aimed at overturning the 2016 election, State Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz released his report on FBI spy operations targeting Trump’s election campaign then. Horowitz’s account exposes how Washington’s political police lied and maneuvered to attack the Trump campaign.
What he fails to mention is that spying and disruption is what they have repeatedly done and will do again against fighting workers and working-class organizations.
What drives liberals’ efforts to oust the president is their loathing for the millions who voted for him or who didn’t vote at all, whom they consider ignorant and reactionary. Writing in the New York Times Dec. 15, Charles Blow sneered at “millions of Americans” who “blithely accept anti-truth propaganda” he says the president issues — people he thinks have to be prevented from electing Trump again in 2020.
As the Democrats, the liberal media, and the middle-class left all focus on the vote in the House of Representatives, they also admit there is no chance the Senate will vote to oust Trump. The liberals have spent the three years since the president was elected in a campaign to criminalize his political differences and, above all, to attack the workers they blame for his victory. Nineteen minutes after Trump became president the Washington Post called for his impeachment.
To buttress their drive, the liberals lionize the capitalist rulers’ political police. They claim that anti-Trump conspirators James Comey and Robert Mueller — both former FBI directors — as well as J. Edgar Hoover, are high-minded, independent civil servants.
The Times ran an Op-Ed Dec. 16 from William Webster, who brags he is the only person ever to have been both the head of the FBI and the CIA. That means he was in charge of targeting militant workers and political rights in every corner of the planet. He excoriates Trump and Attorney General William Barr for pointing out the political bias of FBI spies who have tried to bring the administration down.
The liberals’ efforts to bolster these masters of dirty tricks, disruption and waterboarding is an attack on all those who have fought for decades to expose and curtail their assaults on the rights of working people.
The Socialist Workers Party — which ran Alyson Kennedy for president against both Trump and his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton — conducted a broad and successful political campaign to expose the extent of FBI spying against the party and other political activists. This led to a federal court victory ordering them to cease and desist that still stands today.
The SWP’s 13-year fight against the FBI began in 1973, forcing into the open the extent of the FBI’s COINTELPRO disruption operation against the party and its members. The FBI admitted to at least 204 burglaries of party offices and sending 1,300 undercover informers against the party between 1945 and 1966.
The SWP speaks out today against the collusion of the liberals and spymasters to undermine political rights crucial to working people.
FBI spying revealed
Inspector General Horowitz reported the FBI put a wiretap on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and sicced informants and secret agents to spy on Page and “at least” two other Trump campaign workers. An August 2016 security “briefing” given to Trump by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was in fact given by an FBI agent sent to spy on him.
Horowitz said the FBI “fell far short” of accurately presenting evidence to justify its applications to the U.S. rulers’ secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on the Trump campaign.
Cop and spy agents do not have to swear to tell the truth when they testify before this court. So the FBI can present whatever it wants. FISA courts routinely defer to the cops, granting 99% of all applications.
The “evidence” the FBI used to get the court to rubber stamp its wiretap on Carter Page came from a “report” cooked up by Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. The agency knew the “evidence” was fraudulent when it submitted it.
The Democrats claim that the FBI had been exonerated from charges that they had violated the law. But Horowitz said the facts “don’t vindicate anybody.”
In a rare public statement, FISA court presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer said the FBI had tried to deceive the court and ordered them to submit Jan. 10 a list of what it “plans to do” to be truthful in the future.
Whatever they come up with, the rulers will continue to use the FBI whenever they need to and whenever they can to safeguard their interests.