OPINION:
A conspiracy theory is something “that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators,” according to Merriam-Webster.
One of those theories is coming true before our eyes with the release of newly unclassified documents by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
These documents reveal a secret plot by the Obama administration to falsely frame President Trump as colluding with Russia to fix the 2016 election. With the unveiling of 100 pages of files and emails, the proverbial cat is now out of the bag.
It’s why former National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper acknowledged to CNN last week that he was lawyering up while calling the revelations “ridiculous.”
The plot gets complicated, but here it is in a nutshell: President Obama and the heads of America’s intelligence agencies covered up an investigation analysis that indicated no substantial Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of the Trump campaign.
Instead, on Mr. Obama’s orders, they released a report implying that the opposite was true.
Democrats such as Rep. Adam B. Schiff, now a U.S. senator from California, hounded Mr. Trump for years, cooking up phony scandals. They produced two impeachments and filed 91 felony charges in four Democratic-run jurisdictions. They even unsuccessfully tried to force Mr. Trump off the ballot in Colorado and Maine in 2024.
As we learned years ago, it was the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that paid for the fabricated Steele dossier, which was a key part of the false Russian collusion accusations against Mr. Trump. At most, the Russians purchased some social media ads that had zero effect on the election and targeted both the Clinton and the Trump campaigns.
Now we have documented proof that top officials — including Mr. Clapper, former CIA Director John O. Brennan, former FBI Director James B. Comey and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice — were up to their ears in this plot to deceive the American people.
Ms. Gabbard has sent the documents to the FBI and the Justice Department, which could bring criminal prosecutions. She has labeled it a “treasonous conspiracy,” not an unreasonable characterization.
However, as Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky has noted, charges of “treason” or “sedition” are, legally speaking, unlikely. The first applies to levying war against the United States or giving comfort to its enemies, and the second requires proof of conspiring to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States.”
This is about high-level deception. Anything said falsely under oath could be prosecuted as perjury, a felony charge.
The records show that Mr. Brennan ordered the inclusion of the fabricated Steele dossier in the Russian collusion report. However, he testified to Congress on May 23, 2017, that the Steele dossier “wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used.” He continued pushing the Russian collusion narrative as a regular commentator on MSNBC and in a column in The New York Times.
Just before the 2020 presidential election, some of the same people — Messrs. Clapper and Brennan, most prominently — signed a letter from 51 national security experts that misled the public into believing that Hunter Biden’s toxic laptop was a “Russian information operation.”
They knew it wasn’t. The FBI had long possessed the laptop after securing it from a computer repair shop. This might not be treason under U.S. law, but it smacks of it.
Democrats have repeatedly called any attempt to connect the dots a “conspiracy theory,” hoping to tar anyone seeking answers.
Without diving back into the Obama birth certificate weed patch, recall how quickly Democrats discouraged any serious investigation into Mr. Obama’s past by labeling inquirers as “birthers.”
Likewise, anyone trying to get to the bottom of the statistically absurd number of anomalies in the 2020 election was dismissed as an “election denier” promoting “baseless” or “false” conspiracy theories.
Major media still use those terms whenever the topic is broached. They can’t explain how a mentally challenged Joseph R. Biden, campaigning from his basement, racked up 15 million more votes in 2020 than Barack Obama in 2012 and 6 million more than Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.
For other examples, see climate change “deniers,” COVID-19 vaccine “deniers” and, lately, theories surrounding the “suicide” of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. (Regarding the latter, you don’t have to be a conspiracy nut to wonder how a high-profile, well-connected figure who could ruin powerful people died in a jail cell while on suicide watch.)
Democrats had no interest in Epstein until the second Trump administration promised to get to the bottom of the scandal and then came up empty. Now, the Democrats are milking it hard to draw fire away from the far more serious Obama scandal that’s unfolding.
There’s little doubt that Mr. Trump would love to see payback after being persecuted for years. He has even said so. It just might happen. Mr. Biden’s doctor and at least two top Biden aides just took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress about the cover-up of the former president’s mental health and who was operating the autopen and issuing pardons. That screams guilt.
We need to see some prominent people behind bars, not out of revenge but in the name of justice.
Unpunished treason is a recipe for dooming a self-governing, constitutional republic.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His latest book, “The Battle for America’s Soul,” is available at roberthknight.com.
