So it took something big, like the “Spygate” scandal and the intentional tanking of the Hillary Clinton classified email investigation, to finally convince many Americans that the “crazies” on the Right weren’t so crazy after all.
One of them is Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in national security cases during his time with the government.
McCarthy has been fairly critical of many aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged “collusion” between the 2016 Trump campaign and Mother Russia. That said, he’s mostly been a defender of the system — the same federal judicial system in which he was a participant for a number of years. Like retiring Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., also a former federal prosecutor, it was difficult for McCarthy to actually believe that the Justice Department he once served under as well as the FBI could ever become so politicized they would allow themselves to be utilized as pawns against a presidential candidate.
One of the processes that McCarthy believed in was the manner in which the FBI and Justice Department obtained FISA court warrants to spy on one-time Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
Earlier this year after majority Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a memo stating that the FBI and DoJ likely mislead the FISA court in obtaining those warrants — a memo that was eventually confirmed by Sens. Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham of the Senate Judiciary Committee — McCarthy began to have his doubts. (Related: McCarthy: Mueller’s probe has gone far outside Justice Dept. standards.)
“What the Grassley-Graham memo tells us is that the Nunes memo, for all the hysteria about it, was tame. The Grassley-Graham memo tells us that we need not only a full-blown investigation of what possessed the Obama administration to submit such shoddy applications to the FISA court, but of how a judge — or perhaps as many as four judges — rationalized signing the warrants,” McCarthy wrote at the time, as reported by All News Pipeline.
“We need full disclosure — the warrants, the applications, the court proceedings. No more games,” he added.
Last week McCarthy got what he wanted.
Changing minds
As The National Sentinel reported, after trying for more than a year government watchdog group Judicial Watch managed to pry documents regarding those FISA warrant applications for Page. And though heavily redacted, they nonetheless were quite revealing in many respects.
What McCarthy was able to glean in between the redactions was that indeed the FBI and Justice Department went “rogue” during the Obama administration, allowing themselves to be used as political pawns in a bid to keep Donald Trump from becoming president.
He explained things during a recent appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” morning show:
https://youtu.be/QMZhuxNS5b0
McCarthy also wrote about what he believes the FISA applications confirm: The FBI actually relied on an unproven, unverifiable political opposition report disguised as an “intelligence dossier” in making application to spy on Page, and it’s not at all clear that the FISA court judges were even aware it was fake.
But he not only takes the FBI and Justice Department to task over the applications; he notes they “are so shoddy that the judges who approved them ought to be asked some hard questions” as to why they even approved them (three times, in fact).
McCarthy said he thought there were far too many fail-safes built into the system to ever have warrants approved with bogus information.
“Should I have assumed I could be wrong…?” he wrote. “Sure even great institutions go rogue now and again.
“It turns out, however, that the crazies were right and I was wrong,” he added.
You can bet one thing: If the very rational, very intelligence Andy McCarthy has changed his mind, a ton of other one-time doubters have as well.
Read more about the Left’s conspiracies at Hoax.news.
J.D. Heyes is editor of The National Sentinel and a senior writer for Natural News and News Target.
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