A few days ago, I covered the scandal emerging from the halls of Washington. One reader called the article “outlandish mental gymnastics and conspiracy theories”. Since then, plenty has happened.
You won’t find anything about it in the British media though. But these are your last few days of being able to ignore what’s going on in Washington. Because the news is going to be full of it within five days.
By the way, we’re quite happy to be called conspiracy theorists at Capital & Conflict. For years we covered the manipulation of precious metals markets. Investment bank traders love executing something called the “gold slam” at the expense of gold investors.
And for years people laughed at us for chasing shadows. They usually called us conspiracy theorists. Even after the Libor scandal broke, readers said we were bonkers. In fact, investigators since have proved investment banks manipulate the price of just about everything… except gold and silver.
Well, this morning, six traders from three banks were arrested for manipulating precious metals markets, among other things. The techniques they used were precisely what so called conspiracy theorists theorised. And the manipulation goes back at least to 2008.
But back to politics. The American political establishment’s credibility is about to implode.
The heart of the scandal is a four-page memo supposedly covering the abuse of government surveillance by Democrats during the 2016 election campaign.
The short version is that the US government tried to stop Donald Trump from being elected in 2016. And it has since tried to undermine him while covering up the 2016 manipulation. It had hoped Hillary Clinton’s election would cover its tracks. But it got Trump instead…
The FBI, the Department of Justice, the Obama White House, the Democratic Party, Russian partners of Hillary Clinton and many more abused the American intelligence agencies’ powers to try and stop Trump from being elected. Some of the abuse could be criminal given the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) laws governing this area.
The same people who tried to swing the election also sabotaged investigations into Clinton’s server scandal and are harassing President Trump with his own investigations now.
I know all this sounds absurd. It’s precisely the opposite of what the British media is reporting. That Trump is being investigated for colluding with Russia to swing the election his way.
But the story has surged in every possible direction since it first broke, giving the extraordinary claims a new-found credibility. I covered some of this in the initial article. Now there’s more.
Text messages between FBI investigators of Clinton and Trump uncovered by congressional investigators and the Department of Justice mention an anti-Trump secret society at the FBI and Department of Justice. Allegedly there’s now also proof this society had meetings and spoke about destroying evidence.
The questionable relationships between official government investigators of Clinton and Trump, and the Democratic Party, have led to resignations at the top of the FBI too.
FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was supposedly forced to resign yesterday after months of pressure from Republicans and Trump. He had tried to hang on for a few more months to be eligible for a pension. But he was offered the pension if he quits anyway. So he did.
Why the resignation? McCabe’s wife had received about half a million dollars from Clinton associates to run for political office, which McCabe initially did not disclose, while the FBI was investigating Clinton for her email scandal. Since this emerged, McCabe has faced some tough questioning from lawmakers.
McCabe also worked closely with another FBI agent embroiled in the scandal. Peter Strzok reportedly covered for Clinton during the investigation of her private email servers by downgrading the assessment of her blunders to avoid her being charged. He had to step down from the investigation into Trump after his own bias was uncovered by text messages.
The text message drama which I covered last week is also hotting up. Initially the Department of Justice’s internal investigator said he had the text messages between the FBI agents, which demonstrate the bias against Trump and suggest plenty more.
Then the FBI said they’d been destroyed thanks to an update to Samsung phones.
Then the text messages were found.
But now they’re being withheld from congressional investigators by the Department of Justice.
Only 14% of the messages were released. Not only that, but the released messages reveal that the FBI investigators had conversations about the Trump and Clinton investigations on personal phones, not just work phones.
Based on the messages released so far, several FBI investigators of Trump and Clinton were caught messaging some rather inappropriate things. The latest discoveries include references to “destroying evidence”, for example.
The memo will be released
In the next five days, the memo that triggered the storm may be released by President Trump.
Congress’ intelligence committee already approved the move, just hours ago. The Department of Justice had tried to stop the release of the memo, which isn’t a surprise given it allegedly documents its misbehaviour.
If it’s released, we’ll discover how much of all this is hyperbole. Although not everything is resting on the memo’s contents given everything else that has happened, Republicans are certainly betting heavily on its contents.
But what does it all mean for you?
If the scandal runs as deep as I suspect, the credibility of the American political establishment is about to collapse.
Commentator and author James Howard Kunstler is no fan of Trump. And yet Kunstler explains the implosion of credibility when it comes to Trump’s opponents is terrifying. Here’s his summary of what’s happened:
If an attorney from Mars came to Earth and followed the evidence already made public, he would probably suspect that the FBI and DOJ colluded with the Clinton Campaign and the Democratic Party to derail the Trump campaign train, and then engineer an “insurance policy” train wreck of his position in office.
Also, in the process, to nullify any potential legal action against Clinton, including the matter of her email server, her actions with the DNC to subvert the [Bernie] Sanders primary campaign, the Steele dossier being used to activate a FISA warrant for surveillance of the Trump campaign, the arrant, long-running grift machine of the Clinton Foundation (in particular, the $150 million from Russian sources following the 2013 Uranium One deal, when she was Secretary of State), and the shady activities of Barack Obama’s inner circle around the post-election transition.
The problem here is that the breakdown of the American political system is picking up pace. Trump has already exposed the extraordinary media bias. He’s done it so well that several reporters were forced to resign.
And now Trump is exposing the bias inside the FBI and the Department of Justice too. Again, forcing resignations.
As Kunstler puts it, “We are not far from a point where nobody will be able to believe anything official in this land.”
The end of the Clinton-Bush era
Another way of looking at this explains the nature of what’s going on. Since 1980, the Bush and Clinton families have dominated US political power. They’ve been in charge, or in a major position of power, almost continuously for three and a half decades.
Trump’s victory is the end of the Bush-Clinton era. And that means a ginormous build-up of donors, aligned political careers, covered-up scandals and acolytes suddenly find themselves without their leaders in positions of political power. They can’t cover their tracks, take on powerful positions in the establishment or influence decision making.
Clinton’s backers at the FBI are falling like dominos. The Department of Justice’s investigators are exposing themselves as biased too. Trump is “draining the swamp” as he promised.
The world created by the Bush-Clinton era is crashing down around the ears of those who lived under it. If only it wasn’t the Trump era that’s replacing it.
Until next time,
Nick Hubble
Capital & Conflict
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Category: Geopolitics