Table Of ContentDedication
TO CATE, GRACE AND LIV,
FOR YOUR LOVE AND ENCOURAGEMENT
Epigraph
This was the greatest hoax in the history of our country. And the biggest
witch hunt ever.
—PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR,
JUNE 25, 2019, OVAL OFFICE, WHITE HOUSE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface: A Malignant Force
Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Cases
Chapter 2: Clinton Collusion
Chapter 3: Lying and Spying
Chapter 4: The Attempted Coup
Chapter 5: The Folly of Mueller’s Magnum Opus
Chapter 6: The Media Witch Hunt
Chapter 7: Crooked Cohen Cops a Plea
Chapter 8: Collateral Damage
Chapter 9: Targeted Intimidation
Afterword: The Reckoning
Appendix A: List of Major Characters
Appendix B: Timeline
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Also by Gregg Jarrett
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
A Malignant Force
If you are somebody who’s being falsely accused of something, you would
tend to view the investigation as a witch hunt.
—ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR, SENATE TESTIMONY,
APRIL 10, 2019
I
nventing a lie is easy. Spreading a lie is even easier. Uncovering the truth is
hard. The truth will always have enemies. It is the inherent vice of corrupt
men. Nothing is more dangerous to the public good than a lie contrived to
usurp the reins of power.
Witch Hunt is the story of a pernicious lie that was invented and spread in a
collusive effort to sabotage the election of Donald Trump. When the plot
failed, the objective shifted. Newly aggressive tactics were deployed to
destroy his presidency, undo his election, and drive him from office. There
was never any credible evidence that Trump was a Russian agent. There were
no seditious acts that he cooked up with the Kremlin. It was a damning
fiction that constitutes what is surely the dirtiest political trick ever
perpetrated in politics.
The most amazing part, now that the truth has been revealed, is how
widely the lie was believed. How did a handful of government officials create
the greatest mass delusion in American political history?
What people tend to forget about “witch hunts” is that there are no real
witches, but the hunt persists because of an overwhelming and irrational
desire to believe there must be witches. The absolute, unshakable faith in the
impossible is what makes a witch hunt possible.
Trump’s enemies, blinded by their own bias and hatred, argued that he
could not possibly have won the presidency absent some nefarious cabal to
steal the 2016 election. To them, no other explanation made sense. They
could not conceive that voters had legitimately placed him in office. There
had to be witches flying about. The lie justified their hunch.
In each chapter of this book, the reader will discover people who bent the
rules or broke the law because they knew in their hearts that witches would
eventually drop out of the sky to prove their thesis. Surely the tangible
evidence was there. It was simply a matter of waiting for the apparition. An
astonishing array of theoretically smart people convinced themselves, based
on nothing, that Trump had committed the most noxious crime in America: a
treasonous conspiracy with Russia. At the heart of the witch hunt were rogue
government operators determined to stop Trump. They were tenacious and
unrelenting.
The peril to democracy today is not a foreign force but a malignant force of
unelected officials here at home. Armed with immense power and often
lurking in the shadows, they have revealed themselves capable of uncommon
corruption. Their allegiance is not to the Constitution and the rule of law but
to themselves. Personal animus and a voracious appetite for authority are
what motivates their zeal. Anyone like Trump, who might jeopardize their
hold on power, must be immobilized by any means and at any cost. To
neutralize this threat and achieve their desired ambitions, they politicized
their agencies, weaponized law enforcement, and persecuted people without
respect for law or process.
There is little doubt that top Obama administration officials at the FBI,
CIA, Department of Justice, and other federal agencies abused their authority
for political purposes. James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa
Page, Bruce Ohr, James Clapper, and John Brennan all regarded themselves
as above the law and accountable to no one. Supremely confident in their
arrogance that they were smarter than the American people, who are
empowered to choose a president, their actions would serve a higher moral
purpose. Or so they persuaded themselves. Audaciously, they sought to
incriminate Trump for crimes he did not commit. Witch Hunt unravels the
plot hatched by these enemies of truth, their insipid deceptions, and the
extraordinary actions they took to cover up their malevolent acts.
The mainstream media, riven with bias and easily exploited, enabled the
hoax and became witting accessories to the witch hunt. Their disdain for
Trump, both the man and his policies, influenced their adversarial reporting
on a daily basis. Their methods failed them as they covered every twist and
turn in the search for wrongdoing, instead of investigating ostensible
wrongdoing. Whatever position Trump adopted or action he took was
reflexively opposed by the liberal intellectual quotient that inhabits
newsrooms almost everywhere. Trump was their nemesis. Even the few
striving for fairness in their reporting frequently tweeted only the most
partisan articles to their influential followers. Television commentators set a
new standard for bloviating, simply making things up, and manufacturing all
manner of falsehoods. They were all thirsting to gulp the Kool-Aid. Their
reporting led many Americans to swallow the big lie.
Now, of course, the country can see the last two years clearly. The illicit
scheme originated during the campaign season of 2016. It was secretly
financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Democrats, conceived by a
foreign agent with a checkered past in espionage, and then brokered to
solicitous collaborators at the FBI, the Justice Department, and elsewhere in
government.1 The premise of the ruse was as outlandish as the actions of
those who advanced it: they posited that Trump was a covert Russian asset
who had spent many years “colluding” with the Kremlin to win the White
House. This was contrary to all reason or common sense; it was utterly
preposterous.
As with most mendacious smears, it was bereft of any proof to support it.
There was nothing in the way of probable cause or reasonable suspicion to
indicate that Trump had coordinated or collaborated with Moscow. There was
no hard evidence; indeed, there was no soft evidence. The narrative patiently
constructed on MSNBC and CNN for months—Trump would get a good deal
on building a Russian hotel, Trump hires Russians to hack the DNC, and then
the Russians secretly control our foreign policy—doesn’t even make sense.
Trump did not conspire or, if you like, “collude” with Russia to influence the
election. Others were colluding to frame him.
The first seeds of the canard appear to have been planted by the CIA under
the partisan stewardship of Director John Brennan, who loathed Trump.2 The
idea slowly germinated as Clinton sprinkled her campaign speeches with
tenebrous references to her opponent’s patriotism, suggesting a veiled fealty
to Russian president Vladimir Putin. It was rubbish, of course, but it tended
to arouse the kind of suspicion that only political bombast during an election
can engender. Clinton then took it a step further, fertilizing and harvesting the
idea. Through a series of discreetly disguised transactions that served as
firewalls, her campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired a
former British spy by the name of Christopher Steele who conjured up an
anti-Trump document known as the “dossier.” In a series of seventeen
successive memos penned over a six-month period in 2016, these specious
documents spun a fantastic tale of how Trump associates and the candidate
himself had consorted with sinister Kremlin officials in an elaborate effort to
pervert the election.3
As Steele disseminated his scribble, he confided to a high Justice
Department official by the name of Bruce Ohr that he detested the
Republican nominee and was desperate to prevent him from ascending to the
presidency.4 The end would justify the means, even if that included falsifying
or fabricating evidence against the candidate he despised. Over several
months and with remarkable stealth, Ohr propagated the information to the
FBI, which was already working secretly with Steele, who had been on the
Bureau payroll since early 2016.
At its core, Steele’s “dossier” was based on little more than multiple
hearsays from supposed Russian sources who were largely anonymous. It is
quite possible that those unidentified sources never existed at all or, in the
alternative, the ex-spy was fed Russian disinformation to the amusement of
the Kremlin. Senior FBI officials well knew the sketchy provenance of the
“dossier” and the mutable character of its author. Indeed, they had been
warned.5 They didn’t care. They also knew that the accusations contained
therein were so dubious and unverified that they could never be used in court
or to initiate a formal investigation of its target.
Yet, undeterred by the constraints of law, the FBI used them anyway. Top
officials exploited the “dossier” as a pretext to launch their investigation of
Trump in direct violation of the regulations that govern initiating such a
probe.6 In essence, the outlandish rumors fueled by the partisan enemies of
Trump and the lawlessness of the FBI created the biggest political “con” of
all time: a deliberate deception that managed to dominate and, to some extent,
disable the Trump presidency.
The FBI first got its hands on the “dossier” on July 5, 2016, the very day
that Director Comey stood in front of television cameras to absolve Clinton
of various crimes for mishandling classified documents. As he twisted the
facts and distorted the law, one of his agents was furtively meeting with
Steele in London. When the agent read the document, he was stunned and
remarked, “I have to report this to headquarters.”7 Thus, on the same day
Comey cleared Clinton, the “witch hunt” began in earnest.
The formal investigation was opened three weeks later on July 31, 2016.
That day, rogue FBI agent Peter Strzok texted his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa
Page, admitting that the Clinton case had never really mattered, but the
Trump case was “momentous” and did “MATTER.”8 During my interview of
President Trump at the White House in June 2019, I showed him that text. He
shook his head in disgust and said, “That text tells me it was all rigged from
the very beginning, and it tells me that it is the worst scandal to hit the FBI.”9
Steele did not work alone. His carefully cultivated false narrative of
Trump-Russia “collusion” was engineered by hired surrogates of Clinton’s
campaign and the Democrats, namely Glenn Simpson, the founder of a
company called Fusion GPS, which marketed itself as an opposition research
firm. Simpson was aptly described by a major publication as “a mercenary
for hire by anyone with fat stacks of bitcoins.”10 With clever calculation,
Simpson and Steele hustled their “dossier” to the media and Clinton allies in
the upper echelons of government, with the FBI as the ultimate receptacle of
all phony information.11 Simpson would later clam up by invoking his Fifth
Amendment right against self-incrimination when subpoenaed to testify
before Congress.
None of that impeded the FBI or President Obama’s Justice Department.
Weeks before the presidential election, they misused the unverified “dossier”
as the basis of a “verified” warrant application from a secret surveillance
court to wiretap a onetime Trump campaign adviser, boldly asserting that he
was a Russian spy.12 He was not. Vital evidence was concealed, the judges
were deceived, and the court was defrauded.
The strategy to dismantle Trump’s bid for the highest office was dependent
on proliferating the erroneous and lurid story that he was a modern-day
“Manchurian Candidate” or “Putin’s puppet.”13 When it did not gain the
desired traction and the Republican nominee was elected, his enemies
doubled down on the scheme to portray him as a Russian stooge who would
betray his nation once he set foot in the Oval Office. The complicit media
were all too willing to convict Trump in the court of public opinion by
perpetuating those calumnies without bothering to honestly examine the
reliability of their sources or the ridiculousness of the narrative they were
