It was a busy day in Washington on Wednesday as the intelligence bureaucracy tried to foment a national security panic over Russian nukes in space in hopes of ramming through the Ukraine aid package and killing reforms designed to curb its power to spy on Americans.
Lest you think that sounds crazy, consider the timing of the panic provocations, which came almost immediately after House Speaker Mike Johnson said he and other Republicans weren’t going to be “rushed” into approving the $61 billion aid package for Ukraine. It also came at the precise moment — just coincidentally! — that the House was debating reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set to expire in April, that would end warrantless surveillance of Americans, which of course the White House and intelligence agencies oppose.
All of it just goes to show that the most serious threat facing America isn’t Russian nukes in space or overseas terrorist plots, it’s the political class in Washington and our intelligence agencies that think they’re above the law.
Here’s what happened. On Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner issued a cryptic warning about a “national security threat” related to a “destabilizing foreign military capability” so grave that President Biden should declassify all information about it immediately. Soon thereafter, anonymous sources leaked to the press that the threat was about Russia wanting to put nuclear weapons in space.
This prompted a flood of statements from Republicans and Democrats that the threat was very serious — but not to worry, they have the situation under control. White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters he had already scheduled a briefing with congressional leaders on the matter before Turner made his statement, and don’t worry, President Biden “is going to ensure the security of the American people.”
Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a helpful statement clarifying what all this was really about: “The most urgent national security threat facing the American people right now is the possibility that Congress abandons Ukraine and allows Vladimir Putin’s Russia to win.”
Meanwhile, Congress was set to take up proposed reforms to Section 702 of FISA that would put an end to warrantless spying on Americans. The intelligence agencies and the White House have been very clear about their opposition to those reforms and that they would very much like to keep spying on Americans without having to obtain a warrant. They’ve been using the press to pressure Congress to scrap the reforms. On Tuesday, the FBI shared newly declassified information with Politico revealing it used Section 702 to foil a terrorist plot on U.S. soil last year — a none-too-subtle suggestion that if they had to bother with getting a warrant, they wouldn’t be able to stop these kind of terrorist plots.
What happened next is telling. Even though the House Republicans who were pushing for the FISA reforms appeared to be winning the debate, in the aftermath of the hysteria over Russia nukes in space, Speaker Johnson pulled the bill and canceled Congress for the rest of the week.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to figure out what happened here. Our intelligence agencies don’t want lawmakers getting in the way of their plans. They don’t want any interruption in the flow of U.S. tax dollars to Ukraine, and they don’t want any curbs on their ability to spy on Americans.
The irony here is that the U.S. intelligence community itself has become a far greater threat to our republic than Russia or any other country. As journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag reported Tuesday, the CIA asked foreign intelligence agencies to spy on more than two dozen Trump associates as early as 2015 and share the intelligence they acquired. This surveillance operation would later be used to launch the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and craft the Russia-collusion hoax.
“Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s investigation began after Australian intelligence officials told US officials that a Trump aide had boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia had damning material about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton,” the report says.
But in fact, the reports alleges, U.S. intelligence agencies tasked the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia — the other members of the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance — to surveil 26 Trump associates identified by President Barack Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan.
The purpose of this surveillance wasn’t to discover whether Trump associates were colluding with Moscow. It was to make contacts and create interactions with those people through the Five Eyes agencies and then report those contacts to the FBI as suspicious, thus establishing a pretext for the FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
And as we all know, Crossfire Hurricane notoriously abused FISA to spy on Trump associates — to say nothing of its ultimate purpose, which was to destroy Trump’s candidacy and, failing that, his presidency.
So please, let’s not get distracted with hysterics about Russian nukes in space. Want to know where the real threat to our country is? It’s not in space or in Moscow. It’s in Washington.
