Witch Hunt

The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History

Gregg Jarrett

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780062960092
• eBook ISBN: 9780062960108
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Russia Hoax examines the latest findings about "collusion" between the Trump Administration and the Russians.
Now that every detail and argument set forth in The Russia Hoax has been borne out by the Mueller report, Jarrett returns with Witch Hunt, providing a hard-hitting, well-reasoned evisceration of what may be the dirtiest trick in political history.
In Witch Hunt, Gregg Jarrett uncovers the bureaucratic malfeasance and malicious politicization of our country's justice system. The law was weaponized for partisan purposes. Even though it was Hillary Clinton's campaign that collected and disseminated a trove of lies about Trump from a former British spy and Russian operatives, Democrats and the media spun this into a claim that Trump was working for the Russians.
Senior officials at the FBI, blinded by their political bias and hatred of Trump, went after the wrong person. At the DOJ, the deputy attorney general discussed secretly recording the president and recruiting members of the cabinet to depose Trump. Those behind the Witch Hunt have either been fired or resigned. Many of them are now under investigation for abuse of power. But what about the pundits who concocted wild narratives in real time on television, or the newspapers which covered the fact that rumors were being investigated without investigating the facts themselves?
Factual, highly persuasive, and damning, this must-read expose makes clear that not only was there no "collusion," but there was not even a basis for Mueller's investigation of the charge that has attacked Trump and his administration for more than two years. It's always been a Witch Hunt.

Chapter 1

A Tale of Two Cases

And damn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure we didn’t F something up. This matters because this MATTERS.

—TEXT MESSAGE FROM PETER STRZOK TO HIS LOVER LISA PAGE, COMPARING THE CLOSING OF THE CLINTON CASE TO THE OPENING OF THE TRUMP CASE, JULY 31, 2016

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.

—AUTHOR’S INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, OVAL OFFICE, WHITE HOUSE, JUNE 25, 2019

The United States’ policy toward Russia has always been a contentious issue, often propelled by feverish electoral polemics. However, there has been a striking continuity from the Obama to the Trump administrations.¹ Both verbalized outreach and reconciliation early on, only to retreat into an adversarial posture when reality set in. If anything, the current president has demonstrated greater antagonism toward Moscow than his predecessor, who during a 2012 presidential debate dismissed Russia as “the biggest geopolitical threat.”²

In his first two years in office, Trump imposed a series of new sanctions against Russian government officials and oligarchs, approved punitive measures targeting Moscow’s defense and energy sectors, expelled dozens of diplomats, shuttered several ministerial properties, sent lethal weapons to Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression, authorized military force against Russian troops in Syria, and initiated withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty based on evidence that Moscow had repeatedly violated its terms.³ He also appointed well-known Russia hawks to top-level positions in his administration.⁴ These are hardly the actions of a US president who is a Kremlin sympathizer, much less a furtive Russian agent.

How did the accusation that Trump was in league with the Kremlin transcend conspiracy theorists to become the common mantra of millions of Americans?

We know it began with top officials at the FBI, in the intelligence community, and at the Department of Justice who had reason to damage or destroy Trump. As an outsider to the praetorian ways of Washington, he posed an existential threat to their positions of power. Trump, the candidate, had vowed to “drain the swamp” of those who had wielded outsized influence in government operations with little or no accountability. But the “swamp” did not want to be drained. The prospect of Trump as president represented an ignominious end to their dominion.

Power in the nation’s capital can be likened to crack cocaine: it is highly addictive. Those who exert power tend to become dependent on it and crave it. They are rarely inclined to give it up without a fight. The evidence suggests that people such as CIA director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, FBI director James Comey and his phalanx of loyal lieutenants, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and others imagined Trump as a menace to their ideas of who should control government. Clinton, by contrast, was their favored candidate. She represented the status quo—the equivalent of a third and, maybe, a fourth term of Barack Obama. The Democratic nominee signified continuity of authority and purpose. Those in the “deep state” would likely keep their jobs. The power of the entrenched would be inexorably extended under a President Clinton; it would be seriously jeopardized if her opponent prevailed.

Something had to be done to stop Trump. Remarkably, the plan nearly worked.

Clearing Clinton of Criminality

To understand how the swamp normally deals with perjury, obstruction of justice, leaks, and other administrative crimes, we have to start with the mountain of compelling evidence that Hillary Clinton had committed crimes by mishandling classified documents during her four years as secretary of state. Her fate rested squarely in the hands of Director Comey’s FBI and Attorney General Lynch’s Justice Department. They knew that she had egregiously compromised national security and, in the process, committed a myriad of felonies under the Espionage Act and other criminal statutes.⁵

The tricky dilemma they faced was devising a way to navigate around the facts and the law to clear her of crimes.

Before she was sworn in as the nation’s top diplomat, Clinton set up a private email server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, New York. She didn’t just use a personal email account; she had her emails travel through a personal server, hidden from public view by registration under a separate identity.⁶ She decided to use that clandestine server to handle all of her electronic communications as secretary of state, including the transfer and dissemination of thousands of classified and top secret documents.⁷

State Department rules forbid this because foreign governments and cyberterrorists could readily access such materials using even rudimentary hacking techniques on an unauthorized and unprotected server. The nation’s secrets would be jeopardized. Clinton knew that. She had spent eight years as a US senator. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, she had been counseled on classified documents, how to recognize them, and all the ways she must employ government-instituted safeguards to maintain their secrecy. As secretary of state, she received even more extensive indoctrination: classified records were never to be taken home or otherwise stored there.⁸

She absolutely knew that if all of her work-related emails were housed on the private server in her home, there would inevitably be innumerable classified documents contained therein. It would be impossible for the nation’s chief diplomat to conduct extensive communications without exchanging such classified information. Nevertheless, she intended to establish a nongovernmental server and intended that it be used exclusively for all of her business as secretary of state. She intended that classified records be stored on and transmitted to other people via her unauthorized and vulnerable system. Such willful acts violated 18 U.S.C. § 793(d) and (e) of the Espionage Act,⁹ but also a separate and more fundamental law that criminalizes the mishandling of classified documents, 18 U.S.C. § 1924:

Whoever, being an officer of the United States . . . becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than five years or both.¹⁰

The above language is explicit. She did it knowingly because, by her own admission, she read the classified emails she received and sent, and she intended that they be retained at the unauthorized location. How many crimes were committed? At the very least, there were 110 violations of the law, representing the number of emails that were classified when Clinton sent or received them on her home system. That was made clear when Director Comey announced his findings on July 5, 2016, as follows:

From the group of 30,000 emails returned to the State Department, 110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.¹¹

Comey also found “about 2,000 additional emails [that] were ‘up-classified,’ ” meaning they were not classified at the time they were sent. Under a strict reading of the law, Clinton should have been charged for mishandling those documents, too. That was emphasized by the director when he stated, “even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.”

Citing several email chains involving top secret communications, Comey further observed, “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position . . . should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”¹² Clinton should also have faced numerous conspiracy charges, as well, since she was acting in concert with others who, according to uncovered documents, knew she was using a private account for classified document exchanges and participated in them.¹³

Let’s assume for the sake of argument (and in defiance of logic) that Clinton did not act willfully or intentionally but through unimaginable misfeasance or incompetence. She most certainly behaved with reckless disregard for the protection of classified documents. The law calls this “gross negligence,” a term that is interchangeable or synonymous with “extremely careless” conduct.¹⁴ At the very least, Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents violated the “gross negligence” provision of 18 U.S.C. § 793(f) of the Espionage Act:

Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document . . . relating to national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody . . . or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody . . . shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.¹⁵

There is no question that Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials was, at the very least, grossly negligent. Indeed, her actions are the definition of reckless or extremely careless conduct. Comey grudgingly conceded that she might have jeopardized national security when he stated, “We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.”¹⁶ That was not at all accurate. It wasn’t just possible; it was a fact that the FBI surely knew but tried to conceal from the public. Comey even watered down his findings when he deleted the words “reasonably likely” and substituted “possible” to describe how hostile actors might have breached the secretary’s system.¹⁷

Sure enough, information from Clinton’s server turned up on the “dark web”—a collection of encrypted websites where both criminals and rogue nations operate. Since the secretary of state was violating regulations by using an unprotected system, it was easily accessed indirectly through a source who was communicating with her.¹⁸ That was what happened. Evidence showed that a Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” infiltrated Clinton’s emails by utilizing a server in Russia.¹⁹ That meant that Russian intelligence likely benefited from the illegal penetration and obtained US classified material, thanks to Clinton’s contempt for rules and the law. Among the hacked records was an Excel spreadsheet containing “targeting data” that would constitute top secret information. “It is inescapable that a security breach and a violation of basic server security occurred here,” according to an independent review contained in FBI documents that came to light three years after Clinton was cleared of wrongdoing.²⁰ Yet when Comey absolved the secretary, he tried to minimize the significanc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 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