Douglas Andrews: Real Coups and Fake Ones

New revelations in the Crossfire Hurricane case show that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith didn’t act alone.

Yesterday we learned that the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, will open an investigation into whether Donald Trump’s DOJ “engaged in an improper attempt” to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

Democrats have been hyperventilating about this non-story for some time now, with some going so far as to say the Trump administration’s efforts amounted to “an attempted coup.”

Got that? In leftist parlance, any effort toward uncovering the truth about a deeply flawed election is “an attempted coup.”

Speaking of attempted coups, though, a couple of real ones took place during the Trump years. As our Mark Alexander has pointed out, both involved the use of deep-state operatives within the FBI and CIA in order to remove Trump from office or, at the very least, cripple his “America First” agenda. One of these coup attempts came via a phony impeachment, while the other came via the Obama administration’s willful spying on the Trump campaign under the false pretense of it having colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. And Obama’s fingerprints were all over that one.

Remarkably, more than four years after the fact, the specific details of this so-called Spygate coup are still being uncovered. But we gained additional insight into the Obama administration’s corruption when, during his last days in office, President Trump ordered the release of a trove of heretofore classified documents.

Those documents, as we noted last week, put to rest any claims that the Obama administration wasn’t spying on the Trump campaign. It was spying, and the FBI’s tasking instructions to longtime FBI informant Stefan Halper, which told him to infiltrate the Trump campaign by posing as someone who wanted to work for the GOP nominee, confirm this beyond a shadow of doubt. After all, a person who secretly collects and reports information on the activities, movements, and plans of an enemy or competitor is the very definition of a spy.

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