FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

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Ray McGovern: ‘Russia-gate Is Becoming FBI-gate’

Jan. 15, 2018 (EIRNS)—In his piece, “The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate,” published by ConsortiumNews on Jan. 11, VIPS leader Ray McGovern, a leading Soviet analyst at the CIA for many years, slams liberals who are so blinded by “Trump-hatred” that they refuse to see that U.S. intelligence agencies are doing now what those liberals warned about in the days of Watergate: Manipulating U.S. politics, carrying out “a soft-coup.”

The centerpiece of McGovern’s argument here (delivered with his typical humor) is that even the already-released small fraction of text messages between former FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok and his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, have given us “documentary proof” that “key elements of the U.S. intelligence community were trying to short-circuit the U.S. democratic process” in the last days of the Obama Administration. And the main casualty resulting from those texts “is the FBI’s 18-month campaign to sabotage candidate-and-now-President Donald Trump by using the Obama administration’s Russia-gate intelligence assessment, electronic surveillance of dubious legality, and a salacious dossier that could never pass the smell test, while at the same time using equally dubious techniques to immunize Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers from crimes that include lying to the FBI and endangering secrets.”

McGovern suggests it is time Congress turn its “overlook” committees back into “oversight” committees, and find “the courage to attempt to carry out their Constitutional duty.” Congress must take on

“J. Edgar Hoover-style blackmail on steroids, enabled by electronic surveillance of just about everything and everyone.... If, as many have concluded, the [Steele] dossier was used to help justify a FISA warrant to snoop on the Trump campaign, those involved will be in deep kimchi, if congressional overseers do their job.”