“We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.” —John Adams (1797)

Disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who became acting director after Donald Trump fired his disgraced mentor and boss, James Comey, is doing a masterful job promoting his new book, The Threat.

Last weekend, he launched the book tour with a “60 Minutes” interview — the first public interview since his own firing. McCabe managed to parlay that softball session into top-of-the-fold headlines, wall-to-wall cable news coverage, and a succession of follow-up interviews featuring his ever-evolving justification for his actions.

Seeding interest in McCabe’s remarks, his interviewer, CBS’s Scott Pelley (who must be getting a cut of McCabe’s book sales), offered up this teaser: “The most illuminating and surprising thing in the interview to me were these eight days in May when all of these things were happening behind the scenes… There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment. These were the eight days from Comey’s firing to the point that Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel. And the highest levels of American law enforcement were trying to figure out what to do with the president.”

Until now, discussions about using the “25th Amendment” to remove our duly elected president from office, originally attributed to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as well as Rosenstein’s own suggestion that he could wear a wire to entrap Trump, had been dismissed as facetious.

But McCabe says no. Rosenstein “raised the issue” of the 25th Amendment and “offered to wear a wire into the White House.” McCabe says Rosenstein added: “I never get searched when I go into the White House. I could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn’t know it was there.”

McCabe insists, “He was not joking. He was absolutely serious. And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had.”

Asked by Pelley if Rosenstein was “actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the Cabinet who would vote to remove the president,” McCabe replied, “That’s correct. Counting votes or possible votes.”

McCabe claimed he rejected Rosenstein’s offer to surveil Trump: “I never actually considered taking him up on the offer. I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time.”

Huh? “I never actually considered” it, but “I did discuss it” with everyone, including the lawyers?

He said then-FBI General Counsel Jim Baker rejected the idea: “I think the general counsel had a heart attack. And when he got up off the floor, he said, ‘I, I, that’s a bridge too far. We’re not there yet.’” In his testimony before the House in October 2018, Baker confirmed, “I had the impression that the deputy attorney general had already discussed this with two members in the president’s Cabinet and that they were on board with this concept already.”

Let this sink in.

According to McCabe, and confirmed by Baker, the highest-level officials at the FBI and DoJ were seriously discussing use of the 25th Amendment to remove the president of the United States from office. They were doing so, undoubtedly, with the full knowledge and support of then-FBI Director James Comey and then-CIA Director John Brennan.

As I noted last week, former Harvard constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz protested the McCabe/Rosenstein conspiracy: “The 25th Amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It’s about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It’s not about the most fundamental disagreements. Any Justice Department official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution.”

Indeed, the fact that the highest levels of the FBI and DoJ had become so politically compromised that a discussion of the 25th Amendment was acceptable and not laughable is grievous. And outrageous. And the stuff of banana republics.

These bureaucrats have been drinking government Kool-Aid made with contaminated Beltway water for so long that their chronic “Potomac fever” has grotesquely distorted their perception of reality.

However, it’s what they did next that is the most egregious insult to their oaths “to support and defend” our Constitution.

McCabe was already knee-deep in the conspiracy to take down Trump.

Recall that he was one of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s most influential deep-state operatives, and he became suspect in his role to oust Trump from office after a series of text messages between McCabe’s FBI colleagues, Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page, were disclosed in December 2017.

Ahead of the 2016 election, Strzok, who was also the FBI’s lead “investigator” of the Clinton email scandal, described the prospect of Trump defeating Clinton as “terrifying.” Page wrote to Strzok, “There is no way [Trump] gets elected.” Strzok replied, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office … that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy…”

But Strzok and Page were not referencing McCabe’s 25th Amendment discussions. They were referring to the real coup d'etat strategy cooked up by McCabe and Rosenstein — a slow-burn coup against Trump to set him up for impeachment.

The most revealing thing about McCabe’s CBS interview was not the discussion of the 25th Amendment but his actual admission he lit the fire on that slow-burner.

McCabe (whose wife, a candidate for political office in Virginia, was also embedded within the Clinton political machine) initiated the Trump/Putin collusion investigation based on the FISA warrant made possible by the fake Clinton/Fusion dossier leaked by James Comey.

According to McCabe: “I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion. That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace. … I wanted to make sure that … if somebody came in behind me and closed it and tried to walk away from it, they would not be able to do that without creating a record of why they made that decision.”

According to that record, there are Comey and McCabe fingerprints all over the origins and motives of the Trump investigation. It was then Rosenstein, with McCabe’s backing, who appointed Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and his team of Clintonistas, though there is no indication Mueller was connected to the Clinton/FBI/DoJ endeavor to set Trump up.

Consequently, Mueller has spent the last two years, with the assistance of Democrat Party principals and their Leftmedia publicists, doing everything possible to obstruct Trump’s agenda.

Regarding Mueller’s investigation, asked if he believed Trump was a “Russian asset,” McCabe replied, “I think it’s possible. I think that’s why we started our investigation. And I’m really anxious to see where Director Mueller concludes that.”

Asked if he believed Russians ordered Trump to fire Comey, McCabe answered, “We don’t know.”

Seriously, he is that delusional. That answer is as absurd as if he had given the same response when asked, “Did aliens from another galaxy order Trump to fire Comey?”

Regarding his own firing, McCabe now laughably claims that was because he opened the Trump investigation — part of his book-promotion schtick. But the DoJ inspector general’s report notes that, indeed, McCabe lied under oath repeatedly and was fired for “lacking candor [read: lying] under oath.”

Regardless of political affiliation, all Americans should be gravely concerned about this dangerous episode in American political history — a much more significant assault on our Constitution than Richard Nixon’s concealment of the DNC/Watergate burglary. In fact, Watergate was a wading pool compared to the deep, dark depths of collusion between the FBI, DoJ, and the Clinton campaign. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy concludes that the whole “collusion” charade is about “the criminalization of policy disputes.” And he’s absolutely correct.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he will issue subpoenas for testimony from both McCabe and Rosenstein in order to determine if “an administrative coup” was seriously discussed by members of the FBI and DoJ. “We’re going to find out what happened here,” Graham said. “It is imperative that [they] come before the Senate judiciary to fully explain how and why a FISA warrant was issued against Carter Page, and answer questions about what appears to be, now more than ever, bias against President Trump. … [They were] having a conversation about [invoking] the 25th Amendment. … Was this an attempted bureaucratic coup? I don’t know. … We will have a hearing [to determine] who’s telling the truth [and] what actually happened. … I think everybody in the country needs to know if it happened.”

Don’t hold your breath…

I suspect that U.S. Attorney John Huber, charged with investigating the FBI’s conduct of the Clinton and Trump/Russia probes, will also have additional questions for Comey, McCabe, and Rosenstein.

For his part, Donald Trump protested: “Disgraced FBI acting director Andrew McCabe pretends to be a ‘poor little angel’ when in fact he was a big part of Hilrya Rodhamovich Clintonov’s scandal and the Russian hoax — a puppet for James Comey. … McCabe’s wife received BIG DOLLARS from Clinton people for her campaign — he gave Hillary a pass. Remember this, Andrew McCabe didn’t go to the bathroom without the approval of [fired FBI Director] James Comey! McCabe is a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country.”

Trump referenced Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, who declared: “The biggest abuse of power and corruption scandal in our history, and it’s much worse than we thought. Andrew McCabe (FBI) admitted to plotting a coup (government overthrow) when he was serving in the FBI, before he was fired for lying & leaking.” Trump vented, “Treason!”

The actions of Rosenstein, Comey, and McCabe do not constitute statutory treason or seditious conspiracy; they more closely constitute a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 2385, “Advocating Overthrow of Government,” which is akin to nonviolent subversion of the government.

But don’t expect any early-morning raids by the FBI.

So how are Democrats and their mainstream media enablers responding?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) claims that if the DoJ conspirators believed “that Donald Trump cannot fulfill the obligations of his office, then they have a constitutional responsibility to invoke the 25th Amendment. Their loyalty under law is not to him personally. It is to the Constitution of the United States and to the people of United States.” (Seriously, she said that with a straight face.)

The Brookings Institution’s Susan Hennessey rationalized: “I think we need to take ourselves back to what the situation the Justice Department and FBI officials were facing in that moment. I think what we’re seeing is they were panicked. They had never seen anything like that really in the history of the United States. It goes to how overwhelmed they were in that moment. … It’s not different than any of us sitting around and talking about the 25th Amendment.”

Typical of the Leftmedia response was this absurdity from CNN “legal analyst” Jeffrey Toobin: “I think the correct term is not treasonous, but patriotic.”

However, it appears that the McCabe/Rosenstein/Mueller slow-burn coup d'etat is about to be extinguished.

This week, after the Senate concluded its Trump/Russia collusion investigation, which determined that there isn’t a shred of evidence of any collusion, even The New York Times conceded, “No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.”

Politico has dutifully warned the “Hate Trump” crowd: “Prepare for disappointment.”

John Pistole, Mueller’s longtime top deputy at the FBI, advises: “A public narrative has built an expectation that the special counsel will explain his conclusions, but I think that expectation may be seriously misplaced. That’s not what the rules provide, and I really don’t see him straying from the mission.”

Andrew McCarthy noted likewise: “If the special counsel concludes that President Trump should not be charged with a crime, nothing need be said except, perhaps, that the investigation has been closed. The regulations require the special counsel to report findings to the attorney general, not to Congress.”

But we hope incoming Attorney General William Barr will release Mueller’s final report to expose this hoax.

Finally, regarding the Obama/Clinton deep-state operatives, recall the words of Demo minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer about Trump’s criticism of some US intelligence operations: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Schumer’s comments mirrored a similar assessment, by Obama’s former senior intel advisor, Daniel Benjamin: “Trump’s [intel criticism] will also come back to bite him in the form of leaking and whistleblowing.”

Contemplate the lawless implications of the Schumer and Benjamin assertions. These are bold face admissions that their deep-state operatives within the CIA and FBI will use their positions to do exactly what they have done with the Russian collusion charade, in order to disable and undermine this presidential administration. They have outlined how Obama/Clinton deep-state actors, under Brennan and Comey, have used their positions endeavoring to take down the Trump presidency.

The DoJ IG and Barr should initiate a long-overdue investigation of the deep-state “investigators” who plotted against Trump.

I’ll predict, however, that Nancy Pelosi’s next smear tactic to obstruct Trump’s pro-America agenda will focus on the dubious campaign-finance-violation case currently under construction by Robert Mueller’s investigative partner, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776