When Barack Obama talked about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he wasn’t kidding. Before he came to town, we used to have an intelligence community that focused on foreign threats. But what we have now is a deep state that will rig a presidential election and, failing that, use lawfare and disinformation to hobble the opposition party’s president for his entire term in office.

Thanks, Obama.

But the most alarming thing about all this is the awful apathy, the shoulder-shrugging acceptance of this new abnormal normal as somehow not worth the torches and pitchforks that it deserves. Again, the CIA used to restrict electoral interference to foreign countries. But now it’s interfering in American elections.

As we wrote last week, we know this because of an irregular drip of information about what journalist Jacob Siegel last year called “The Hoax of the Century,” namely the intelligence community’s illegal attack on Donald Trump and his associates under the pretense of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In fact, the whole American intelligence operation orchestrated by the soon-to-be outgoing Obama administration and its CIA director, John Brennan, was election interference. And disinformation.

We’ve spilled a lot of bytes on these pages about the Russia collusion hoax — about the deep state’s efforts to cast Trump’s election in 2016 as illegitimate and then hamstring his administration with an unwarranted special counsel’s investigation. Still, even with last year’s release of the damning Durham Report, there were some missing elements in this criminal scheme and an utter lack of accountability for the Obama administration officials who carried it out.

We’re still not convinced that accountability — either criminal or historical — will ever come to Obama and his henchmen, but new information unearthed by a trio of intrepid journalists does shed some new and disturbing light on the hoax. According to new reporting on Substack based on “multiple credible sources,” independent journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag say the CIA targeted 26 Trump associates for foreign spy agencies to “reverse target” and “bump” — that is, to actively contact these individuals and then manipulate them. These Trump team members thus became targets of our own intelligence community for collection and misinformation. As the intrepid trio reports:

Until now, the official story has been that the FBI’s [Crossfire Hurricane] 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.

Until now. Remember, too, that it was the Clinton campaign that colluded with Russian agents to create the phony Steele dossier to damage Trump with all manner of salacious and utterly uncorroborated rubbish.

As Shellenberger told Jesse Waters on Fox News earlier this week, there’s also a binder of highly classified information detailing the whole operation — and those materials have gone missing. Shellenberger suggests that the deep state’s desperate search for this binder may have been what triggered the FBI’s July 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Looking back, what we wrote shortly after that unprecedented raid now sounds spot-on: “What we’re hearing now is still speculation … but now we’re told that the feds were worried that Trump might ‘weaponize’ certain materials he’d been collecting in order to exonerate himself, perhaps during the upcoming 2024 presidential campaign.”

According to that Substack report, which was published Monday on Shellenberger’s public account, the U.S. intelligence community asked foreign spy agencies known as “The Five Eyes” (in addition to the U.S., these are Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand) to surveil those 26 Trump associates in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, which triggered the allegations that Trump’s campaign — remember Carter Page and George Papadopoulos? — had been colluding with Russia to rig the election.

Word of this massive deep state operation trickled out, which caused Obama to say on April 10, 2016, “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case.” Uh-huh.

Obama’s CIA actors weren’t just involved in the Russia collusion hoax; they started it. Brennan asked our English-speaking allies to target Trump and his associates. These 26 would be bumped, and these interactions would be reported to the FBI as “suspicious” to then trigger an FBI counterintelligence investigation. Diabolical.

Republican House investigators led by since-retired California Congressman Devin Nunes had cracked the case, but the clock ran out on the Trump administration, which perhaps took that binder out of Langley. The Obama administration had launched a preemptive war against our republican democracy and got caught doing it. So where’s the accountability?

John Durham, for whatever reason, wasn’t looking in this direction during the years-long production of his utterly damning Durham Report. If we had to guess, we’d say this highly regarded career prosecutor on the verge of retirement simply didn’t want to look in this direction. He scratched the surface a bit with two failed prosecutions — those of Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko — which taught us that Washington, DC, is a scummy and hopelessly rigged town that votes nine-to-one Democrat and serves up juries to match.

Donald Trump called all this. He said the deep state was spying on him and his campaign back in 2018, and he was roundly ridiculed by the likes of former CNN talkinghead Don Lemon and others for doing so. But he was absolutely right. Was he ever. Asked about the spying allegations in October 2020, Obama smugly said: “The allegations are so absurd that even Republican-controlled committees, y'know, looking into it have dismissed them. And y'know, uh, Attorney General [Bill] Barr uh, has dismissed them. … You do not allow the politization [sic] of the criminal justice system, the intelligence system, the military. That is something that you keep out of politics.”

Uh-huh. Thanks again, Obama.

“It seems unlikely there will be anything in writing to establish John Brennan or another member of the U.S. Intelligence Community solicited assistance from the other members of Five Eyes,” writes The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland. “Nonetheless, Americans deserve to know what was in that 10-inch binder and which foreign intelligence services interfered in our 2016 election by ‘bumping’ members of the Trump campaign to craft the Russia hoax.”

Cleveland adds, “The now-known significance of that [missing CIA] binder also raises the specter that the search of Mar-a-Lago wasn’t to protect classified materials but to protect intelligence agencies — American and foreign.”

In a not-unrelated development, we learned this week that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin prefers President Joe Biden to President Donald Trump. As Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw writes: “When asked who he would prefer to see win the American election this year, Putin was careful to say that Russia would work with ‘any U.S. leader who the American people trust.’ But he first said that he would prefer Biden because he’s ‘more experienced, more predictable.’ That shouldn’t be too difficult for the public to translate.”

Here’s a less charitable translation: Biden’s a Russian stooge! So where’s the intel operation? Where’s the Crossfire Hurricane sequel?

Those are rhetorical questions. In case it wasn’t clear.