The Patriot Post® · On the Anniversary of Crossfire Hurricane, Nothing

These days, we have an anniversary for just about everything: boot camp graduation; baby’s first steps; 10 years on the job; 195 days, 2 hours, 28 minutes, and 57 seconds of abject American misery under the Biden administration. You get the idea.

But one infamous anniversary passed recently with nary a peep: Saturday, July 31, marked five years since the FBI opened up the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. In doing so, a few partisan players at the J. Edgar Hoover Building violated the civil rights of Trump and his associates, sabotaged his presidency with phony charges of Russian collusion during the 2016 election, and debased a perfectly good Rolling Stones tune.

And more important: The actions of then-FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Special Agent Peter Strzok, lawyers Lisa Page and Kevin Clinesmith, and a handful of other Trump-hating partisans deeply disgraced a once proud bureau and rendered it untrustworthy to tens of millions of American citizens.

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York noted this anniversary with a brief but brilliant synopsis of the whole sordid affair. He writes:

On July 31, the FBI started the process that led to a million leaks, enormous damage to candidate Trump, and then President-elect Trump, and then President Trump, the abuse of the government’s secret surveillance court to wiretap a low-level Trump adviser, efforts to impeach the president, more leaks, media hysteria, and, finally, the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, who could not establish that collusion — he called it “conspiracy” or “coordination” — ever took place, much less that Trump or anyone associated with him was involved with it.

It was a multi-year wild goose chase. And it did incalculable damage to the country. Certainly, some portion of the distrust of the FBI that exists today is the direct result of the bureau’s fruitless pursuit of Trump.

York also details what he calls “one of the most atrocious scenes in recent political history, or perhaps all political history.” He’s speaking of the episode in which Comey comes to Trump Tower to “brief” then-President elect Trump on the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference in the just-concluded 2016 presidential election. It was a setup, we now know — an opportunity for Comey to share the salacious findings of the phony “Steele dossier” with Trump before its rotten and unverified contents were “mysteriously” leaked to the media.

As it stands, U.S. Attorney John Durham, who was given “special counsel” status by then-Attorney General William Barr toward the end of Trump’s term, is the lone hope for those of us who revere the Constitution and believe that no one, regardless of their political affiliations, is above the law.

Durham has been investigating the investigators since the spring of 2019, but to little avail so far. As Yahoo News reports: “Much to the chagrin of Trump and his allies, Durham has so far secured only one guilty plea. FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who has since left the bureau, admitted to Durham in the summer of 2020 he falsified a document during efforts to renew its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority to wiretap former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page by editing a CIA email in 2017 to state that Page was ‘not a source.’”

Think about it: For the crime of having falsified evidence deeply injurious to a sitting U.S. president, Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer, got a mere slap on the wrist. And the scumbags who told him to do it are still free men.

July 31 is thus a date well worth remembering. Why? Because the entire investigation was garbage, because justice still hasn’t been served, and because, as Donald Trump himself has said numerous times, “We can never let this happen to another president again.”

John Durham: What say you?