Author Lee Smith on bureaucrats plotting to thwart the president
ee Smith has written an astonishing new book in which he claims that the Obama administration, in concert with the Clinton campaign, used fake intelligence in an attempt to take down a newly elected president.
The coup was launched in early 2016, when the Clinton campaign began to leak parts of the “Steele Dossier,” a now-discredited document that claimed Donald Trump was in the snares of the Russian government. A sympathetic FBI and Department of Justice then used that information to spy on Trump campaign operatives — US citizens — with the ultimate goal of defeating Trump on election day. That information was spread by a willing press corps. When that failed, the investigators changed tactics. Spurred on by an outgoing Obama White House, FBI director James Comey and others set in motion what would become the Mueller Report, which created the interminable cloud hanging over the White House.
What once sounded like a conspiracy theory was detailed in a report compiled by Congressman Devin Nunes in February 2018. Titled “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the memo detailed how federal investigators used false information to obtain FISA warrants to spy on US citizens. Smith writes that their ultimate goal was a coup, an attempt by the bureaucracy to accomplish what the election could not.
Raised in New York, Lee Smith has worked as a journalist for 30 years. He is a former reporter at the Village Voice, Talk magazine, and the Weekly Standard, and he is currently a columnist for the online magazine Tablet, where he writes about the Middle East. A former resident of Egypt and Lebanon, Smith is the author of three books, among them The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations.
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