Two enduring aphorisms emerged from the Watergate affair, both directed at then-president Richard Nixon. The one at the outset of the investigation was delivered in the form of a question: “What did he know and when did he know it?” The second came at the end in the form of a warning to future presidents: “The cover-up is worse than the crime.”
Thanks to the Durham report, we know the date that then-president Barack Obama learned about what John Durham calls the “Clinton Intelligence plan.” If CIA Director John Brennan’s notes are to be believed, that date was August 3, 2016.
This was the day Brennan briefed Obama and other key players about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
To be fair, Barack Obama likely had no more role in the orchestration of the Clinton Intelligence plan than Richard Nixon did in the 1972 bugging of the DNC headquarters at the Watergate. Obama did, however, play the critical role in the cover-up of the Clinton Intelligence plan. It could not have happened without him.
This past Sunday, former congressman Devin Nunes raised the cover-up issue on Maria Bartiromo’s show. Said Nunes, “We now know from Durham that Obama knew and his team knew that in August 2016 this was a dirty trick from the Clinton campaign.”
So what did Obama do with this information? Right after the November election, said Nunes, “He got all the intelligence agencies involved and they leaked out to the fake news media that, ‘Oh, the Russians must have done something and they were trying to help Trump.’
Had Nixon blamed Watergate on Cuba — several Cubans were, in fact, arrested — he would have been laughed out of office. Unlike Obama, however, Nixon did not have an obsequious media eager to ignore his mischief nor to explain away that which could not be ignored. With the FBI and the intelligence community in his pocket, Obama executed the most elaborate — and destructive — political cover-up in American political history.
Peter Strzok, the FBI agent heading “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI investigation into Trump’s apocryphal collusion with Russia, confirmed Obama’s role on August 5, two days after the August 3 meeting. Texting with his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok quoted an unnamed bigwig, likely Brennan, as saying, “The White House is running this.”
Strzok wasn’t happy. He believed the White House was intruding on FBI turf. On August 15, Strzok memorably signaled the shared motive of all the conspirators. “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted Page. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.” On September 2, Page confirmed Obama’s involvement. “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing,” she texted Strzok.
The insurance policy proved insufficient. Shocked and understandably frightened by Trump’s victory, the conspirators got more methodical in their plotting. As part of the plot, Obama was to keep his hands clean — or at least appear to. In his 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, intimate Obama adviser Ben Rhodes makes a claim so deep in exculpatory BS it needs to be read in full:
Of course, we had no idea — Obama had no idea — at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House, and I wouldn’t even learn about it until long after I left government, in the press.
The “time” in question was two weeks before Election Day 2016, nearly three months after the initial August meeting. In Rhodes, Obama had found just the right person to move this hogwash forward, but then again Obama had a gift for choosing the unscrupulous. In nominating John Brennan first as deputy national security advisor and later as director of the CIA, Obama picked the rare American intel chief openly fond of Marxism.
