If you’re not the first lady, being alone in the Oval Office with the president of the United States is a rare occurrence. Even visiting heads of state will be accompanied by an interpreter, or an official notetaker, when they meet privately with the most powerful man in the world.
So I will never forget the day, in June 2017, when I found myself in front of the Resolute Desk, with just President Donald Trump in the room with me.
I was there for something that pertained to my job as strategist to the president—if memory serves, it was to discuss our plan to undo the 44th president’s disastrous Iran Deal—when the topic of Russia came up.
Suddenly the president stopped, looked at me, and said: “They will find nothing because there is nothing.”
Since he shared that declaration with me, good men like General Mike Flynn have been charged with process crimes, shady characters like Paul Manafort have been convicted of wire fraud, and young men such as George Papadopoulos have served time in federal prison as a result of their foolish self-aggrandizing. Yet, none of the charges made or convictions brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller have linked the activities of the Trump campaign with the Kremlin, which of course, was Mueller’s mandate.
Two years later, at a reported cost of well over $25 million, not one charge or conviction has proven the original allegation of “Russian collusion.” At any other time, this would have led otherwise reasonable people to say: Enough! Time for Mueller and his team—a dozen of whom are registered Democrat donors—to close shop and for the former FBI director to end what President Trump justifiably has called a “witch hunt.”
Instead, the Left, and the Left’s domesticated media, have escalated their attacks.
Monday, as the president was preparing to board Marine One on the North Lawn, Kristen Welker, a member of the White House Press Corps working for NBC, actually asked him whether he is working for Russia.
This following a New York Times story, in which we learned that the FBI’s leadership initiated an investigation into the president after he fired James Comey, positing that he was, in fact, an agent of the Kremlin.
President Trump was right to call Welker’s question disgraceful. But we must go further.
First, there is the issue of facts. After two years in which Donald Trump as president has raised the defense budget, sent anti-tank missiles to the government of Ukraine, scolded NATO nations for not taking the threat from Russia seriously and encouraging them to keep their commitments to the alliance, as well as authorizing the killing of more than 200 Russian paramilitary “contractors” in Syria. How can any sane person who values the truth—and her own professional integrity as a journalist—even ask such a ridiculous and surreal question?
But there is an even more serious question, one that raises the specter of sedition at the highest levels of our republic.
As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted on my show, “America First,” the FBI is part of the executive branch and its mandate to execute counterintelligence investigations serves one person and one person alone: the incumbent president.
McCarthy, remember, helped put the mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack, Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheik), behind bars. As he has written time and again, counterintelligence operations are not exercises in evidence gathering designed to lead to a prosecution of a crime in a federal court. They are instead secret activities designed to provide the chief executive with information on what enemy nations or inimical non-state actors are doing to the country so that the president can direct responses to the threat, be it from Soviet agents during the Cold War, or ISIS terrorists here in America today.
This is not what happened in 2017.
Instead, a rogue FBI decided unilaterally to investigate the newly elected president in order to undermine him—rather than serve the elected official who bears ultimate responsibility for the safety of all Americans. Never before in our history has this happened.