Obama Intel Chief Pushed Idea That Trump-Ukraine Transcript Could Be a Fake
James Clapper was already laying the grounds for a “conspiracy.”
A day before President Donald Trump agreed to release the transcript of his now-notorious July phone call with the president of Ukraine, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was using CNN to spread the idea that any such document could not be trusted.
After all, Clapper told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Monday, the phone call Democrats wanted so badly might not tell them what they want to hear — and could mean an elaborate hoax by President Donald Trump’s White House.
“You know, I hate to suggest this, but it’s crossed my mind that even if we got a transcript, well, can we be assured that’s actually what was said?” Clapper asked. “So getting a transcript may not be such a great thing, either.”
He really “hated” to suggest it. That’s why he did — essentially accusing the White House, and his old intelligence community colleagues, of plotting a deliberate deception of the American people.
Well, as it turned out, Clapper was right about one thing as far as the Democrats are concerned: Getting the transcript didn’t turn out to be “such a great thing either.”
Basically, it’s a fairly anodyne conversation that should be more embarrassing to former Vice President Joe Biden (and German Chancellor Angela Merkel) than it is to the Trump White House.
Democrats, of course, had to expect something like that was going to happen, since they’ve been pursuing some rationalization to impeach the president since before he even took the oath of office.
Every avenue has failed miserably, most notably the “collusion” hoax that distracted the country for two years and ate up tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money only to end in the embarrassing spectacle of a clearly addled former special counsel Robert Mueller displaying for all the world that he was barely familiar with key elements of the investigation.
Even before the transcript was released, Democrats had made it clear that it would not be enough to satisfy their bloodlust when it comes to the Trump presidency.
But Clapper’s statement to Cuomo took things to a different level.
It would be one thing for a standard, brainless Trump Derangement Syndrome victim to suggest it (like, say, Joy Behar).
But for a former director of national intelligence to use a national network like CNN to drop the idea — based on nothing more than his own supposition — that the White House was planning to release a falsified document and claim it to be true is an entirely different matter.
It’s worth remembering here that the swamp creature Clapper himself is not known as a paragon of honesty when it comes to matters relating to Trump, or even things that came up before Trump entered the national political scene.
In fact, he is known to have lied under oath about the surveillance of American citizens when he was testifying before Congress in 2013 — back when he was President Barack Obama’s right-hand man on national intelligence issues.
It’s also worth remembering that at the time he spoke, Clapper, who lost his security clearance in 2018, had no more idea of what had transpired between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky than any Tom, Dick or Harry on the street.
But that didn’t stop him from planting the seeds of a conspiracy theory that’s likely to spread like a weed as Democrats realize how badly they misfired on the Ukraine “scandal.”
Now that the phone transcript has been released, they’ll call it “fake,” or “not complete,” or simply not enough, and demand the complaint from the whistleblower who started the latest affair.
If that’s released, they’ll call it insufficient, or just the evidence they need to start a new investigation, and the beat will go on until the Trump presidency comes to an end, through either the will of the voters in 2021 or the limitations of the Constitution in 2025.
And they’ll have Barack Obama’s former national intelligence director, James Clapper, to thank for adding completely irresponsible fuel to the fire.
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