Politically Unstable: Americans deserve accountability for ‘Russiagate’ lies

Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler sits down with former 2016 Trump Deputy Campaign Chair Rick Gates to discuss the emails DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard is releasing about the origins of ’Russiagate’ and the lack of accountability for parties involved in the scandal.

[SADLER] We’re going to talk “Russiagate” and the releases coming out of the ODNI’s office, Tulsi Gabbard’s office. This week, there was a new patch, one which implicated Adam Schiff for convening a meeting to leak classified information against President Trump during the campaign. We all kind of suspected he was a leaker, but this is a whistleblower that came out that implicates him in that, as well as a series of email exchanges between then-NSA Mike Rogers, who served under the Obama presidency to John Brennan, James Comey, and then Clapper kind of was brought into this chat, showing he wasn’t comfortable tying Trump to Russia. He didn’t think that there was enough evidence to put together the intelligence report. And he wanted to see more of the intelligence before he signed his name on that report that President Obama, back in December 2016, leaned on them to produce a report that tied Trump to Russia, despite there being absolutely no evidence. 

Rick, you lived through this. Where is this going? What do you think of these new releases? Are we going to get any sort of accountability moving forward?

[GATES] It’s a long time coming. I think a lot of this information, some of us had heard about during our persecution, but we were not allowed access to it under the guise of national security. And I think there are several important things when you look at this information. First and foremost, these are not Republicans creating rumors or that they heard conversations. These are actual documents. They’re just being declassified, thank God, by Tulsi and Pam and others. And that’s what you really need in order to have the transparency. And we’re not going you get to accountability until we start with transparency. 

And what you’re starting to see now is not just individuals committing actions relating to maybe some nefarious activity, political activity, maybe the swing of the election toward Hillary Clinton. But you’re starting to see conspiracy. You saw the first batch of documents from Tulsi was including James Comey and John Brennan, right? Specifically. And when you see what they did separately and then started communicating with each other, you start seeing that conspiracy effort. And it’s important because right now a lot of these individuals you have allegedly commiting perjury. But there’s a statute of limitations on that to five years. Now there is some argument of when that five-year clock can start, is it to start back when they testified? Or can it start now that this new information has been surfaced, so the clock starts over again? 

But the conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges are much more serious, and they have a much longer statute of limitations. So my hope and belief is that Pam at DOJ and Kash Patel are using this conspiracy link to really bring this all together to show that this was a coordinated, deliberate, and vile effort to target Donald Trump, try to link him to Russians, and then say his campaign worked with the Russians to get him elected, which was not true. 

[SADLER] I just want to go through these emails and read them verbatim, because this is the first time we’ve directly seen then-CIA director John Brennan basically give the orders saying that they needed to rush this, that they weren’t going to deploy the measures that the CIA should in order to get this out, and that they all need to work together as a team. Because this was their narrative that they wanted to get out there. And they were indeed very successful. “Russiagate” basically plagued Donald Trump’s entire first term in office for all four years. 

Watch the video for the full conversation.

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